Infrastructure¶

This is the infrastructure wiki.

• Mercurial, where repositories are hosted,
• Lists, mailing list archives,
• Buildbot, continuous build service (FreeBSD only at the moment),
• Pad, brainstorming.

External useful tools:

• http://asciiflow.com, box drawing in browser,
• http://regex101.com, test regex online.

IRC¶

You can reach us on IRC at malikania.fr port 6667 and 6697 for SSL.

The following channels are available:

• #staff: general talking (usually french though)
• #code: basic development talking
• #malikania: official malikania channel
• #irccd: official irccd channel
• #paster: official paster channel
• #vanilla: official Vanilla Linux channel

FAQ¶

Why no GitHub?¶

I want flexibility and be able to do exactly what I want. I've started using Redmine even before GitHub existed and I almost know every feature of it, it's highly customizable. Also, I prefer a homemade infrastructure rather than giving all my personal data to private companies. Remember when sourceforge was the main place for opensource projects?

See also:

• https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/10/26/microsoft-completes-github-acquisition
• https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/issues/164

Why no Git?¶

Some people are asking projects to move to Git and some are even considering non-Git SCMs as legacy, it is not. As a long time Mercurial user and occasionally contributor I can't say enough that Mercurial is active and receive a vast amount of contributions every day. Mercurial is far easier and comfortable to use than Git with a sane UI guidelines and good integration, also Mercurial works better on other platforms that Git. The only downside is the current mainstream hype around Git feeling like it's de-facto standard for team development, thus many people fails to understand that alternatives exist.

That said, Mercurial is the only one SCM used at Malikania and there will never be any kind of SCM repositories in other forms. However, Mercurial mirrors are allowed and some of them are officially updated and maintained.

Why no Discourse, Matrix, Slack, Discord?¶

Nowadays, there is a mainstream consensus of bloating every simple things. This also impacts basic communications channels that are available since decades. While IRC has its warts and is pretty minimalist, it still serves it's sole purpose: instant messaging focusing on the content rather than the form. “Modern” alternatives such as Discord, Matrix provide many more features and additional extras that prevent you from focusing on what people said; the content being mangled alongside a lot of GIFs, emojis, images and such.

At Malikania we keep the UNIX principle of using simple tools following the KISS philosophy and that do not requires a brand new shiny hardware to run all of those alternatives. This does not mean that we don't consider alternatives but simplicity and elegance is chosen first. In that area, Redmine is probably the only complex and big software running in the infrastructure but in contrast to GitLab it has the advantage of doing well without installing billions of dependencies.

That said, we think that IRC, mailing lists are still the best way to share quality content focused on pure data.

Is there a code of conduct?¶

There is a common mainstream hype of putting Code of Conducts everywhere. Malikania doesn't have such of any kind nor will have one. On the other hand, this does not mean that everything is tolerated, just keep common sense.