Why behind closed doors? Well we truly believed this was going to be a temporary problem, and we would be able to continue with business as usual when Xtraeme returned, and we believed he would return.
I find this to be a particularly illuminating example of how slippery it can be to give up on transparency, even for the most honorable reasons. I think to remember reading somewhere (a manifesto of a Free Software project maybe?) something along the lines of “we won’t hide problems”.
There are boundaries to transparency and revealing personal details about the person who was unavailable would have been wrong. But acknowledging the problem, explaining the impact and the attempts to resolve them would have been the right thing to do.
Source Control, or the headache of GitHub
Easily the worst part of gaining control of the project was…
This is a shining example of what hosting a development software project is about, namely the infrastructure (i.e. the forge but also the external tooling, travis in the case of voidlinux). If there is no infrastructure as code (which is impossible with GitHub because it would require it to be self-hostable Free Software), it cannot conveniently be moved from one place to another.
Fascinating read on this fine morning 