Ask HN: They cried “Gna! is shutting down” but were they not heard?

1 points by christianbryant 7 years ago | 1 comment

Years ago I was looking for projects to join, searching "help wanted" postings on sites like GNU Savannah [1] and Gna! [2]. I joined a few projects on Gna! and while they fizzled, I never thought they would disappear or I had left them. Gna! was supported by the Free Software Foundation France; that gave me a sense of permanence.

November 2016 Gna! announced it would shut its doors. I was on the list that sent this message. Even here on HN someone raised the cry [3]. I didn't hear it until it was too late. Others started pinging me that Gna! was gone; what would happen to the code, did they have the last commits, what's next?

I turned to GNU Savannah, to GitHub - what if they closed their doors? Was my illusion of permanence toward code repos unfounded? It caused me to question the Internet in general, how we approach projects like the Linux kernel differently from smaller projects hosted by GitHub, GNU Savannah and SourceForge. Are all projects equal and are their repositories? Certainly not if Gna! could be allowed to close for good.

When they cried "Gna! is shutting down!" were they not heard? Was this a symptom of a disorder, something that could grow, potentially reach more repos? Do we need to act? Some will say Gna! was barely used, most people hadn’t heard of it, what’s the big deal? Some will remind us the Internet has no functional permanence - such expectations are counter-productive. But source code repos aren’t just Internet sites – they’re infrastructure (IMHO). Should infrastructure not hold permanence, such that code repos simply change hands, not close? Why wasn’t the Gna! baton passed?

[1] https://savannah.gnu.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gna!

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13559215

christianbryant 7 years ago |

My one major concern not outlined above is that of responsibility to end users who may not have resources with which to adjust when large repos are retired. Case in point: We assume users of forges are like us - that is, back up their own code, proficient enough to move to their own local repository if needed, etc. However, what if some of the developers using an online repo were something else. Highly hypothetical but imagine they came from a country where they could only code from a remote server and had to check in to some online forge to store their code (whether it's source like Python or updates to documentation - not all project members are coders). Imagine this user was a political fugitive or similar.

Now, it's not your legal responsibility as the originator or current curator of the repo to help this person out, of course, but in terms of the industry and our behavior as software engineers it seems we do owe some sense of permanence to things that feel more like infrastructure than simple personal websites. I’ve been very guilty myself of stepping “briefly” away from things knowing in the back of my mind I may never return. I continue to try to reform my attitudes online. Remember BerliOS, Google Code, and CodePlex? Gna! is merely one of several, not even the most used.

Realizing this might appear an attack against the Gna! project owners, I had to reach out and talk about this with them and identify this as merely a conversation starter. The loss of Gna! definitely has made me think more about the ecosystem we work within and whether we are doing everything the way we should be doing. How many users of GitHub might be working under frightening conditions to get code out to the world they could be arrested for writing? We don't know. I merely propose we might have a gap here in the process that does not acknowledge users who may rely greatly on some of our tools we offer for "free" and that when we retire them, something important could be lost in the process.

Note: Sylvain Beucler, formerly of the Gna! project and notably of many great projects like Savane and FusionForge, reminded me ArchiveTeam volunteers are often working behind the scenes to keep snapshots of retires sites such as Gna! when able. That project is currently headed by one of my favorite ASCII-oriented minds, Jason Scott of textfiles.com. They are linked to below.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Gna!