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

Lucas Walter ros.discourse at gmail.com
Thu Jun 7 16:58:51 UTC 2018



What would it take to regularly back up the entirety of ROS so that it could be reconstituted in the event of for example [github.com](http://github.com) disappearing forever for whatever reason?  Could every package (and all forks) be backed up- and not just the released ones (there could be an opt-in list)?  Can all the issues and pull requests and comments be scraped and redeployed into a different set of hosting software- and keep the cross links alive?  Users would reclaim their accounts and forks by verifying through the emails they used in commits?

If the answer is 'it would be really really hard and likely tons of recent work and documentation in comments would be lost' maybe there ought to be a general plan to steer towards making it easier and reducing the amount of lost work.  Mitigating that extreme case would also have the side benefit of making it easier to switch hosts for less cataclysmic reasons, like gradual neglect, or increasing numbers of disaffected open source developers gravitating towards something newer and shinier- ideally something that solves all of the above problems also, by storing all comments in parallel git repos, and providing a seamless web user experience for what is actually a patchwork of distributed servers (both public and private) using a federated user authentication scheme, and integrated blockchain buzzword compliance etc.





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