[ruby-core:71725] Re: [Ruby trunk - Feature #11741] Migrate Ruby to Git from Subversion

[Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>]

me@jonathanmoss.me wrote:
> I think it's unreasonable to ask a website to degrade and work
> normally without any GUI or use of Javascript -- these are the core
> foundations of the web today, and in order to use the web, you must
> use these technologies. I also think it's uncalled for to ask a
> website to work through a terminal window -- again, this is not what
> the modern web was designed for.

I have no interest in a "modern web" which requires hundreds of
megabytes of memory to exchange small pieces of text.  That is
discriminatory to users who cannot afford to upgrade.

Ruby isn't known for being memory-efficient, but nearly all of my
Ruby processes are under 50MB of RAM, most are under 20MB.
Ruby certainly never requires a GUI to run; thousands of servers
run Ruby that way.

Given an Internet connection, anything that can run Ruby should
be able to contribute to it.

And given things like NoScript are popular, so I would say working
without JS is still important.

> If you do need Gitlab to work without
> a GUI or JS, Gitlab has a great API and you can build a small Sinatra
> app for yourself to consume Gitlab's data.

Maybe that's an option; but signing up isn't intuitive.

I tried signing up for GitLab.com with w3m and I see 4 unlabeled fields
which requires manually inspecting each element to know what it is.

The terms of service are less strict than GitHub (a good thing);
I would assume any self-hosted GitLab instance would not have to
abide by the same laws which govern GitLab B.V.

Redmine at https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ has no terms-of-service at all
and the signup is clearly labeled.

> Most software projects these days (especially ones created in Ruby) do
> not use mailing lists for contributions. Only the very large ones,
> like Git and Linux as you have mentioned previously, use mailing lists
> for contributions. I think using a mailing list as a way to accept
> contributions would create a very large learning curve for beginners,
> and would increase the bar for knowledge needed to be able to
> contribute. I don't agree with you that just because Ruby would be
> changing to Git, "we ought to adopt the workflows git developers
> themselves use." I don't think the toolset that the core Git
> developers use would be appropriate here, since Ruby is something
> that's much higher up the technical stack (more abstractions).

You're right about the current state of things.  But do you
wonder why projects like git and Linux have attracted so many
contributors?  Perhaps the lack of registration barrier has
something to do with it.

Back in the early days, git was heavily implemented in shell and Perl
scripts which were very high-level.  I wouldn't say Ruby is any higher
up the technical stack than using the git plumbing.

> I think using something like Gitlab, as compared to Github, is
> compromise enough for a distributed system, and something that would
> meet your demands. I am not trying to be rude by saying this, but I
> don't think the ideology of one person should be holding back a
> migration like this. I am happy to try and find common ground, but I
> think some of your requests are a little too much (example would be
> needing site to be viewable over terminal, with no JS).

I have no more influence in this matter than you do.
In fact, I have always refused to ever have any more influence than
anybody else, anywhere.

And maybe GitLab works reasonably well from a terminal.
Hopefully it stays that way, maybe we'll know in a few years.

OTOH, I'm really not sure it's worth changing two things at once is
worth it.

There's a bunch of Redmine-specific tools the maintainers use
(I haven't checked in depth); and as I said before:
Redmine works with git, too.

So perhaps migrate to git first and stick with Redmine for now.