On Nov 30, 2014 11:09 AM, "Donald Stufft" <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > > > > On Nov 30, 2014, at 11:55 AM, Barry Warsaw <ba...@python.org> wrote: > > > > On Nov 30, 2014, at 09:54 AM, Ian Cordasco wrote: > > > >> - Migrating "data" from GitHub is easy. There are free-as-in-freedom > >> tools to do it and the only cost is the time it would take to monitor > >> the process > > > > *Extracting* data may be easy, but migrating it is a different story. As the > > Mailman project has seen in trying to migrate from Confluence to Moin, there > > is a ton of very difficult work involved after extracting the data. Parsing > > the data, ensuring that you have all the bits you need, fitting it into the > > new system's schema, working out the edge cases, adapting to semantic > > differences and gaps, ensuring that all the old links are redirected, and so > > on, were all exceedingly difficult[*]. > > > > Even converting between two FLOSS tools is an amazing amount of work. Look at > > what Eric Raymond did with reposurgeon to convert from Bazaar to git. > > I fail to see how this is a reasonable argument to make at all since, as you > mentioned, converting between two FLOSS tools can be an amazing amount of work. > Realistically the amount of work is going to be predicated on whether or not > there is a tool that already handles the conversion for you. Assuming of course > that the data is available to you at all. > > As a particularly relevant example, switching from Mercurial to Git is as easy > as installing hg-git, creating a bookmark for master that tracks default, and > then pushing to a git repository. > > > > > It's a good thing that your data isn't locked behind a proprietary door, for > > now. That's only part of the story. But also, because github is a closed > > system, there's no guarantee that today's data-freeing APIs will still exist, > > continue to be functional for practical purposes, remain complete, or stay at > > parity with new features. > > This feels like Chicken Little-ing. If Github closed it’s APIs then you could > still get at that data by scraping the web interface. However why would Github > do that? That would piss off the vast majority of OSS projects who are currently > hosted there and is likely to cause a pretty big migration off of Github for > fear that Github is going to attempt to lock people onto Github. The popularity > of Github *is* Github’s killer feature and doing something that is going to > send the vast bulk of your users running for the hills sounds like something that > they would have to be particularly stupid to do. > > > > > Cheers, > > -Barry > > > > [*] And our huge gratitude goes to Paul Boddie for his amazing amount of work > > on the project. > > _______________________________________________ > > Python-Dev mailing list > > Python-Dev@python.org > > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > > Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/donald%40stufft.io > > --- > Donald Stufft > PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
I tend to agree with Donald that it's highly unlikely for GitHub to close off their APIs but Barry is right that it isn't impossible. That can be mitigated by regularly scheduling a back-up of that data using the tools we have now so that the sky doesn't appear to be falling if the worst case does occur. I also tend to disagree with Barry that it will be extraordinarily difficult because I have migrated issues and pull requests off of GitHub and was able to automate the entirety of it reliably with python. Admittedly, I'm very familiar with GitHub's API as the author of github3.py so for me this is a trivial task. I would also be willing to help set up migrations and back ups if we decide to use GitHub.
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