Mapping SVN usernames to git

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

I'm sure this is a discussion you have had a thousand times but just to 
throw in my two cents:

Like Dirk, I dislike it if something depends on "free" commercial 
services. For something hosted on GitHub, the fact that someone who 
wants to contribute or even just open an issue has to create an account 
with a business somewhere in the US is a very clear downside.

But, I am not a fundamentalist. There comes a point where pragmatism has 
to trump "principled objection". The fact is, almost anyone has a GitHub 
account nowadays. People are used to how to work with GitHub. and having 
stuff hosted there is, in practice, LESS of a hurdle to clear for new 
contributors than having stuff hosted in SVN, Trac, or even a plain git 
or gitlab repo.

I know that Dirk has built a ton of "handmade CI-like stuff" on top of 
the trac/svn system and not all of that will easily transfer, but as 
long as it doesn't, we will always have the situation that Dirk has to 
maintain the system and Dirk is the only person to understand how 
maintaining it works and therefore it will never change.

This is not a healthy situation - a "bus factor of 1" and it needs to be 
fixed.

I suggest to throw ideological thinking over board and fully join the 
GitHub train. It is not ideal but in my opinion the current situation is 
worse, with ancient technology presenting a clear obstacle to contribution.

I know that JOSM has had its share of people who want to re-do 
everything as a condition for their contribution, and frequently told 
them to leave us alone when I was the JOSM maintainer. But I mainly said 
that to people who wanted to (in my opinion) make the whole thing more 
COMPLEX. I always said: We need to be able to attract as many 
contributors as possible and keep the hurdles low, so please don't 
re-engineer all this to a point where only people with 10 years of Java 
experience can work on it.

But we now have a point where the arcane SVN/Trac/homemade CI stuff is 
the complex bit, and a move to GitHub would simplify things and open 
doors for new people.

I would be in favour of expediting the move to GitHub, and if this 
breaks a few things for a while (because Dirk has created so much 
automation that somehow parses Trac Wiki entries that flow into JOSM 
configuration and whatnot) then so be it - let things be broken for a 
while until someone fixes it. And it doesn't have to be Dirk all the 
time. Dirk, you could take a deep breath and allow a new generation to 
make their impression on JOSM. They'll get it working, no doubt.

Saying "we can only move to git once this list of 100 things is 
guaranteed to work from day one" will delay the project to infinity, and 
saying "we can move to git but never GitHub" is also a shitty idea - 
gives you all the pain without the gain.

If Dirk doesn't want to be responsible for the move to GitHub - 
something I could fully understand - then maybe it is time to pass the 
baton to a new maintainer who is willing to take on the job.

The move to GitHub is inevitable. Dirk, the only thing you can influence 
is how long it takes and how painful it is for everyone.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"