Am 16.07.2021 um 13:45 schrieb jr:

> fwiw, the 'github.com/POV-Ray/povray/tags' page would benefit from showing
> checksums (sha256?) for the archives, too.

I'm not sure what the benefit of that would be.

If you do not trust to get the proper archives from GitHub, I see no 
reason to trust that you'll see the proper SHAs for those files.

(Or do you mena SHAs of the commits corresponding to those tags? Well, 
the first 7 digits of those _are_ shown on that page; and if you click 
on those, it'll take you to a page where the full SHA of the commit is 
shown in all its glory.)

Now, publishing checksums on the POV-Ray home page, that might be 
another matter. But even then, it only really makes sense for versions 
we build on our own machines and upload to GitHub later. Not so much for 
the betas: They are built directly on GitHub servers.

(And yes, I do trust Microsoft's GitHub servers more than I do my own 
Windows 10 machine.)


>> GitHub _is_ our preferred place for bug reports these days.
> 
> sure.  (though regrettable from my perspective)  as long as no account is needed
> to download the source archive.

These days, there is pretty much no software project that allows the 
reporting of bugs without _some_ form of identification. It's just not 
possible anymore - they'd be swamped by spambots.

And with that in mind, I for one welcome our new insect overl... erm, I 
mean, I for one applaud every project that uses some reasonably common 
bug tracking service, rather than rolling their own. Because although I 
do agree that it sucks to be unable to report a bug without registering 
_somewhere_, in my opinion it sucks less if that registration is good 
for multiple pieces of software that I use.


>> And we're by far not the only ones. There is an ever growing number of
>> other pieces of open source software ...
> 
> the "not the only ones" argument reminds me of an old saying "people, eat more
> shit, four billion flies can't be wrong".  fifteen or twenty years ago,
> SourceForge was the place to be (seen) on, maybe github will do better, who
> knows?

SourceForge thought they could exploit their pole position with 
impunity. Which is how they lost it to GitHub.

We didn't go to GitHub because we thought it was the bee's knees; we 
went there because we decided to set up a public repository, in hopes to 
get more people to contribute - and SourceForge had just gone rogue at 
the time we were ready to actually go ahead with that step. GitHub just 
happened to be pretty much the only contender, and actually we were 
initially quite skeptical, not the least because we had no experience 
with Git in particular nor even any other distributed version control 
system in general.

Looking back, I'm sure it wasn't the worst of choices.


Also, I'm not saying you should join the flies and host your own 
projects there (although I might, if you were to ask for advice in that 
matter). Going with that image, it's more like I'm saying that if you 
want to catch flies, that's where to find lots of them. That's not a 
question of taste - it's just pure matter of fact.

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