[Repo-criteria-discuss] Why is Data Export only listed in Extra Credit?

[Ingo Ruhnke]

I find it rather troublesome that I have to go down the list all the
way to the bottom to find:

> A+ — Extra credit
>
> All data contributed by the project owner and contributors is exportable in a 
> machine-readable format. (A+5)

>From my point of view that is *by far* the most important point when
it comes to hosting, far more important then anything else on that
list. If the data is stuck on the server with no way getting it out
that means I am at the whim of the hoster or project manager and if
they ever decide to change policies or just shut down permanently I
can't do anything about. This is especially troublesome when it comes
to projects or content that is created inside the webbrowser itself,
such as Wikis or bug reports, the lack of export can easily kill such
a project or lead to huge data loss. The lack of data export really
should put a hoster into the "Unacceptable" category.

In practical terms this is no longer as big a problem as it used to
be, as Git makes it easy to mirror whole repositories along with the
complete history and services like GitLab and GitHub use Wikis that
are build on top of Git. But bug reports can still be rather
troublesome to move from one service to another, as some data might
get lost in the export (e.g. the Google Code -> GitHub move didn't
copy attachments, but only text) and there are of course other
services around that might not be based around Git and have no export
at all.

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