On 2016-8-20 11:04 , Kevin Walzer wrote:
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 can't speak for Apple, but I imagine if all the projects move
somewhere else, Mac OS Forge will simply cease to exist. Is it still a
hosting service if it isn't hosting anything? :)
Pretty much every project on Mac OS Forge apart from us was run by Apple
employees, and I'm sure Apple projects will continue to get the server
resources they need. I can't imagine WebKit would just disappear, for
example. Whether it will still be under the Mac OS Forge banner I don't
know.
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.
I share these concerns and brought them up during the discussions. And
TBH I think Mercurial is a better tool. But we did come to a consensus
that GitHub is overall the best choice at this time.
And as Mark mentioned, one of the advantages of a DVCS is that the full
repository history isn't locked away on a single server, so if GitHub
goes down or turns evil, we can easily pack up and go elsewhere. (This
of applies to source code but not to things like issues, which is
another good reason to keep them on our own server.)
- Josh
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