Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> writes: > On Sun, Jan 3, 2016 at 7:45 PM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > > Anyone can take email data from the email server, migrate it to a > > different implementation of the same email system, keep it running > > with the same data and allow the same people to continue interacting > > with it as before. > > > > Those are traits I think a community should require of any system > > that controls vital discussions like pull requests. > > They are. Ultimately, a GitHub pull request is backed by a git pull > request. Here's an example: > > https://github.com/MikeiLL/appension/pull/187
Yes, of course the VCS data is in Git and therefore can be accessed with Git. Please stop raising that when *I'm not talking about* the VCS data alone, I'm talking also about the data of the pull request feature. The discussion data, code review data, etc. is all part of “GitHub pull request”. How do we export, along with the VCS data, the data and system that control the code review discussino and other useful features entailed by “GitHub pull request”? How do we get that data and confidently and quickly set up a system hosted on a different provider that allows everyone involved to continue the same code reviews and discussions etc. without GitHub? To my knowledge we can't, short of re-implementing an expressly proprietary non-standard system against the wishes of the vendor. That's valuable community data being locked into a single-vendor system, who explicitly rejects community access to the system and the data needed to continue on a different provider. It boggles my mind that so many people – even when the conversation has directly raised the notion of different layers of technology that control different layers of valuable data – blithely ignore the fact that *the discussion itself* is dependent on a software system and data. Control over that software system and data is important to control over the valuable discussions, just as control over the VCS system and data is important to control over the valuable source code. Conversely, as Ned Batchelder points out, without all the proprietary vendor lock-in centralised features, GitHub is a fairly unimpressive Git hosting provider. The “but Git is free software, no one is locked in!” is trivially true, and has an obvious response in “then there's no good reason to move anything there”. Please, those who are going to advocate for GitHub especially over other Git hosting providers because it has specially valuable features, be honest that you're advocating moving control of valuable information away from the community that values them. -- \ “First things first, but not necessarily in that order.” —The | `\ Doctor, _Doctor Who_ | _o__) | Ben Finney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
