Re: [pygame] New pygame.org website

[Radomir Dopieralski <pygame@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 23 Dec 2016 16:49:07 -0600
Luke Paireepinart <rabidpoobear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  The advantage I see of requiring users to host at github in a
> separate repo vs allowing arbitrary hosting is that you do not have
> to worry about spam links nearly as much. Just ask user for the repo
> name and that's it. The script that processes the requests can then
> verify that the provided name is a valid github repo and that it
> meets the standard guidelines and pull the readme in automatically as
> well as the link.  It could also show all releases on the pygame page
> just like the 'releases' tab, and we could promote content that is
> active whenever the static site generator runs (it could check each
> repo for activity).
> 
> When generating the site, if anything doesn't match the templates,
> throw it out automatically.
> 
> That also allows users to leverage github tools for reporting
> malicious content, and makes it much more likely that the content &
> links on the site will be accessible.  Allowing users to self host
> content is why, when you go back and look at some old forum posts
> from 5+ years ago online, none of the images load.    here's an
> example, I checked about 10 random project IDs and found one where
> the content is no longer hosted on the site:
> http://pygame.org/project/1003/  If there is some interest I could
> definitely scan all the projects to determine how much dead links
> there are on the current site.

You are right about the benefits, of course, and some communities
embraced github as the only place to keep all their stuff (for instance,
the node.js community, with all those libraries in npm). However, there
is also a cost for that, and that is not just that any new users have
to learn to use git and github.

Github is a for-profit commercial company based in the USA. When you
create an account, your data is getting stored on their servers,
together with all the logs about your activity there. What's more, when
creating an account, you agree to their Terms of Service, and are
legally bound by them. Different people object to different parts of
that, but the important thing is that not everyone are comfortable with
this, and that we shouldn't be forcing people to do that just to get
their game on the website.

One especially problematic thing is that some of the better PyGame
games are actually commercial, closed-source games made for sale.
Github doesn't allow that, but we want to still show those games.

Note that I don't have a problem with the need to have a Github (or
Bitbucket) account to contribute to PyGame or its website themselves --
you have to use the tools that the project choose to contribute to that
project, and in a pinch you can always send your patches by e-mail. But
forcing all members of the PyGame community to become Github's
customers somehow feels different.

-- 
Radomir Dopieralski