[mantisbt-dev] Request for Feedback: Github

[John R. <jr...@le...>]

Howdy all,

With some of the recent feature additions to Github, and their continued support 
of open source projects and the free software community, myself and a few other 
developers have decided to investigate a move to Github as the official hosting 
location for the core MantisBT repositories.  A preliminary "organization" for 
MantisBT has been created [1], and the full mantisbt.git repository is being 
mirrored there for people to experiment with.

Some of the obvious advantages of switching away from self-hosted repositories:

  - Less bandwidth and server overhead required, potentially saving server costs

  - Higher availability of code; Github will respond to outages faster than us

  - Self-maintained user accounts mean users could manage their own SSH keys, etc

  - Simple and powerful community forking and contribution; users could fork the
    repo, and pull-requests through Github could notify this mailing list

  - Improved source code browser with graphs and coordination between forks

  - First-party support from Github for using both Mercurial and SVN clients

  - Street-cred for being where the cool kids are

Some of the existing features we already have:

  - Email, CIA/IRC, and source integration service hooks are available, but can
    be configured using a simple interface instead of editing hook scripts

  - Github's team permissions mean we could still grant developer access to
    individual repositories like we do using Gitosis on our own server, but
    without needing to deal with complex configuration files

I personally cannot find any disadvantages, other than requiring a bit of work 
to handle the migration, and needing to redirect any existing inbound gitweb 
links to the new pages at Github.  But I would love to hear any questions or 
concerns to the contrary.

Cheers

-- 
John Reese
LeetCode.net