Re: GNA Shutting Down?

[David Chisnall]

On 4 Feb 2017, at 07:24, Fred Kiefer <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> No reason to apologise. It was great to bring this issue to our attention. 
> Something must be done and I agree we should rather act early than late. I 
> would suggest you add the source to your local gitlib instance and from there 
> to Savannah and GitHub and set up the automatic synchronisation mechanism. We 
> call the Savannah instance the main one, but advice people to get data from 
> GitHub. That way we get the best of both worlds and everybody should be happy.

By far the biggest advantage of GitHub is the ability to accept pull requests 
(well, that and the fact that most people already have a GitHub account, so can 
file bug reports with a very low barrier to entry).  If the GitHub repository 
is not the authoritative one, then you need to ensure that you have 
bidirectional sync, so pushes to the GitHub repo are mirrored in the official 
one.  It’s possible to do this via the hooks that they provide, but it’s 
potentially racy and if two people push to the GitHub and other repos at the 
same time then sorting out the history can be nontrivial.

We moved libobjc2 to GitHub a while ago and I’ve seen a noticeable improvement 
in contributions and useful bug reports.  I haven’t seen anything similar for 
the rest of GNUstep.  I don’t intend to get into a rehash of the last debate, 
but once again GNUstep has the choice of either making contributions easy and 
encouraging wider community participation or doing something ideologically 
pure.  My vote is for the former option.

David