curious: why use own hosting rather than github?

[John Franklin]

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 7:28 AM, Matthieu Weber <mweber at free.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, 25 May 2020 at 01:08PM +0200, J Rt wrote:
>>  Get a bit the same feeling. Sent a small patch a few months ago. No
>>  idea what its status is now. Would have been much easier to track 
>> the
>>  status with a fork / pull request / issues workflow in my opinion. 
>> The
>>  result is that I will probably not try to participate more here in 
>> the
>>  future :( .
> 
> Are the patches lost because a mailing list is a bad communication
> channel, or are they lost because the maintainer does not care enough
> about the project to actually collect the patches, review them and
> integrate them? In the second case, the maintainer could equally 
> ignore
> pull requests made through github/gitlab/whatever.
> 
> Also please, don't reply above the text you are referring to.
> 

I've also sent a patch to the mailing list (1Password import 
improvements) only to have it fall in a black hole.  I, too, would like 
to see some kind of public-facing bug tracker.

I've been doing open source for a long time and I can't think of a 
single project before pass that used a mailing list as the sole way of 
managing patches.  They've all had an issue tracker of some kind.  
Gnats, Bugzilla, Redmine, Trac, Mantis, Debbugs ... bug trackers 
existed long long before Git or GitHub, and all of them have some kind 
of email integration.  The integration may be as simple as notifying 
people of updates to tickets, others use email as the way to interact 
with the bug tracker, and sending an email to a specific email address 
may be the way to post a new bug.  Before the Web, email was the one 
thing we all had, and so that's just how you did it.

More recent web-based bug trackers, like Trac and Redmine, provide a 
view into the repository and will match a commit with an issue, if you 
include the issue number in the commit message.  Setting up either of 
those is as simple as `apt install <pkgname>` on Debian, and a little 
editing of their config files.

In regards to workflow, the thing GitHub and GitLab added is the 
ability to submit an entire branch as a patch, and let the maintainer 
accept the patch with a single click.  Also, a social media-like 
community that makes it easier for people to contribute.  I can 
certainly see the value of both, even if I'm not sold on putting my 
creative efforts on Other People's Servers under their shifting Terms 
of Use, not after what happened with SourceForge.  I'm in strong favor 
of self-hosted solutions.

Standing up a bug tracker doesn't obviate this mailing list.  
Discussion among the most active contributors about issues that don't 
fit neatly in a ticket, the architecture of pass, or providing 
community support (both for and by the community) is best done here, 
and should continue.

I suspect that Jason simply doesn't have time or energy to give the 
project the attention it needs, not that he doesn't care about it.  I 
know time has been in short supply for my own projects over the last 
year, I can hardly fault him for the same.

jf
-- 
John Franklin
franklin at sentaidigital.com