Issue #322: Federation protocol
| Reported by: | Koala Yeung |
| State: | new |
| Created on: | 2018-06-09 16:01 |
| Updated on: | 2018-06-13 05:45 |
Description
As you might have notice, GitHub has been acquired by Microsoft lately. And that created huge echo in the open source community because that's where tens of thousands of open source software live.
The success of GitHub model is hugely because of the network effect of the development community. The fork-PR model and issue tracker made Git based development flow approachable to all developers. And these developers constructed a network to help out each other.
Can we reproduce that network effect without a monolithic source code hosting service?
I have started a small repository (ironically, on GitHub) to discuss if we can make existing open source Git service software federate with each another. I originally only proposed to do Fork and PR. And someone else joined to also raised discussion on federated issue tracking.
The link: https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub/
I know Kallithea do not do issue tracking. But I believe members in a federation do not need to support all features that the protocol supports. They only need to support the part they can and care about.
Also we have talked about having support beyond Git. Since Kallithea supports both Git and Mercurial, it would be great to have your contributor(s) on board to discuss how we should federate.
Our discussion has started less than a week ago. The workgroup mailing list archive is here. Please consider to join the effort.
Should any contributor here would like to join us, please reply this issue and introduce yourself. Thanks.
Attachments
Comments
Comment by Thomas De Schampheleire, on 2018-06-12 19:49
Hi Koala Yeung, thanks for contacting us.
In fact, there is a similar request sitting in our (bitbucket) issue tracker: issue #26 "API to send pull request from one kallithea instance to another". Until now, no work on it has been done though.
I certainly agree that a focus on Git alone is too specific. There are very good reasons why people may prefer Mercurial or something else over Git. From that perspective, the names 'git-federation' and 'gitpub' are unfortunate. Something include the term 'vcs' (version control system) could be more generic but still clear.
The fact that there is no issue tracking in Kallithea is not really a design goal but rather a current limitation. It is on our wishlist to have something like that, although it may be better to integrate with something existing than to write something ourself.
Please note that the resources in the Kallithea project currently are very limited, and we already have a list of things to do. This means that I don't think you could expect active contribution from our side, unless someone steps up. That said, Kallithea is an open-source project welcoming code and documentation contributions from everyone, after review/discussion/rework, and as long as the changes are not in contradiction with our guidelines and project view.
Meanwhile, I already subscribed to your mailing list to be able to watch how things evolve.
Comment by Koala Yeung, on 2018-06-13 05:45
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the reply. We don't expect everyone to implement anything right the way. Just want to involve anyone interested so we might gather more point of view in our discussion. In long run, it would be great we have a common protocol to bridge different VCS service software.
Thanks for subscribing :-)