Re: Out-of-date mirror on GitHub

[Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@xxxxxxxxx>]

Frank Terbeck wrote:
> I always thought that the nice thing about decentralised systems like
> git was that they allowed contributors to keep forks even without a
> central place like github. Github is only useful if you want visibility
> for your changes and even then you can just publish a repo with your own
> account. On github, bitbucket or $yourserviceproviderhere, it doesn't
> matter. I actually think having more than one canonical source (and one
> that might be out of date as we can see) would actually hurt.

Who talked about a central point?  I'm talking about using one of many
convenient free services to keep my code.  No, it's not for
visibility; the point is that my fork needs to be published somewhere
if:

1. I want to work from multiple devices (which I currently do).

2. I want my friends on GitHub to try out my fork, and be able to base
their work on my fork (by forking my fork).

3. I want my local clone to have two different namespaces
(refs/remotes/origin versus refs/remotes/myfork) for a clean
separation between upstream and my fork.  I've actually been
advocating this triangular workflow setup since I got
remote.pushdefault and branch.<name>.pushremote merged into git.git
(just earlier this month).  It means that I can have lot of local
branches that pull from upstream, and push to my fork (git pull/push
just DTRT once this is set up).

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.

> 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.