Everything moved to git generally, and GitHub specifically.
Lots of tools and workflows expect you to be using git (Visual Studio and Xcode have built-in git support, etc) and Mercurial is becoming an alien thing to lots of people. Instead of being a thing you use, it’s now One More Thing to learn. It’s far more likely that people familiar with revision control generally will also be familiar with git specifically.
I am not a fan of git; I still believe Mercurial is a better piece of software, and that git has made some calamitous design choices…but for our personal needs we can more or less use a subset of git the same way we use Mercurial now, while letting everyone else use git however they personally like.
And the way that most people personally like using git is via GitHub.
One reason we hadn’t considered a move to GitHub before now is that this project has had a policy of owning all its infrastructure. This project survived the demise of Loki, it survived devolution being scooped up by a domain squatter, it survived Dreamhost’s flaky servers. Years ago, we had enough of it all and moved everything to Digital Ocean because it’s just a colocated Linux server; we maintain all the services and nothing is ever taken out from under us…in the worst case we would just move our nightly backup to a new host and update DNS and not be just generally screwed as providers drop services or break things and just generally don’t answer the phone.
The tradeoff for this freedom, of course, is that everything is buggy and janky and no one has time to make it better. Bugzilla doesn’t really look much different than it did twenty years ago (and, as we discovered, the Bugzilla developers didn’t bother updating their code when newer MySQL releases broke it, and I’m a game developer and don’t want to fix perl code from two decades ago to get the bug tracker working after I upgrade Ubuntu, blah blah blah).
It’s not just Bugzilla. It’s the wiki, the mailing lists, the quaint little Mercurial web interface. The little open source thing that we rely on but no one is working on and probably has security holes in it. It’s all janky, and it causes developer friction. It causes it for Sam and I, and we’re old Unix command line cowboys, so for those that expect computers to treat them like computers do in 2021–with slick UIs and without cronjobs that occasionally fail until Ryan rolls along to restart a service over ssh–it was becoming untenable.
So in moving it to GitHub, we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day. And I grew up during the heyday of the Free Software Foundation, so I know this is a trap, but I’m tired and don’t have the energy to be a server admin for something that’s held together with scotch tape and prayers when I’m really supposed to be writing OpenGL code.
So we’re moving to servers we don’t control, which does make me nervous, but the argument goes like this: Microsoft owns GitHub, and it’s highly unlikely Microsoft is going to go bankrupt anytime soon. If Microsoft pulls the plug on GitHub, it’s not just SDL that would be in trouble, it would be the entire open source ecosystem, so interested parties would move fast to help you migrate to somewhere else…right?
And for us? That somewhere else would probably be our own server, hosting a copy of the git repository we cloned ourselves.
We will be migrating on the 10th. Tomorrow. If everything catches fire, we’ll revert everything back on the same day, but I would expect services to be disabled for a few hours while we sort things out, and then most existing things to make reasonable attempts to redirect you to GitHub. Stay tuned and have patience and hope tomorrow goes smoothly.
