Mirroring GNOME on github

[John Stowers <john stowers lists gmail com>]

Hi,

I spoke about this with a few people at GUADEC, but I would like to
continue the discussion here.

Can we please mirror the GNOME repositories on github.org
(https://github.com/GNOME)?

Advantages
* Many many people already have forks of GNOME components there, if
GNOME was the parent of these clones then we could easily the
differences
* Github has a working code search
* Nice web UI including visual image diffs, branch diff browser,
commit browser, etc
* Allows maintainers see who is working on their project via
notification of forks and watchers
* Code search is approximately ∞ than google code search (RIP)
* In my experience cloning from github is faster than cloning from gnome.org
* Improved visibility, perception of openness, other marketing intangibles.

Disadvantages
* Maintainers might see this is mandating them change their workflow.
I emphasize that github should be only a mirror, interaction and
merging should occur first on git.gnome.org
* Github UI is not FOSS
* Work required to keep mirror up to date

Regarding the last point, Alberto Ruiz already has some scripts that
are manually run to update the mirror. A simple approach would be to
put these on the gnome servers and run them in the post commit hook.
However, Github already maintains mirrors for others
(https://github.com/mirrors). I would not be surprised if they could
do a similar thing for us if we ask.

Regards,

John