Re: [gpsd-users] Problems with the gpsd website move

[Eric S. Raymond]

Ed W <address@hidden>:
> Your counter argument is almost surreal..  Are you seriously saying
> that you would prefer a suboptimal solution for the things that you
> do every day, rather than create one new login to a service that you
> will probably only use very occasionally?

I don't think you understood my objection.

When I say "same system", I don't mean same hardware host.  I mean
that I want the pieces to talk to each other, in ways that only
a dedicated forge does or can.  For example: on either Savannah or GNA, when 
I push a commit with a log message that mentions a bug identifier #nnnn, 
the log message of that commit is added to the tracker comment thread
for #nnnn.

Another thing I want is for devs to have one canonical ID that is
used everywhere in the project metadata and message queues.  That
gets broken if the project services are scattered over different
machines with different logins.

Yet a third thing I want (and *nobody* gets this right; it's a main
reason why I think I'm going to have to build a forge that doesn't
suck) is not to have to have separate credentials and a separate
authentication procedure for editing forge metadata and managing
mailing lists.  Mailman has allowed forge designers to take the
lazy way out for too long.

> You will need three security tokens for this.
> a) SSH key for sourcecode checkin
> b) Github login for management of web based things in github.
> c) Google login for Google Groups

Google groops is a spam-ridden shitpile that I won't touch.  But
that's a detail. The real problem is that you're increasing the number
of per-project identity keys for a dev from two to three when it
really ought to decrease to one.

> All in all I really don't see that there are any significant
> problems caused by additional login tokens in any of the above?

Sounds to me like you've never run a project and never had to wonder
"who is that?" when somebody wanders on a mailing list or IRC, email address
only, using a different identity than the one on their forge credentials.
Even on a project as small as GPSD this causes me confusion sometimes.
Balkanizing identity keys has real costs that blow up quadratically with
the number of devs and multiplicatively with te number of identity spaces
you have to match.

> It seems like you could migrate to github by:
> - Download existing html site into your local src code directory
> - Put html site under git version management
> - Create new github page
> - Git push the html up to github
> - Git push the main src code up
> - Setup issue tracking if you want it
> - Err... apart from finessing the above, and setting up redirects, I
> think that's actually about it?

No.  How do I set up hooks for commit notifications? Where are my
mailing lists?  Why aren't they properly integrated with the
bugtracker?  
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>