It would be too painful to move D to Gitlab or another medium?

[IchorDev]

On Saturday, 25 January 2025 at 19:59:48 UTC, Steven 
Schveighoffer wrote:
>> And again it's owned by a company which is not regarded for 
>> good things, I just read the article about the usage of their 
>> AI for the destruction of Gaza.
>
> Speaking for myself, we are here to write software, not 
> participate in activism. As long as the service can perform the 
> needs we have, how others use their service is nothing of my 
> concern.
>
>> Another thing that I always think, is giving too much power to 
>> one entity, balance is good.
>
> I don't think we would be in anywhere near as good shape if we 
> hadn't relied on github for all these years. It was 
> revolutionary in getting people to contribute to D.
>
> I think we should keep GH as long as they do not make things 
> unbearable. We have all the code, we can export all the PR 
> data, etc. If we wanted to change services, it's doable. 
> There's no need to go through that pain for almost no gain, 
> when we are comfortable here.
>
> We already know how much effort and pain it took to move from 
> bugzilla to GH. We shouldn't be looking at other services now.
>
> -Steve

The fact that an account is required to PR is not great. As a 
bare minimum a push-pull mirror should be established as a 
backup. Even a slow mirror would be suitable, since according to 
you it would have less traffic.

> And no guarantee gitlab does not do the same thing eventually.

Fuck GitLab. I don’t have anything nicer to say about it than 
that.
If we were to move forge, it should be to something like 
Codeberg, since it’s community-driven, and D is FOSS. It’s worth 
noting that many other forges have a function to migrate 
repositories from GitHub (including issues, PRs, etc.) with 
trivial effort, and some have a way to set up mirrors as well.

> Note that we pay GH nothing for all the services we get. And we 
> get a lot.
>
> Many online services are moving this way. We are just going to 
> have to live with this.

This direction is dangerous. Free services aren’t free to run, 
and eventually we’ll be forced to pay or become the product. If 
GitHub starts requiring an account to view repositories or pull 
them, then D will effectively become closed source. I fully 
expect them to do this though (and probably also start charging 
money for more and more previously ‘free’ stuff) because it will 
give users an ultimatum between signing up and giving up. 
Facebook and TwiXter have already done this, and modern social 
media platforms are all designed to be signup-only from day 0. 
People are disturbingly accustomed to the expansion of the deep 
web, which has now swallowed vast amounts of previously readily 
available information into its depths.
For contrast, you know what happened when I temporarily lost my 
forum account in the past? Nothing. I was even posting the entire 
time, because you don’t need an account to use the forums.

The bottom line is that D’s core infrastructure must remain 
freely accessible. I don’t care if we have to go back to mailing 
lists, RSS feeds, and IRC. This present acquiescence will cost us 
dearly in the long run if not averted.