On Friday, 24 January 2025 at 16:55:41 UTC, matheus wrote:

No, we should not be doing this.

Many online services are moving this way. We are just going to have to live with this.

Note that we pay GH nothing for all the services we get. And we get a lot.

And no guarantee gitlab does not do the same thing eventually.

Speaking for myself, we are here to write software, not participate in activism. As long as the service can perform the needs we have, how others use their service is nothing of my concern.

I don't think we would be in anywhere near as good shape if we hadn't relied on github for all these years. It was revolutionary in getting people to contribute to D.

I think we should keep GH as long as they do not make things unbearable. We have all the code, we can export all the PR data, etc. If we wanted to change services, it's doable. There's no need to go through that pain for almost no gain, when we are comfortable here.

We already know how much effort and pain it took to move from bugzilla to GH. We shouldn't be looking at other services now.

-Steve

On Friday, 24 January 2025 at 16:55:41 UTC, matheus wrote:

Yes. This is beyond horrible and definitely damaging to any open source project using Github, and undoubtedly it will continue to worsen over time. Within the next few years it will be necessary to log in to do anything with a Github repo. It will succeed because the main developers of these projects are already logged in.

An easy solution is to run your own Fossil server. Set up a script to pull from Github on a daily basis and commit to the Fossil repo. (SQLite does the reverse, using Github as a mirror of the real repo.) Once you have it set up, maybe it can be linked from the main website. The full SQLite repo, which gets massive traffic, is hosted on part of the cheapest Linode server.

On Saturday, 25 January 2025 at 19:59:48 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:

The fact that an account is required to PR is not great. As a bare minimum a push-pull mirror should be established as a backup. Even a slow mirror would be suitable, since according to you it would have less traffic.

Fuck GitLab. I don’t have anything nicer to say about it than that.
If we were to move forge, it should be to something like Codeberg, since it’s community-driven, and D is FOSS. It’s worth noting that many other forges have a function to migrate repositories from GitHub (including issues, PRs, etc.) with trivial effort, and some have a way to set up mirrors as well.

This direction is dangerous. Free services aren’t free to run, and eventually we’ll be forced to pay or become the product. If GitHub starts requiring an account to view repositories or pull them, then D will effectively become closed source. I fully expect them to do this though (and probably also start charging money for more and more previously ‘free’ stuff) because it will give users an ultimatum between signing up and giving up. Facebook and TwiXter have already done this, and modern social media platforms are all designed to be signup-only from day 0. People are disturbingly accustomed to the expansion of the deep web, which has now swallowed vast amounts of previously readily available information into its depths.
For contrast, you know what happened when I temporarily lost my forum account in the past? Nothing. I was even posting the entire time, because you don’t need an account to use the forums.

The bottom line is that D’s core infrastructure must remain freely accessible. I don’t care if we have to go back to mailing lists, RSS feeds, and IRC. This present acquiescence will cost us dearly in the long run if not averted.

My personal projects have been converted from CVS to Subversion to Mercurial to Git over the years. And from SourceForge to Google Code (RIP) to Bitbucket to GitHub. But always at a point where that seemed like the natural way forward, when the benefits seem obvious. I think it's the smaller projects that have to pave the way, not the large ones that involve hundreds of contributors. An official mirror makes more sense to me at this point in time. But I'm also not a D contributor, just a user.

On Sunday, 26 January 2025 at 19:27:01 UTC, IchorDev wrote:

I have heard zero complaints about having to create an account to make a PR. This is also not a new requirement, it has been there since the beginning (we have been on GH for close to 15 years).

The discussion is on searching code and comments.

I disagree. I consider GH to foster D's openness and do not consider the terms (creating a GH account) odious.

If this changes, we can change. Until then, I would recommend we stay there.

-Steve