On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 09:44:09AM +0300, Lars Eggert wrote: > On 2019-7-31, at 5:21, Martin Thomson <mt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The reasons to use GitHub aren't limited to hosting of git repositories. > > > > Foremost is the low friction for contributions, which is made > > possible by having a large, existing community of people with > > accounts and knowledge of the system. > > +100 > > As someone said earlier in the thread, of course we can stand up our > own instance of pretty much anything based on git. But we'd > instantly loose the community already on the public platform. Git is a distributed system. As such, the same git repository can be made available on multiple git servers. For example: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/fs/ext2/e2fsprogs.git https://github.com/tytso/e2fsprogs.git https://repo.or.cz/e2fsprogs.git Are all mirrors of each other. So even if/when github.com were to cut off access to some country, people still have access from the other two git repos. Furthermore, *nothing* says that you have to use github's pull requests as the only way to request changes be made to a git repository. You can just as easily send a request that a change be made to a git repo via: git send-email -1 --to=ietf-example-wg@xxxxxxxx .... and then the document editor can use "git am" to apply e-mail message to the repository, if she chooses. Cheers, - Ted P.S. This is also something individual working groups can do on their own. The repo.or.cz site is a public service which charges no fees (although they do accept donations) in the Czech Republic which, while part of NATO and the EU, might have somewhat different ideas of international relations than the Orange Haired One currently gracing the US White House. So if an IETF working group has a valued contributor which is getting blocked by github, an ietf wg chair (or anyone on the working group, for that matter) could establish a unofficial mirror of the wg's git repo on repo.or.cz without needing to ask permission from the IESG, IAB, RSE, RSOC, etc.
