Move development to a more ethical hosting service

[aspiers]

GitHub is not a suitable choice of hosting service for GNU projects, since it is non-free in many ways, and scored an F in the GNU Ethical Repository Criteria Evaluations.

Savannah scored an A in the same evaluations, but it is so old and clunky that realistically it does not support development of Stow well enough for me to maintain it in my limited spare time.

GitLab CE scored a C, and there are efforts to get it to score higher. Additionally it offers easy migration from GitHub, so I think it's a good idea to move there. Feedback welcome.

[gutierri]

@aspiers Gitlab is a good alternative and a lot used by developers.

There is also notabug and try to follow the good guidelines of software freedom. They use the Gogs

[aspiers]

Thanks for the other ideas @gutierri. Gitlab is probably my top pick for now, due to the ease of migration from GitHub, plus its rich feature set: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/gogs-vs-gitlab.html

[gutierri]

In fact, gitlab has a very interesting features (like CI and patch via email, for example).Would there be any way to integrate the CI with the documentation and update of the news or changelog on the GNU page?

[aspiers]

That should be possible (modulo the need to trust gitlab CI with GNU credentials) but it's fairly low on the list at the moment. Having said that I do need to update the web page to include the news about 2.3.0 - thanks for the reminder on that, and feel free to keep nudging if I don't manage it in the next week or two :-)

[gutierri]

It's ok :) Maybe we can create an issue about it, so we can keep it logged for future discussions. What do you think? 

[aspiers]

I already did it.

[CircleCode]

have you considered https://sr.ht/?

[aspiers]

I have, and I think my beliefs about the most effective approaches to collaboration on software development are fundamentally incompatible with the philosophy behind that site (for example avoiding Javascript entirely). Additionally, it's still in alpha, and eventually hosting of any project will need to be paid for by someone. Personally I think GitLab is a better choice.