Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Hi, I have a question for the FESCo and Council candidates: do you
support allowing Fedora src-git repositories to be hosted on
gitlab.com, which a proprietary software git forge?
IMHO (as a non-candidate), it is sad that this question has to be asked at
all: Fedora has "Freedom" as one of its 4 core goals. Using proprietary
infrastructure is inherently incompatible with that and should not even be
up for discussion. So any candidate answering anything other than "hell no!"
can absolutely not be voted for IMHO.
But I wonder why we even need src-git at all. I have not seen any consensus
for its introduction on this mailing list, and I do not see what it
technically brings that dist-git does not. For those packages where Fedora
is upstream, they should be hosted on pagure.io (and that should actually be
a requirement: hosting Fedora-as-upstream projects on
gitlab.com or even
Microsoft GitHub should be an absolute no-go!) and packaged in dist-git. For
those packages where Fedora is *not* upstream, Fedora should not be in the
business of shipping a source repository at all. Keeping the upstream code
on one hand and the packaging, including patches, on the other hand separate
is best practice that clearly identifies what, if any, changes to the
upstream code have been applied in downstream packaging.
But *if* it is decided that a src-git is needed at all, it needs to be
hosted by Fedora, on Fedora-controlled infrastructure, using only Free (as
in Speech) Software. The same standards should be applied to dist-git, to
projects for which Fedora is upstream, and to any other Fedora
infrastructure. (And to me, "Fedora-controlled infrastructure" also includes
the hardware. The use of Amazon cloud services for Copr is a problem, too.)
So do not expect me to waste any voting points on any candidate who does not
answer Michael Catanzaro's question with a clear "NO".
Kevin Kofler