Investigate switching away from GitHub

[nzakas]

As ESLint has continued to grow, we've started to outgrow the GitHub ecosystem. Team members spend hours each day triaging issues, many of which have incomplete information or are otherwise unclear. As such, we spend a lot of time just asking for more information ("what do you mean?", "what version are you using?", etc.). This has become increasingly frustrating for everyone on the team and ultimately takes time away from being able to contribute code to the project.

Additionally, it's nearly impossible to keep up with what are the most important issues and whether or not people are following up on issues. In short, everything that Dear GitHub mentioned is severely hurting the team now. As ESLint's popularity continues to grow and there are more and more issues filed, this is quickly becoming a scalability problem.

The team has discussed investigating alternatives to GitHub to see if we can find a home that is better suited to open source projects with our level of scale. We strongly feel that the code and issue tracker need to live in the same location to make it easier to manage and give people one location to visit for all of their ESLint-related needs (so simply moving to a different issue tracker and keeping the code on GitHub is not an alternative).

Requirements

• Must host the repo along with the related tools
• Must be able to run automated tests on pull requests
• Must allow contributions from anyone
• Must have a way to setup issue templates prescribing what fields are required
• Must have ways to organize issues other than labeling (milestones, priorities, etc.)
• Must import existing GitHub issues and pull requests

Alternatives to Investigate

1. GitLab
2. Phabricator

Concerns

1. Will people find us in another location?
2. How high is the barrier to entry for new contributors if we're not on GitHub?
3. What about the Gitter chatroom? What happens to that? Do we need to find another chat location?
4. Others?

[ilyavolodin]

Just to add a few more concerns:

• Integration with other tools. We are currently use Travis, AppVeyor (both fall under need to build after each issue), but we also integrate with Coveralls (not really a deal breaker, but nice to have).
• Even if people do find us in another location, would they be willing to create an account on the new service just to contribute to one project, or create an issue?

Maybe it's worth checking with other people who maintain large projects on GitHub and signed "dear GitHub" letter to see what their plan is? Coordinated move to the same alternative service would have higher chance of success.

[ilyavolodin]

One other (pretty major) thing that I forgot is the ability to easily host/deploy site with support for markdown, as well as everything connected to that (plugins for markdown, custom domain name support, etc). I guess we could always go the route of separate website hosting, but it would mean more involved releases, and might be harder to maintain.

[nzakas]

We could also keep the website hosting on GitHub if that's a big concern.

I'm not opposed to doing separate hosting, either. My personal blog is a Jekyll site that I update automatically. It would be pretty easy to setup the same thing for eslint.org.

[artyomtrityak]

@nzakas you can just move issues to Phabricator as babel did, keeping all popular projects in one place is really cool.

[RReverser]

As for organizing issues - can't you use ZenHub or alternatives so that repo would stay on Github? (doesn't solve the issue template though, but might be a good start and it's free for OSS)

Personally, I find it much easier to track all popular open-source projects in one place (that's pretty much the only reason I moved from Bitbucket to Github couple of years ago) and ability to participate in any of them through one UI, cross-links between projects etc.

Projects that move elsewhere raise the barrier (again, just a personal feeling / opinion here) to something like what projects on Google Code felt before its recent discontinuation or SourceForge feels like. Note - I'm not talking about UI, as other platforms can surely have features which are more convenient for maintainers, but rather talking specifically about the existing ecosystem and low barrier for participating in new projects within it as for newcomers as well for regular OSS contributors.

[captbaritone]

I would like to echo @RReverser's concern about keeping the barrier to participation low. Participation comes not just in the form of commits and filing issues, but also staying abreast of what those issues are, and how they are being handled. I have an app on my phone that allows me to follow GitHub repos. I see all the PRs, all the issues, and all the responses. I see new commits and tagged releases. I'm sure there are many other people who are passively involved in the project via this or similar systems (including the builtin GitHub email notifications). The barrier to entry can be as low as clicking the "Watch" button on the GitHub page.

In another ecosystem, I'm guessing my best bet would email email alerts, and I have no interest in flooding my inbox with that number of emails.

Is it possible that we could take some work of the maintainers' plates another way? Maybe we could have some lower-lever volunteers who can handle the more mundane tasks?

I would really hate to see this project leave GitHub.

[afahim]

As a fairly nascent developer, I think one of the things that I / people with my experience level care about is establishing credibility / getting credit for open source contributions, and whether we like it or not, github has become the first place to look whenever someone is trying to judge someone's contributions. It shows contribution activity loud and clear on profile pages, and this type of attribution is really helpful / important for new contributors to prove their mettle in the open source world. I feel that not having this kind of attribution would not provide enough motivation / demoralize a lot of people who would want to contribute, and I think this kind of lack of motivation and enthusiasm can be to the detriment of the project in the long term.

Given those considetations, I would really hate to see this project leave Github.

[mysticatea]

Honestly, I love GitHub. I hope to not leave from here.

[alberto]

👎 to moving away, unless there are very clear benefits.

What is making us move? Is it some or all of the points of the "Dear Github" open letter? Anything else? Can we solve it without moving away?

[ljharb]

Not being on Github is a huge barrier to entry. Babel's move to Phabricator was perhaps a clear win for the maintainers, but I believe it's a huge downside for everyone else.

While it's important to make sure maintainers are able to sustainably maintain a project, it would be a very sad thing if users had to bear a burden because maintainers wanted to lighten theirs.

[janmarek]

I know the issues on Github are terrible. But the benefits of the Github community are great. Please keep in mind there is a barrier for new users - everybody is familiar with Github which is not the case for Gitlab nor Phabricator.

[MathRobin]

What about bitbucket?