Re: Out-of-date mirror on GitHub

[Frank Terbeck <ft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ramkumar Ramachandra wrote:
> Frank Terbeck wrote:
[...]
> Now, you can argue that everyone can have a full clone up on GitHub
> (like you do), but that's highly sub-optimal: forks on GitHub share
> the same object store, which means that my fork is only taking up the
> space used up by my non-upstreamed changes on the GitHub servers.  And
> yes, it makes it easy for a friend to see what I'm working on.

I think the number of active zsh developers is much too small for the
size of the object store to matter for an operation the size of github. ;-)

>> Since any real changes have to go through the mailing lists to pick up
>> X-Seq: header numbers¹ for later reference anyway, I think everyone is
>> better off working on a clone (which already _is_ a fork) of the
>> canonical zsh code repository at sourceforge, and using git's excellent
>> mail-workflow related tools (like "git format-patch", "git send-email"
>> and "git am").
>
> I'm not advocating pull-requests or anything of the sort.  I like the
> mailing list and the patch workflow.  I'm just asking for another
> reliable mirror on GitHub which we can all use with a click of a
> button.  I mainly contribute to the git project, and we use the patch
> workflow too: but we have several up-to-date mirrors including one on
> GitHub (at git/git).  linux.git also has a up-to-date mirror on GitHub
> (mirrors/linux).
>
> Unless we have something against GitHub, I don't see what the harm is
> in having an official (or semi-official) up-to-date mirror hosted
> there.

For the record: I am NOT against mirrors. Mirrors are good. The more the
merrier. Github and Bitbucket would be suitable candidates for obvious
reasons. One of the reasons for contemplating a switch to git was the
CVS server outage at sourceforge a year or two ago, that lasted for a
substantial amount of time. With a number of well-maintained mirrors
that would have been much less of a problem.

However, someone would have to feel responsible for keeping the mirror
up-to-date. And I think an actual mirror is not some repo you push to
manually every now and then from your laptop. A mirror would update
every - say - 10 to 15 minutes from a machine that's permanently online.

Also, like with the git project itself, it has to be established that
have to be submitted to the -workers mailing list for inclusion in the
main codebase. These are the main concerns with semi-official mirrors.
You need to make it perfectly clear somewhere, where changes need to go
to be included, and it the mirror needs to be automatically updated at
short intervals, IMO.

Regards, Frank