New online man pages for Debian

Posted Feb 2, 2017 19:42 UTC (Thu) by anarcat (subscriber, #66354)
Parent article: New online man pages for Debian

The underlying problem is that there is no free alternative to GitHub that is as full-featured[...]A free alternative that eventually attracts a large following is what is needed, but nothing has really reared its head at this point.

Really, I'm not sure about that. I use Gitlab a lot, both the commercial version on Gitlab.com and a private instance, "community edition", and I feel it's actually the opposite: there's a bunch of features from Gitlab missing in Github. CI is fully integrated and you can download artifacts straight from the gitlab interface, you can hook up your own runners in the CI - and since it's free software, it's only a matter of running the right apt-get install... Sure, there are *some* things in Github that are missing in Gitlab, but these days I feel it's just a matter of time before the free software alternative catches up...

And yes, there's less people on Gitlab. That's a significant problem. It's the same problem we have with social networking free software alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. But we can't actually blame Gitlab for this: Gitlab supports mirroring (and pushing to!) other git repositories, so it doesn't force you to centralize. Github on the other hand, centralizes everything: while you can mirror your repository on github, you can't automatically push from Github to other repositories. In other words, Github is one way in, no way out. And that's why everyone is centralizing there. That is completely against the free software and distributed spirit of git, but we can hardly blame that situation on alternatives like Gitlab: the blame resides on Github here.

Now. As one of the people that worked on replacing manpages.debian.org, I find it's a shame that the relaunch of the service is obscured by yet another Github debate. I'm a stark free software promoter and defender, but I also think we need to respect the work of our volunteers. Michael put a lot of hours, of his own time, to not only write debiman, but also put the service in production. He has been very responsive to requests, and you don't actually need to use github to get his help: I found him on IRC and he gladly fixed the redirector for dman to work, quite quickly.

I happen to know how much work this is, because before Michael wrote debiman, I wrote debmans, in Python. We worked in parallel, which is unfortunate, but Michael's implementation was so superior and complete that I was happy to let him take the lead (more details on that in this blog post). But if people prefer a manpage generator that's fully hosted on free software, they should look at debmans. It's hosted on Gitlab, but it's synchronized with Alioth (two ways) so you don't *actually* have to use Gitlab either. You just need to finish implementing i18n, conflicting manpages, and the redirector. Then make sure it runs as fast as debiman, support it (through the Debian BTS, of course) and put it in production. Then your ethical dilemma is solved.

But I guess it's easier to complain about another volunteer's ethical choices than to do the work yourself. The "Github issue" in the Debian community is just strange to me considering that the Debian logo itself was built with proprietary software and a even a proprietary font. The Debian stretch artwork was also produced with proprietary software as well, and while there was the usual noise when the choice was made, it was stated by some that, while we prefer that they are produced with free software, but accept they are not, provided they are released under a free license and they work with free software tools. That seeems to be the consensus for artwork, why is that a problem with debmans.

Debiman is free software. Heck, it's fair to assume that debiman was *produced* with free software (e.g. the golang compiler is free, although nobody actually asked what editor Michael was using to produce it, maybe no one actually cares?) That it's hosted on a proprietary service shouldn't matter. Anyways, there are plans to package it in Debian at which point Debiman will become just another upstream, for which we obviously don't (and can't) enforce free software hosting...

So I raise my hat to to Michael and Javier who put all this hard work in making manpages.d.o real again. It looks sexy and it's super fast. Congratulations and thanks for restoring the service!