Re: How are the defaults chosen?

[Drew DeVault]

On Thu Sep 10, 2020 at 8:47 AM EDT, Theodor Thornhill wrote:
> Sure - I'll quote some stuff from earlier.

Cheers :)

> The discussion is around how to modernize the process around
> contributing to emacs. It seems like some of the arguments made here
> are the same you seem to want to tackle with SourceHut. I am sure you
> are not aware, but different forges have been evaluated:
> https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria-evaluation.html

I am aware, actually, and I have submitted an evaluation for sourcehut
by these criteria. Unfortunately this page is outdated and unmaintained,
so it didn't go anywhere.

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CC03B4X6WE7XN.9NAXAORGDJ0B%40homura%3E

There have been a few small improvements since this was written.

> AFAIK, we are looking for volunteers to help with finding a satisfactory
> alternative to debbugs.  The biggest challenge seems to be to
> transparently support both a web based and an email based
> workflow.  Existing solutions usually do either one or the other well,
> but not both.  There was a thread here about this in the last year.

Aye, todo.sr.ht is a good replacement for debbugs. You can submit,
comment on, and manage tickets by email, with or without an account, and
with an account you can do all of those in a web browser as well.

> Stefan Kangas writes
> AFAIU, SourceHut has the explicit goal of enabling email based
> workflows, which does sound in line with our needs.  But it is still
> explicitly in alpha.

For the record, the alpha is not a vague sense of instability or
incompleteness, but rather a specific set of guarantees:

https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

Most of this relates to the hosted offering, but the same is true of the
software itself, which can be self-hosted (it's 100% free/libre
software). The software is approaching completion and most of the daily
use features (like email for tickets) are robust and battle tested. The
hosted service is also very reliable, with less downtime than both
GitHub and GitLab this year. Data security is also taken very
seriously-- all data is stored with at least 4x redundancy, and
sometimes more. The performance is also best in class:

https://forgeperf.org

The main limitations of the alpha are:

- Limited integration between services
- The right is reserved to make backwards-incompatible API changes
- Documentation is incomplete
- Payment is optional for the hosted service, and will ultimately become
  mandatory for project owners (but not contributors)

Additionally, a few important features are still under development, but
if what's already there is suitable for your needs, then suitable indeed
you shall find it.

We started major planning towards the beta this month, which will
resolve all of these issues, and mostly serves as a chance to improve
reliability of the hosted service (though, again, it's already the most
reliable offering available today) and pay back any accumulated tech
debt.

Basically, we're aiming for quality, so these milestones are where we
push ourselves well above and beyond the standard set by most projects
in our domain. Today sourcehut is already a pretty compelling option and
a lot of projects are using it seriously as their primary hosting
platform.

Hope that was helpful. Happy to answer any other questions if you want
to know more or need anything clarified.