Received today:
Dear Loïc,
you applied to the 2022-08 open call from NLnet. We have some questions
regarding your project proposal Friendly Forge Format (F3): an Open
Standard for secure communication between software forges.Could you provide a breakdown of the main tasks, and the associated
effort?
The role and associated feature set of forges are continuously evolving.
Vendors continue to increase their features, for instance integration of
donation buttons, license compliance support, CMS and wiki functionality
etc. Where do you draw the line (and by what criteria), and stop
implementing additional features? How do you see the life cycle/future
maintenance of the specification? Have you considered engaging with a
standards body, e.g. OASIS?
Projects that are currently autonomous could be hesitant to switch away
from their existing internal abstractions, serialisations and on disk
file formats - unless their developers have 100R0confidence that
services are not disrupted by migration and users are guaranteed to not
lose information. How realistic do you consider it that others can
natively adopt an externally defined file format as-is in their
applications, or even spend time looking into such a possibility -
unless they are involved early in the definition of the format?
To what extend can F3 be an archiving format? How good is the expected
feature coverage of the spec when looking at the whole spectrum of
version control systems (e.g. Fossil, Sourcehut, Gitolite, Pagure,
Pijul, etc) and proprietary services like Github? Is the idea for the
spec to be a superset of all (theoretically) possible features of all
solutions available in todays solutions, or an opinionated subset of
that?
Today’s forges also still lack quite some features. Will you for
instance also integrate software translations, which are now often
outsourced to external translation tools like Weblate? Will you handle
groups, access control/rights, key management/signing etc? Is the spec
extensible to cover whatever a project needs?Thank you very much for your timely reply.