Should we move away from GitHub?

[GideonBear]

This is not going to happen anytime soon, but I wanted to get the community's current opinion on it.

GitHub is awesome, but especially recently doing... questionable things. And like it has always been, it is proprietary big tech. I've toyed with the idea of moving Topgrade to a different Git forge, like Codeberg. However GitHub is still the "standard", and it will definitely reduce contributions; the last thing I want to do is keep out new contributors. Maybe there's a middle ground, where we can accept issues and contributions on GitHub, and mirror from another forge. Thoughts?

Any ideas (other forges, ways of mirroring, etc.) are appreciated!

Pings: @SteveLauC @s34m (previous maintainers) @Izder456 (you personally moved to Codeberg) @atoerien (contributor)

[lucaspar]

I wouldn't oppose it, and I'm a minor contributor anyway, but GitHub is the only forge I regularly access today.

GitHub is awesome, but especially recently doing... questionable things

is this about the AI push, or something else? The problems I usually have with GitHub are long-standing, like the lack of a fast-forward merge that rehashes commits and loses signatures, when that doesn't need to happen; and the overall lack of support for rebasing and linear history.

[Izder456]

https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

I believe it has something to do with the points outlined in the above article.

[GideonBear]

Without reading the link, for me it boils down to three things:

• GitHub is proprietary and owned by Micros*ft. (This is not enough for me to hate it on its own, GitHub has, for a long time, appeared to me as good for its community and are still offering their services for free)
  • They have been distant and not listening to the community for a while, a specific example I encountered was when they removed a feature that was opt-in without reason. It shows we're powerless.
• Recently, they are pushing AI onto projects heavily, which can very directly impact open source projects by giving people tools to easily open PRs with AI-generated code.
• They are attempting to use AI in the development of GitHub itself, which may or may not be related to the apparent loss of quality the past years. Things like the safe_sleep.sh incident remind me that even technically, GitHub might not stay reliable.

It's not so much that these are specifically a big problem right now, but the fact most open source projects are reliant on solely GitHub is worrying, given that these things can get much worse without warning.

sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub

Good points, agreed with all of that.

I think Topgrade has the power to set an example, because it's a relatively popular project. That's at least as important to me as any practical problems with GitHub.

[SteveLauC]

Voted "I wouldn't mind".

by giving people tools to easily open PRs with AI-generated code.

Have Topgrade received any slop PRs that were obviously created by vibe coders? I unwatched the repo since I left the project, so I am not clear about this. But I do heard other projects said they receive them.

[GideonBear]

Have Topgrade received any slop PRs that were obviously created by vibe coders? I unwatched the repo since I left the project, so I am not clear about this. But I do heard other projects said they receive them.

The only real slop I've seen was #1313 which "disabled" workflows that don't exist. Again though, this is more of a "future problem" for us.

[Izder456]

I would be for migrating to Codeberg, as it'll make my personal life easier to not have to have another project I contribute to on a platform I ideologically disagree with.

The only side effect I can think of is that CI will have to be adapted to Codeberg's woodpecker CI, which means a lot of our CI infra will have to change. Also- Codeberg's CI lacks *BSD runner or VM support, so if we want to continue producing *BSD release builds, some willing contributor will have to host their own woodpecker instance on the various *BSDs. Some decent and fairly cheap VPS options would be something like Vultr or BoxyBSD. Though- I'd be ok with dropping release CI upon a migration temporarily if it means a new platform that is not riddled with AI Junk.

On the lack of contributors point- a lot of people have already moved away from Github due to the recent-ish post from the Software Freedom Conservatory's explosion in people's awareness. I think even if people haven't migrated, linking to this page in the readme of an archive'd Github repo would be helpful for end users who previously used Github and encouraging them to move to Codeberg with us.

[GideonBear]

Also- Codeberg's CI lacks *BSD runner or VM support, so if we want to continue producing *BSD release builds, some willing contributor will have to host their own woodpecker instance on the various *BSDs. Some decent and fairly cheap VPS options would be something like Vultr or BoxyBSD. Though- I'd be ok with dropping release CI upon a migration temporarily if it means a new platform that is not riddled with AI Junk.

I don't consider missing BSDs to be a big problem. If someone is willing to contribute a *BSD machine I'll take it, but I won't lose any sleep over dropping *BSD in CI/CD.

The only side effect I can think of is that CI will have to be adapted to Codeberg's woodpecker CI, which means a lot of our CI infra will have to change.

This is not a big problem, I enjoy CI/CD and wouldn't mind learning a new system :)