[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Microsoft acquiring GitHub

[Martin Günther]

I believe there is no reason to panic. Every maintainer of a ROS package can already today decide for themselves where to host their packages. Almost everyone is on GitHub though. Here's a quick breakdown of the current released packages for Kinetic:

|                 |      |        |
|-----------------|-----:|-------:|
| github.com      | 1457 | 96,75% |
| bitbucket.org   |   37 |  2,46% |
| gitlab.com      |    8 |  0,53% |
| self-hosted git |    2 |  0,27% |

Migrating ~1500 packages away from GitHub is an enormous task. Even mirroring a package on two Git hosting providers has costs: One of the copies has to be read-only, i.e. no pull requests accepted (otherwise chaos will ensue). The copies have to be kept in sync. Etc etc.

In short, it's already possible today for package maintainers to migrate away from GitHub. Personally, I would recommend staying calm and see what happens before committing an enormous amount of time and creating a lot of confusion needlessly.





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