I remember reading a post from someone some months ago (can’t remember who wrote it, and I can’t find it anymore) lamenting how some GitHub repos (such as the repo for our website) are exclusively available on GitHub and can’t be accessed through other means. Whilst I understand that our website repo is on GitHub because the website can be automatically updated through there, it would be good if the website repo and other repos that are only on GitHub are available through Haiku’s Git instance so more people can access them.
I think no one has problem just accessing github. The problem is some people don’t want to create an account there. Even if we had mirrors of the repositories on our own servers, it would not allow people to contribute more easily.
Moreover, our Gerrit/Git server is writable only if you have a Github account currently (and we should fix that first).
Currently I am aware of one developer with this problem, and we have set up something so I can upload their changes to our Gerrit account and github repositories from my machine. It’s not great but it gets things done for now.
We have two things in progress:
Trying to enable bitbucket as an alternative authentication method (nielx looked into this, he has asked for comments on the mailing list and 0 persons have answered to say they need it or don’t want it). This would be a temporary solution until the next item is done, but I think it is easier to deploy.
Setting up single sign-on so we would have our own account system and use it for the forum, trac, and gerrit with a single login. Probably a bit larger of a project and it will require converting the existing accounts.
Sounds like a good idea, but the thing is though, what if someone doesn’t have a BitBucket account?
Ah, yeah, this one. Definitely will take a lot more time/effort - I agree that we should probably put in a temporary solution (something like the first point) for now.