The GitHub migration continues

By Macoy Madson. Published on .

Cakelisp is now developed here. The GitHub branch is already stale, and I do not plan on mirroring to GitHub. While I had many reasons for migrating, the straw that broke the camel's back was Copilot, which in order to resist I must keep my code off of GitHub entirely.

Migration progress

The GitHub migration I planned has gone slower than I expected.

I didn't have an urgent reason to move, so I admittedly took my time with it. It is annoying work as well:

There are a few more decisions I haven't made as to how far I want to go with the migration:

Should I archive the repositories?

This leaves the code still on GitHub for their monetary gain, which means I don't avoid the Copilot problem. It also signals to potentially interested people that the project is no longer developed, which is not true.

Should I delete the repositories?

This solves both the Copilot issue and means people won't misread the archived status, but means that old URLs to the code will become 404s.

Should I delete everything, including my profile?

This would be the ultimate commitment to self-hosting. The main drawback is if I want to submit a pull request to a repository on GitHub, I won't have any way to do so unless they provide a public email address (which they almost never do). I don't often submit PRs, but I have (to Ogre, STB, and a few other projects), and I probably will need to in the future.

Should I mirror my dependencies to my site?

This would include repositories like SDL, FreeType, etc. I think it is a good thing to do, but repositories can take up a significant amount of space and mirror bandwidth, which has costs. I think I will eventually do this based on the idea that submodules will break as often as URLs break, which is relatively frequently.

A bright future

Despite these troubles, I am still convinced I am doing the right thing. I feel a much stronger sense of pride and ownership when I host my own code.

I do think there will be less collaboration if the contributors need to use a site other than GitHub to find my work, but I am willing to pay that price.

I like hosting my own website. There's a definite sense of freedom and self-sustainability that comes with it. On the negative side, it is much quieter, and I will admit seeing those GitHub stars pile up on Cakelisp and my other repositories is validating.

When I was a kid I coded a simple blog website in PHP. I added a counter which went up every time someone visited the site. Seeing this number go up ended up being detrimental. I would feel bad about it being low, and got excited when it went up even if it was just a bot or something. I think it's better to not measure those kinds of things for those reasons, and instead just put things out there. I much prefer receiving deliberately written emails rather than obsessing over trivial numbers.