GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2018 at 02:02:12PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On 06/08/2018 01:01 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > but the valuable associated information like PR discussions is
> > specific to Github and there is no easy way (if there's a way at
> > all!) to export this data and import it elsewhere.
> 
> For importing, you may be right. For exporting, I'm not sure I agree.
> With curl and something like Adam's HTML DOM (or heck, even just
> regex) it shouldn't be too difficult to crawl/scrape all the
> information into a sensible format. That's a technique I've been
> wanting to do a LOT more with than I've had a chance to.

True, you can write a crawler to trawl through all the pages and collate
all the info.  But it doesn't seem to be something that can be done
overnight, and the extracted data will probably need further processing
to be put into a more useful form (e.g., resolving cross-links, parse
references between PRs, etc., dumping the raw HTML is only the first
step).


> Although granted, that's still far more complicated than it SHOULD be,
> and doesn't help much if there's nowhere to import it into.

Even if there were somewhere to import it, it would still require a fair
amount of effort to massage the data into the right format to be
imported.


> > It's 2018, and history has shown that standard, open data formats
> > are what stands the test of time.
> 
> Yup. Unfortunately, history has also shown that closed-off and
> locked-in tend to be more lucrative business models. Which is why all
> the big muscle in the tech world is usually working *against* open
> standards.

Of course.  Money corrupts, and where money is involved, you can expect
that anything else that stands in the way to be shoved aside or thrown
out the window completely, no matter how much more sense it may make.
Ironic, that Github hasn't turned a profit yet. :-D


T

-- 
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares? -- Erich Schubert