Minetest Forums

Actually reading the past discussions, I feel that all the devs expressed far less entrenched opinions than Linuxdirk presents. There seems to be a consensus for moving, but no agreement on a schedule for it. Some want to move only when MS start breaking things, all seem to agree it is very likely to happen.

texmex: I am starting to explore mesehub, are you hosting this by yourself?

Linuxdirk wrote:sfan5 doesn't want an issue tracker at all and wants IRC discussion only

With lies like this, people should really wonder if they can trust the rest of your post.

For clarification: The "discuss on IRC" was an idea to make contributing from people who can't/won't use Github still work.

Yes, the FUD-salted posts of Linuxdirk are truly a constant in our little community.

Yvanhoe wrote:texmex: I am starting to explore mesehub, are you hosting this by yourself?

Feel free to explore it, it's a small project on the side. Half as repo hosting for myself, half as a proof of concept of how a relatively noob hoster like myself is able to get reliable git hosting up and running in 5 minutes.

*sigh*



And where do code reviews and discussions happen? In an issue tracker.

sfan5 wrote:For clarification: The "discuss on IRC" was an idea to make contributing from people who can't/won't use Github still work.

Then why don't you state it like that? It "sounded" completely opposite to me.

Linuxdirk wrote: Then why don't you state it like that? It "sounded" completely opposite to me.

Because it's in an issue about letting people not on GitHub contribute?

Hamlet wrote:Paramat's own words:
"By commit number i am the top contributor in Game and 6th highest in the Engine.
By total number of commits i am second after celeron55." (source)

If this does not make him the de facto lead core developer, then I hope that celeron55 has a higher interest than Paramat toward these matters. Actually though, I don't have any hope.

Number of commits does not make someone a lead developer, in the same way that the number of commits does not make a contributor a core developer. A lead developer is someone that is "in charge of a number of software projects". There has to be a level of control or responsibility there. Paramat does not have any additional rights or say over the Minetest engine, and has been overruled many times. There are sufficient other devs in the engine to counteract.

Also, it's worth noting that the majority of his commits are tiny. Commit number is a bad gauge of contribution, as is source lines of code

If Minetest moves, it needs to be after one of the self-hosted Git platforms gets federation support, otherwise it'll be a pain to contribute.

Me thinks some rabid FOSS folks are trembling at the mere thought of M$.

Does this never stop. Just cause M$ has a history, and now they own the distro channel, does not mean that we have anything to worry about. Why?

Embrace. Whether the code is Lua, C, Basic, or Yourmommasputtogethercomputerlanguage. It don't matter. M$ has made quatrillions by simply looking at code, and rewriting it. To kill off MT would kill of a source of potential content for minecrap. M$ would probably let us continue to thrive, as long as our code contributions to this project can be stolen for their moneymaker. It's their nature. It's their history. Why do we worry? Linus didn't, and look where we are now.

Extinguish. MS will extinguish those that blatantly violate licenses. Yet, they've allowed the hackers among us to continue to use their software. How long has Vis Studio been around? How long has M$ actively pursued developers who use that software, legit or not? They'd be insane to go after the folks that make them money. So they won't


Shad

Wuzzy wrote:
So, Minetest is directly depending on Microsoft. And Minetest is competition to Minecraft.

Some time ago I also thought like that. But the truth is a little different, and somewhat paradoxical.

I watched a few weeks ago an interesting YT video about the latest resurgence in MC popularity. What's especially worthy of note, it's not only due to the new features and more new content provided by Mojang, but also due to hype surrounding Hytale and some other voxel sandboxes. It seems that all in all, most players who enjoy this kind of gameplay will sooner or later check the Big One, that is -- thanks to immesurable content created for Minecraft, almost all of them are tempted to have (or upgrade) this legendary game and to have some good time playing it, and those who don't have MC yet will finally buy it, even just out of sheer curiosity. It's some sort of self-propelling snowball effect -- Minecraft will always be far ahead just because it was the first so succesful game of this kind. And that's the point - no matter how good Minetest is going to be, for those who enjoy it and don't have MC yet, it will most probably be just an introduction to the much more ample and vibrant world of Minecraft creations, games, mods, communities.

So it's not in fact a competition, it's kinda spin-off of the main idea, which is still best represented by Minecraft. Maybe someday some game will truly change the balance, but as for today MC's share of the open world sandboxes market isn't endangered in the least, and most probably it will never be. For me it's perfectly okay, as long as Minetest takes advantage of the general interest in this genre more people will hopefully join this project and contribute this or another way.

I despise MS more than anyone should despise anything but...
they purchased github because they stand to make a killing with it.... so why would they do anything to drive users away?

All of these comments aside... In order for MS to do anything drastic which would have a serious/negative impact on such a vast number of projects (regardless of their license) they would have to give advance notice, lest they would face the wrath of a whole shit load of very angry organizations/individuals and potentially a swarm of lawsuits (possibly even a class action lawsuit)

They know this... so I would not worry about any of this at all... it is hysteria/panic

Be real for a moment and realize that MS doesn't give a rat's ass about Minetest/Minetest Game.... seriously.
It is not "competition".
Those who use it are very very few compared to MC... and... those who use it, probably do so because they don;t want to spend the $26.95 for MC so they aren't losing $, which would/will never come their way anyway.

And actually... MT/MTG may even cause people to go out and purchase MC anyway... once they become frustrated.
I imagine a good portion of MTG users, also use MC anyway...
I just think this is all demented and seriously over-worrying

Wuzzy wrote:Are you Minetest devs not worried that Minetest will eventually be booted from GitHub?

No.

If it ever happens, that would give us a fantastic amount of publicity. Like, the best thing that could ever happen to Minetest.

well...

not the best thing..... (the best thing would be.... simply, that celeron55 created it.....and then GAVE it to us) ;)


but certainly a darn good one............


+100 @sofar

I like the self-hosted solution or using a git service such as notabug that is committed to Free Software. I'm somewhat new to the open source, free software, and programming communities. I left nearly all of gaming and Windows/proprietary software for a better alternative that was healthier for my life and education: free software. It was a big sacrifice for me and took a lot of effort to change my habits. But I did it gradually over time and now only use free software everywhere except for the firmware on my cell-phone and firmware on my BIOS. I self-host most of my services and daemons for myself, family members, and friends. I'm in the process of learning git for my projects. I've chosen to go with notabug for my personal projects in the future due to their commitment to free software. It's a bit challenging to use this platform though because most people seem to use Github. I can't comment on issues or make commits since I don't want to contribute to the Github platform. I'm not going to make a Github account.

I'm a bit disappointed the forums here don't support other git repo's in the user profile section. It seems to incentive and promote the use of github indirectly. Of course there is nothing stopping users from just posting their alternative git profile in their posts or signatures.

I'm highly biased against using Microsoft platforms as they have interests that may conflict with Minetest, users, and developers concerned with freedoms, at least eventually. Microsoft has a drastically different philosophy for their software and interests than this community has (I don't mean to speak for others, but I think it's accurate to say this as most projects here use free licenses; and Minetest, itself, is free/open software).

Microsoft is already a titan in the software world, there are plenty of cases of them using predatory trade and marketing practices over the years. That alone warrants skepticism. I try my hardest to avoid the big tech companies (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook) in my daily life as I find them too manipulative, predatory, and invasive to be used by a healthy and free society. So much of this closed tech is used for data gathering, analytics, and surveillance of people that is kept indefinitely and exchanged amongst data brokers. That not being paranoid, its well-documented now.

I would estimate that Github will eventually be engineered to make Microsoft money in some way (duh). But that can come in the form of auth/login-walls (e.g. Linkedin), pay-walls, subscriptions, more aggressive tracking, or serving other interests. Sure, it works, but use of the platform encourages others to use it and builds dependency over time. Once usage is high enough and that dependency reaches a certain level, the platform and people on it can be manipulated more aggressively.

Ultimately, I'm here in the Minetest community because I decided to learn, develop, support, and promote free software and the communities that use it. Everything I've done here has been consequential from that decision and principle. If I was apathetic to software rights and user freedom, I'd be involved in Minecraft and its community. I'd like to see a git service that is aligned with the principle of freedom adopted.

Not related but I'm a bit bummed a lot of our coredev's are burned out. This game is great. I've learned a lot about programming and software development so far! Thanks everyone! :)

.

I think that the devs are right that it is nowhere near a high priority to get out of github. It is also true that it is very unlikely that MS will waste the little reputation it (rightly) struggles to get as a supporter of OSS or as a neutral platform operator going against something that is as small as minetest.

The danger is more of a diffuse notion that github is becoming the facebook of code and may very soon be able to push ways of doing things down developer's throats.

Git is great because adding a remote source is straighforward and built in the protocol. The code is safe in github because it is in a git repository, safe from MS shenanigans. One can contribute to code easily even without a github account.

It is for things like pull requests and bug tracking (i.e. GH issues) that things get thornier. I think a huge part of the value MS saw in github was the amount of devs who are already hooked to the workflow proposed by GH. I am very suspicious that they want to inject some things there, force to use some tools, force to accept some sneaky obscure EULA clauses and eventually break it as they did with many products they have bought.

Maybe sell Azure storage for binaries or impose some annoying but cashable constraints, break the migration API or "forget" to include in it new convenient features they will add over the years. We will see it once they have buried the competition. Right now gitlab, bitbucket, sourceforge still exist, they will do their best to be the better option until they all go under.

Of course, at this point, for me, this is largely paranoia and emotional anger directed at MS. It is just the result of 20 years of me using their products and being constantly betrayed by their behavior. Yes, maybe this time it will be different, maybe it is not an abusive relationship anymore...

There is no reason to move right now, and even if it gets increasingly complicated to leave, it will remain possible later, so there is a rational argument for not giving this high priority. I am just so certain that I will have to move out of it at one point that I find it worthwhile to do it while it is easy and learn now how to make PRs and issues in a way that allows people from different platforms to collaborate.

Linuxdirk wrote:

Hamlet wrote:We can spend hours, weeks and months debating: [...]

It's always like this.

You mean, people who don't have enough drama in their lives getting overly excited about things that most of the community are already aware of? : )

Also, Hamlet, the choice is not theirs. The code (and all other related data) is freely available. Anyone who wants to can mirror it anywhere they like, fork it, set up another community, etc. If someone is worried, they have ample choices of action besides talking about it.

I think that the devs are right that it is nowhere near a high priority to get out of github. It is also true that it is very unlikely that MS will waste the little reputation it (rightly) struggles to get as a supporter of OSS or as a neutral platform operator going against something that is as small as minetest.

The danger is more of a diffuse notion that github is becoming the facebook of code and may very soon be able to push ways of doing things down developer's throats.

Git is great because adding a remote source is straighforward and built in the protocol. The code is safe in github because it is in a git repository, safe from MS shenanigans. One can contribute to code easily even without a github account.

It is for things like pull requests and bug tracking (i.e. GH issues) that things get thornier. I think a huge part of the value MS saw in github was the amount of devs who are already hooked to the workflow proposed by GH. I am very suspicious that they want to inject some things there, force to use some tools, force to accept some sneaky obscure EULA clauses and eventually break it as they did with many products they have bought.

Maybe sell Azure storage for binaries or impose some annoying but cashable constraints, break the migration API or "forget" to include in it new convenient features they will add over the years. We will see it once they have buried the competition. Right now gitlab, bitbucket, sourceforge still exist, they will do their best to be the better option until they all go under.

Of course, at this point, for me, this is largely paranoia and emotional anger directed at MS. It is just the result of 20 years of me using their products and being constantly betrayed by their behavior. Yes, maybe this time it will be different, maybe it is not an abusive relationship anymore...

There is no reason to move right now, and even if it gets increasingly complicated to leave, it will remain possible later, so there is a rational argument for not giving this high priority. I am just so certain that I will have to move out of it at one point that I find it worthwhile to do it while it is easy and learn now how to make PRs and issues in a way that allows people from different platforms to collaborate.

I don't think Microsoft would attack Minetest unless it's based on (what they believe are) legal grounds, like they recently did with a much smaller and newer project that was allegedly violating Minecraft's copyright and API. Note, they didn't simply make GitHub delete the repo. They sent a DMCA notice and got it deleted through the normal channels.

If Microsoft ever decides Minetest is some kind of "problem" to be "solved", they can do the same thing no matter where the project is hosted. But realistically, any such actions would have to be directed against specific mods/subgames, not the engine itself unless it starts treading into a grey area.

As to whether Microsoft will ruin or shut down GitHub, that's a risk with every host. GitLab is a VC lapdog aiming for an IPO next year. What kind of sharks will they jump to make that happen? BitBucket (Atlassian) recently announced they will drop support for Mercurial and delete everyone's Mercurial repos next summer. WTF? SourceForge... yeah.

And Minetest is competition to Minecraft.

Unlikely, i'm not worried.

I want to give attention to 2 questions from the first post which are still unanswered:

Wuzzy wrote: - Do you have ANY backup of the bug reports and pull requests? (this one is important!)
- If yes, does the backup actually work?

My current reasons against GitHub are, summarized:
1) It's using proprietary JavaScript. If you open github.com in your browser with JS enabled, you run proprietary software. YOU might not care personally, but your choice also affects other users, who are forced to execute the proprietary GitHub JavaScript code to collaborate ... (unless they are NoScript wizards …)
2) It's controlled by Microsoft, which we should not trust (however, I agree that other companies are not neccessarily more trustworthy. It's a dog-eat-dog world, after all …)
3) I have no idea if bug reports and pull requests are backed up

1) It used to annoy me, but there seems to be a complete API and people have coded CLI tools (at least for PRs, I did not check for issues). So that at least, is a minor issue for now. As long as they maintain that API (an area where I do not trust MS but let's be fair, for now they are keeping it)

https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/
https://developer.github.com/v3/pulls/

2) MS is worse than the others IMO, but what is important is that we can run away with the code if needs be. It is both technically possible and legal.

The worst case scenario (not the most likely at all but this is a theoretical discussion) is that MS would suddenly erase everything on the MT repo. Code and history would easily be recreated by the devs. Pull request would be reassembled from the forks backups (people would have to submit them though). Discussion on issues would be lost unless someone backed them all. It is doable but the API is creating an annoying bottleneck instead of providing an easy way to dump all the data. You have to iterate through 297 "pages" (an abstraction that makes little sense for the JSON interface IMO and that is not documented) then for each issue, fetch the description, events, labels and comments. And I guess comments can be on several pages as well.

Then comes the problem of keeping it up to date by redownloading the active issues where discussion may have occurred.

Not the crontab one-liner I was expecting and probably something MS is in no hurry of simplifying, but it is doable by anyone worried of sudden disruption.

> the de-facto lead core developer (Paramat)

I am not, and have never thought of myself that way. If anyone is, celeron55 is.

> does not even care if Minetest is available in languages other than his own:

The impression you give, of a lingual supremecist, is very different from what i wrote:
"Personally i'm uninterested in working on translations for MTG, but don't mind if others do. I'm also neutral about whether MTG should have translations.".
I do not oppose it happening. Note: I'm neutral, undecided, unsure.

> Paramat's own words:
> "By commit number i am the top contributor in Game and 6th highest in the Engine.
> By total number of commits i am second after celeron55."
> If this does not make him the de facto lead core developer,

It does not, it just means i have been active.

> Go figure if he cares about which git host Minetest should use!

I am very concerned about any possible migration, and would be very concerned about where we go.

> Paramat is against accepting PRs or issues from non-GitHub users

I am not.
I have taken a contribution from someone who left GitHub and opened it as a PR so it can be merged.
I have made various efforts to help pgimeno continue to contribute to MT.

Microsoft probably doesn't even know minetest exists. And even if it did, it's got such a small player base and in every way is not refined like minecraft is so they wouldn't see it as competition. Microsoft is not going to "boot" minetest off github. It's a tiny open source project that never gets any updates.

Joseph16 wrote:It's a tiny open source project that never gets any updates.

Though I agree with the previous part of your post, here I have to say you're wrong. The recent version of MT (released earlier this year) compared to MC 1.8 performs way better, at least on my laptop.

Joseph16 wrote:Microsoft probably doesn't even know minetest exists. And even if it did, it's got such a small player base and in every way is not refined like minecraft is so they wouldn't see it as competition. Microsoft is not going to "boot" minetest off github. It's a tiny open source project that never gets any updates.

Minetest has over 100 million downloads and receives regular updates twice a year. Minetest is one of the more popular open source games. Minetest may be tiny compared to Minecraft, but isn't a tiny open source project