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I used to help maintain Xfce's svn and then git server. I'm not going to say it was hard, but it was work, and it was work that took time (time that was volunteer free time) away from working on Xfce itself. When I did the final git imports of our svn repos in mid-2009, GitHub had been around for about a year, maybe a year and a half, and wasn't that popular yet. And I suppose back then I had the bull-headed "must self-host because that's the only thing a respectable open source developer should do". That was a foolish attitude that took time away from the actual goal, which was making Xfce better. If it were today, I would have moved us to GitHub in a heartbeat, or perhaps GitLab (their hosted offering; I wouldn't self-host), instead. I haven't been involved with Xfce (still a happy user though!) in nearly a decade, but I suspect they still self-host out of inertia, with probably a little of that bull-headedness mixed in (that I myself can't claim to be fully free of either). While GitHub's uptime isn't perfect, it's pretty damn good, and better than most volunteers will get running their git server off a single box someone had racked somewhere in Belgium, which I believe was what we were doing at the time. Tools for that sort of thing are better now, and if I had to self-host today, I'd use EC2 or something like that, and automate the hell out of everything, but it's still a lot more work than just using somebody else's infra. |