On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 10:12 AM, David Nalley <da...@gnsa.us> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 10:24 PM, Niclas Hedhman <nic...@hedhman.org> > wrote: > > Opening a new thread... > > > > Git without Github is like sex without a partner, sufficient but not very > > satisfactory. Github option has been explored in the past, and due to > > various reasons, it was not possible to achieve. > > > > But, during my last 2-3 year absence, has the GitLab[1] option been > > discussed and/or tried? GitLab is open sourced, can run on our infra and > > has many of the essential features of Github. > > But perhaps people are satisfied enough with the Github mirroring that is > > already in place, but with GitLab in house, we could (in theory) add > > features around licensing (like ICLA style assurance, similar to Jira), > and > > non-committers could(!) be allowed a direct route to the horse's mouth... > > > > Although the Enterprise system cost money, my guess is that GitLab would > be > > happy to waive fees and give us access to EE. > > > > > > Just a thought. > > > > [1] https://about.gitlab.com/features/ > > > > -- > > Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer > > http://www.qi4j.org - New Energy for Java > > > Infrastructure (at least in the short term) won't deploy Gitlab. The > reasoning is this: > 1. Most of our demand from projects is for Github, and truthfully, if > we could resolve one or two nagging problems, Infra would love to no > longer run and administer several hundred git repositories and instead > offload that work to Github. > 2. There is a lot of infrastructure built up around the existing git > infrastructure. Deploying Gitlab or Allura or anything else would > require us to figure out authorization, backups, integration with > Github, Jira, BZ, svn mirroring, etc; that's a lot of work. IF we were > going to tackle such a project it would need to be for all projects, > not just a few, and it would be significantly lower on the priority > list than a lot of the work we are currently doing. > > My current thinking (though not yet Foundation policy) is that there > is the canonical repository must be managed by Infra, and I suspect > that will be in the proposed policy that gets submitted to the board. > > I have a question about this part. Does INFRA's management over the Apache organization in GitHub (github.com/apache) satisfy this requirement? In other words, would it be out of the question to foresee managing project teams in GitHub directly at some point in the future, working on the canonical repositories directly in GitHub, rather than simply treating it as a mirror-hosting service? (since GitHub has all those integrated features, like bug-tracking, etc., already, which INFRA has to maintain separately today).
It seems to me that the biggest hurdle for using GitHub for canonical repository hosting is authentication (since authentication is done via GitHub, not ASF). Providing users the ability to specify their GitHub username in id.apache.org before getting added to a "team" in a GitHub project could solve that, though. I personally like GitLab... it's nice software (haven't tried Allure). I'm just not sure there's a real need for INFRA to manage any separate git hosting service so long as GitHub exists and we can easily mirror/copy anything pushed to it. I don't see it as much different than paying for server hosting for other parts of our infrastructure (like EC2, or wherever our servers currently reside).
