Developers of the SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer) library aimed at making it easier to write games and multimedia applications announced to move development from source control Mercurial and the bug tracking engine Bugzilla to Git and the platform GitHub . According to Ryan C. Gordon ( Ryan C. Gordon ), project leader, Mercurial remains the best source code management system, and Git has implemented a number of unfortunate architectural decisions, but in today’s world Mercurial is becoming an outcast and all development tools and workflows are Git-centric.
Most developers work with Git, and participating in Mercurial-based projects requires learning an additional tool. Legacy backers may well use a subset of Git commands to accomplish the same tasks that Mercurial did, but everyone else will be able to use a more convenient tool. The reason for choosing the GitHub platform is the familiarity of this service for most developers and the ability to get rid of the burden of maintaining the server software.
The downside is that GitHub is an external service controlled by a third party. SDL used to rule that all infrastructure must belong to the project. But over time, the project moved away from using its own physical servers in favor of servers leased from Digital Ocean, which made it possible not to worry about equipment maintenance and, in case of problems, restart the service from a backup copy of another provider.
The price of such freedom was the need to independently maintain outdated infrastructure elements and the lack of time to carry out modernization. For example, Bugzilla is roughly the same form as it was 20 years ago, and has a mountain of unresolved issues and bindings that cause headaches every time the distribution is updated. The wiki, mailing lists, and web interface to Mercurial also remained archaic. Maintaining all of these systems required a lot of manual work and raised concerns about possible vulnerabilities in the code of the semi-abandoned projects used.
According to Ryan, he realizes that the move to GitHub is a loss of control, a trap and a step away from the principles of the Free Software Foundation, but he no longer has the strength to instead of writing OpenGL code to do the work of an administrator of systems that are bursting at the seams, still working thanks to patches from skoca and prayers. GitHub is supported by a large team of paid engineers, and if for some reason Microsoft disconnects GitHub, this will not only affect SDL and will become a global problem for the entire open source ecosystem, which can be solved by another migration to a new service.