Dear Ben Gardiner,
In message AANLkTinWDRkfOw1wLZiw2VC8Mu7cqYmdMW1QqELn6TyN@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
Could a mirror of u-boot tree (and maybe u-boot-testing) be put up at github? I asked them directly to do this some time ago [1] and then got cold feet.
I don't know if it could be done (probably it could), but then, I'm certainly not going to do it. Their ToS are not acceptable to me.
For example: "E2. Prices of all Services, including but not limited to monthly subscription plan fees to the Service, are subject to change upon 30 days notice from us. Such notice may be provided at any time by posting the changes to the GitHub Site (github.com) or the Service itself." I understand that github may run your project for free until you put enough effort in it that losing it would be painful, and then they could decide that the service is no loger free, but they charge you $$$ for it. All they have to do is "posting the changes to the GitHub Site (github.com) or the Service itself." That means chances are good that you don't even notice such change in time. They have your e-mail addresses - why don't they actively notify about such changes?
G11 might be another reason not to use github. Better not use them for a project which receives any better interest than average.
The mirror on github would not be a replacement for the custodian trees[3] but it can be a useful starting point for staging long patches. Forks of github repos are easy to create and can be public right away meaning a long patch series can be easy for the custodians to pull and easy for testers to pull.
I want to keep with the requirement that all patches have to go through a single channel where everybody can take part in the reviewing preocess even in early phases - i. e. postings on the mailing list. git-am makes it trivial enough to apply such patches.
As an alternative anyone could, of course, create a repo on github and push a copy of u-boot from their local repo to github but having a common starting point on github means that multiple forks wouldn't waste storage space; it also makes finding the forks straightforward.
Don't worry about storage space - this is a cheap resource.
Consider the linux-2.6 mirror at github [4]. One of the forks [5] was used recently by Alexander Gordeev to propose patches for inclusion to the kernel [6]. I imagine that Heiko's patches could have been put in a github fork of u-boot-testing and made available by a URL without any intervention from you.
If you want to create a ton of forks please feel free to go on an do it. Nobody wila lprevent you from using whatever tools and services you find efficient to work with.
But, given their current ToS, I will not work with github in any way.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk