[OH-Dev] Moving our git repository to Github

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hey now all OpenHatch peeps,

I propose that we move our main Git repository hosting to Github. I expect 
most people won't mind, but some people's feathers will be ruffled by us 
switching from a free-software service (Gitorious) to a proprietary one 
(Github).

My own feathers are ruffled by me proposing it, honestly. I'm not 
thrilled, and I'll write more at the bottom about why I think it's a good 
idea.

This is separate from any workflow changes, which might also be a good 
idea, but I see as separate.

Proposal
--------

We declare that an account on Github has the primary git repository for 
OpenHatch website development, as well as is the primary store for the 
other git repositories we have.

Tasks to get there:

* We adjust the new-contributor documentation to point at a repo on 
github.com not gitorious.org

* We adjust server-side scripts that look at the repository to use 
github.com as "origin"

* We make a list of which features we're willing to use (examples: we sure 
do want to use the git repo hosting. We don't want to use the issue 
tracker because it sucks. We don't want to use the wiki because we want to 
limit our use of Github-only features.)

Other thoughts about getting there:

* I, for one, am not personally interested in maintaining a mirror on 
Gitorious. I don't want it to get out-of-date.

* I propose that we do:

    git rm *
    echo "WE MOVED THE REPO. SEE github.com/openhatch" > WE_HAVE_MOVED.txt
    git add WE_HAVE_MOVED.txt
    git commit -m 'We moved'

(or something similarly clear) to all the repos hosted on 
gitorious.org. This prevents a serious problem where contributors find an 
out-of-date repository and wonder why there's no activity.

Reasons I want to switch
------------------------

In the past few months, I've experienced more than one full day in which 
Gitorious refuses to accept my SSH key authentication. To fix it, more 
than half of the time, I have to file a support request. That's the main 
issue for me.

Gitorious makes it hard to integrate the git repository with other 
services like IRC bots. Github provides "web hooks" that make this quite 
easy. (Gitorious' code supports this, but it's *disabled* on the main 
gitorious.org instance.)

We could have these features if we hosted the git repository ourselves, 
but that comes with maintenance burden that I (at least) am not able to 
take up.

Github has the hugely-useful feature of showing the README file on the 
front page of the repository.

Github's git hosting provides way-faster bandwidth, which (when timing 
from a machine on the MIT.EDU wired network) provides our repo in 45 
seconds. A clone from Gitorious takes 7 minutes. Most users will 
experience a less-dramatic speed difference, but that was amazing to see.

Github is also more well-known, makes our repository easy to find, and 
because of these things *maybe* more people will submit contributions 
through it compared to Gitorious. I'm not particularly swayed by this 
argument (I would emphasize the word "maybe" strongly), but I wanted to 
mention it in case anyone else is thinking it and wonders why I didn't 
mention it. (-:

Timeline
--------

Unknown; I can't put any time into this at the moment, but I wanted to get 
the idea out there.

-- Asheesh.