For those who cannot or don't want to access GitHub, the gitbox repos on ASF infrastructure are actually the "real" source of truth. As I understand it, our GitHub repos are really some kind of mirror that is kept in a two-way sync with gitbox. (Unless something has changed since I last looked into it.)
However, the way we use GitHub makes it so that GitHub is for all practical purposes the central thing for us and gitbox is some kind of afterthought (if we even remember that it's there). We as a project don't have to work in a GitHub-centric way. We could choose to use ASF's Jira for issues, ASF's buildbots for CI, etc. But GitHub's all-in-one way of working and the fact that it's so entrenched makes it the path of least resistance for most users and contributors around the world, and probably the least maintenance and administration effort for us. That's probably why GitHub is in such widespread use. The convenience and entrenchment is either an advantage (if you just want to write code and not muck around with administering all kinds of systems or teaching contributors your special way of working) or a disadvantage (if you don't like dealing with the other baggage that comes with it), depending on your point of view. While I would rather we didn't depend on GitHub as much as we do, I recognize that if we work any other way, it will introduce friction and we'd likely take a big hit in the amount of contributors and contributions. So, not because I like it but just because that's practical reality, I'd rather accept it and just focus on getting work done. I went off on a tangent. I began by talking about gitbox, which is on ASF infra. If you set that up as your remote, you can pull from it and not deal with GitHub for pulling. But what about the other direction, when you want to upstream your work? Since we have adopted the convention that no one merges their own changes (this is a good convention in my opinion), and because of CI, anything you want to push has to become a PR somehow. I don't really know how that can happen. I suppose you can email it to dev@ with a subject line starting with [PATCH] and someone can volunteer to put it in a PR and sort of become the steward of it on GitHub. But this won't get us out of the "AI" training datasets. Nothing will. As others have said, all our code is public so anyone can take it and do things with it, including training AI, and I'm sure there are lots more of them than just this "Stack" thing. Nathan On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 6:43 PM Gregory Nutt <spudan...@gmail.com> wrote: > I think we need to continue to use PRs at some point in the process. > PRs are so tied into our CI that I don't think we could work around it. > > Can you use another GIT repository? If you create a PR on gitlab or > bitbucket, someone could move the PR to github. Or perhaps we could > take commits from a local repository clone? We haven't done it for a > while, but patches could also be converted to github PRs with a little > more effort. > > I think there are options, but without PRs on github, I don't see how > you could independently make changes. > > On 3/21/2024 4:08 PM, Sebastien Lorquet wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I plan to leave github completely and delete my account, because of > > this: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/in-the-stack > > > > It is the last of reasons that make me want to leave this place for good. > > > > How can we imagine a process so I (and others) can continue to > > contribute to NuttX without using pull requests from github? or any > > public "forge" for that matter. > > > > Sebastien > > >
