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One reason for the demand to move to GitHub is because it makes it easier to find software to solve a problem which is actually open source software if everyone

One reason for the demand to move to GitHub is because it makes it easier to find software to solve a problem which is actually open source software if everyone has a GitHub mirror. Searching for “Open source foo” often times results in a bad search results: https://www.google.com/search?query=Open+Source+WOFF+generator https://www.google.com/search?query=Open+Source+WOFF+generat... doesn’t link to the open source reference C language WOFF generator but https://github.com/search?l=C&q=WOFF&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?l=C&q=WOFF&type=Repositories does find it.

ddevault 6y ago
Your case is a bit weird. You're looking for a specific niche codebase, whose authoratative source has disappeared, and end up at a non-authoratiative archive. That's Google on hard mode. If you knew you wanted the reference converter, a more specific Google search would have worked: https://www.google.com/search?q=ttf2+to+woff+reference+converter https://www.google.com/search?q=ttf2+to+woff+reference+conve... A more in-depth research effort into the solution space also turned up things like FontForge and github.com/google/woff2, neither of which showed up in the GitHub results, but depending on your use-case are likely to have been compelling options. I think it's more important to use FOSS infrastructure for FOSS projects than it is for those projects to turn up in a search result. I also think that projects can and should market themselves in a manner which extends beyond appearing in search results. However, I do acknowledge that GitHub search can be useful. I have been thinking about letting you link up repositories hosted on not-sr.ht for your sr.ht projects, which are indexed here: https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects So you could, for example, have a GitHub repository, a GitLab repository, and a sr.ht mailing list, all under the same project, indexed in one place. This would go a long way towards establishing a single list of FOSS projects. It would be centralized at first, but I have also been thinking about using RSS to federate the project list across many independent sr.ht installations: centralization gone.

ddevault 6y ago

Your case is a bit weird. You're looking for a specific niche codebase, whose authoratative source has disappeared, and end up at a non-authoratiative archive. That's Google on hard mode. If you knew you wanted the reference converter, a more specific Google search would have worked: https://www.google.com/search?q=ttf2+to+woff+reference+converter https://www.google.com/search?q=ttf2+to+woff+reference+conve... A more in-depth research effort into the solution space also turned up things like FontForge and github.com/google/woff2, neither of which showed up in the GitHub results, but depending on your use-case are likely to have been compelling options. I think it's more important to use FOSS infrastructure for FOSS projects than it is for those projects to turn up in a search result. I also think that projects can and should market themselves in a manner which extends beyond appearing in search results. However, I do acknowledge that GitHub search can be useful. I have been thinking about letting you link up repositories hosted on not-sr.ht for your sr.ht projects, which are indexed here: https://sr.ht/projects https://sr.ht/projects So you could, for example, have a GitHub repository, a GitLab repository, and a sr.ht mailing list, all under the same project, indexed in one place. This would go a long way towards establishing a single list of FOSS projects. It would be centralized at first, but I have also been thinking about using RSS to federate the project list across many independent sr.ht installations: centralization gone.