On 8/19/16 8:18 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
Since 2006, Apple has hosted MacPorts on its Mac OS Forge service. In the decade since Mac OS Forge was created, collaborative software development platforms like GitHub and BitBucket have become very popular and successful, and when I was hired as Mac OS Forge sysadmin last year, part of my job was to evaluate whether such services could be a suitable replacement for those offered by Mac OS Forge. We determined that the answer was yes, and that GitHub was the best choice, due to its overwhelming popularity. Other Mac OS Forge projects including XQuartz, CUPS and CalendarServer are already in the process of moving to GitHub, and the time has now come for MacPorts to likewise bid a fond farewell to Mac OS Forge and move on.
This is certainly an interesting development. I hope this works out well for the MacPorts project. What will become of MacOS Forge if all its projects migrate off it? Is Apple ceasing support for MacOS Forge?
I understand that a lot of thought has gone into this decision, but it's also not hard to view one of its primary motivators--"all the cool projects are on Github, and it's crucial for developer mindshare"--as something to view with concern. Competition in this space is healthy. A decade ago SourceForge occupied the place in the community that Github does now, and there was hardly any place else to go if their site was down. One reason Tcl/Tk moved off SF to their own Fossil repo was because of a serious outage at the site that prevented commits for weeks.
This is more of a hope that Github does not become the kind of monoculture that SF was than any criticism of Github--as long as Bitbucket and other platforms are around and still have some volume, that will help.
--Kevin -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin/Mobile Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com http://www.wtmobilesoftware.com _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list macports-dev@lists.macosforge.org https://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo/macports-dev
