As title says. Kakoune development is going on GitHub, and I’m afraid that it can in some way affect contributions. Were there any thoughts on moving to self hosted solution like gitea or gitlab? (or any git web for that matter)
Plugins are also based mostly on github, so some plugins may become unavailable. What I like about Emacs is that it has several repositories for packages, like Elpa and MElpa. This is not best solution, but it helps keeping plugins available, yet its putting all the eggs in the same basket.
I think it would be nice yo have github Independent solution for both of these parts of Kakoune life, but I guess the law still may take place making contributions harder or impossible.
If we decided to move, I would be quite tempted to go to sourcehut.
I am not a big fan of github in general, they did a good job at making contributing easy, but I would be happy if github became a mirror of wherever Kakoune development moved to.
SourceHut is pretty cool, but I believe it’s also US-based, and legally required to enforce the same trade sanctions as GitHub. Probably it’d get away with not enforcing them for longer, since they’re much smaller, but legally…
What about self hosted solution? I think that there’s some FSF approved solutions that should not struggle from such problem. The servers might be restrictive for incoming traffic though.
This is bullshit. Why should trade sanctions apply to FOSS contributions? There’s nothing being sold.
For moving:
I’d like to give a +1 for GitLab; it has a similar workflow to Github, and has a self-hosting option, and does pretty much everything (+1 & -1). Though I’m biased, since it’s the only Github alternative I’ve used.
This is the first I’ve heard of SourceHut, and it looks good (-1 for still being in alpha; +1 for being developed by Drew DeVault (I’m a fan of his other works like Sway); +1 for not taking the “kitchen-sink” approach like GitLab; +1 for self-hosting option).
First of all, I love SourceHut and would be fine with that being the primary home, but that wouldn’t be at all a solution to this “problem”. If taken seriously, and not just as a sort of “fun issue to get all worked up about and then forget”, below is a list of just a handful of the countries that we could (1) not host in, (2) not host on a company based in, and (3) not live in, because as a citizen of most countries you are committing a crime by bypassing sanctions of that country.
United States, EU, Australia, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland, Japan — just to call out the “big names”, many more of also signed on. So again, you could not, host in, host on a company based in or LIVE in those places.
And that is just looking at one of the places listed by Github (Crimea) – if we wanted 100% coverage to support developers in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria as well – the list of countries we could not host in, host on a company based in or live in goes up significantly… making it almost impossible to do.
Sanctions by their nature are designed to be hard to get around and carry significant criminal penalties with trying to be bypassed.
That doesn’t mean I am happy with this situation, but it does mean that trying to avoid sanctions (again, a crime in many countries to even attempt it) is profoundly challenging, and not US specific.
Ugh, export controls on software is an insanely complex and broken system all over the world. You are not the first one to scream in agony of the stupidity, but as information and software becomes the most valuable “asset” in the world – passing oil – it is only going to get more complex.
AND I AM GOING TO BE THE GREAT LORD OF THIS LAND. THE LAND WHERE PLUGINS ARE WRITTEN FOR ME TO USE. THE LAND OF PERFECT EDITOR. LAND WHERE EVERYONE HAS A MODE OF CHOICE AND IN CONTROL OF IT’S OWN BUFFERS.
