Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2020 23:23:58 +0000 (UTC)
From: Cosmo Borsky <me@cosmoborsky.com>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Message-ID: <3516641b-cade-47b1-9d53-6db5cac84032@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <20200310170643.7a475808@ncopa-desktop.copa.dup.pw>
References: <24b91bd507e8151d41ac1d9866a4fd7a07febfe0.camel@cogitri.dev> <20200310170643.7a475808@ncopa-desktop.copa.dup.pw>
Subject: Re: Does it make sense to keep ~alpine/aports running?
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If it makes any difference, I am willing to contribute time and resources for SourceHut related Alpine development.

I think it is good to keep to one platform. GitLab is a mature suite which is familiar to a lot of developers, although aspects of it are proprietary.
SourceHut is in alpha, still in (very) active development, and many pain points have been and are being alleviated, on top of it being full FOSS.

However, since there are a good amount of developers contributing patches to the aports list, it makes sense to keep the list knowing that review may take time, and have developers/reviewers use the platform they are comfortable with until several pain points are resolved.

It would be good to put together a comparison list between GitLab and SourceHut that covers what each platform does well, what could be worked on, and what it does not do well.

From this email thread, what I see as things that need to be worked on with SourceHut are:
- CI builds for patches submitted via list
- Fix compatibility with various hosts, eg Gmail
- Offer alternative methods for submitting patches, for example via web api if SMTP is blocked on a network.

GitLab has these pain points:
- Requires a user account
- requires submitting patches through merge requests, which has overhead (open web browser, fork, push changes to fork, ...)
- email-based workflow is proprietary and only included in enterprise editions