[FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 180, Issue 3

[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 08:16:10PM +0000, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There’s a generation of people that have an irrational dislike of Microsoft having to do with them being brutal competitors in the 1990s.
> Never mind that they now have a huge research organization and are ahead of many in commercial deployment of advanced technologies, e.g.
> https://github.com/aspnet/Blazor

The risks MS pose to the hosted projects are no different to the risks
GitHub posed. These risks are real, eg Geocities, but can be
mitigated. Git is a fully distibuted repository, so if GitHub were to
disappear overnight, the repositories will exist with all the commit
metadata on all the developer machines out there that have cloned the
repositories. It is a simple exercise to populate a new Git repository
with the contents of a locally cloned copy. As a result, I do not
worry about the source code for the projects I'm involved in.

My biggest worry is that the bugtracker data (called "issues" on
Github) might disappear. For my own projects, I use SourceForge's
tracker, which IMHO is slightly nicer, and for historical reasons, but
the same risks exist. I have a python script that grabs the contents
of all open tickets for a project on SF. The data is a bit scrambled,
but at least it will be possible to reconstruct the tickets on a
different system if required. It is also useful to get a local copy of
open issues for when I'm working offline on my laptop.

Cheers
-- 

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Dr Russell Standish                    Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellow        hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University         http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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