Open Sourcing a Python Project the Right Way | Hacker News Reader

Open Sourcing a Python Project the Right Way

jeffknupp.com

1 pointPerados5 comments

GitHub is not the right way to publish something.

Would you care to elaborate?

First, there are other valid options, like BitBucket or GitLab. Second, if GitHub deteriorates for any reason (and it will happen sooner or later; ten years ago nobody would have even think that SourceForge could go awry, and look at it today), you'll need to update all the possible places where it was mentioned as a distribution point. Thus, you should treat it as an auxiliary thing, and host the canonical distribution yourself.

Nobody said not to upload to BB or GL. GH is just a more popular option. You still have to choose one canonical distribution point and I would put money on your own hosting failing both earlier and more often than GH.

I think your issue here is rather personal against GH. You could say exactly the same things about uploading to BB. And you could say the same about uploading to PyPi rather than own repo, but didn't - why?

> Nobody said not to upload to BB or GL. GH is just a more popular option.

I don't know if you have noticed, but I put an emphasis on the word the of a phrase "the right way". If it was "a right way", I wouldn't ever speak up.

> You still have to choose one canonical distribution point and I would put money on your own hosting failing both earlier and more often than GH.

OK, how would you send me your money? GitHub has experienced three or four outages in my recent memory, while my hosting remained on-line.

And you miss the point completely. It's not about nine nines of uptime, it's about having control over communication channels. Primary/canonical/always up-to-date one you should host yourself, because you won't migrate from it to elsewhere, barring getting a new domain name.

Any third party repository hosting, now with us having git (or any DVCS, for that matter), may easily be an auxiliary distribution point. It may even handle most of the traffic, sure, but it's a mirror, not the source of truth.

> I think your issue here is rather personal against GH. You could say exactly the same things about uploading to BB.

No, it is nowhere near personal. You really think I would react differently if the article claimed BitBucket be the right way?

> And you could say the same about uploading to PyPi rather than own repo, but didn't - why?

No, you couldn't. PyPI as a distribution point is OK-ish, but it rarely is the only one, and PyPI doesn't give you repository hosting, so you still need that one.

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