SDL Library Developers (Simple DirectMedia Layer), which aims to facilitate the writing of games and multimedia applications, announced the change of the Mercurial source control system and bug tracking engine Bugzilla to Git and the GitHub platform.
According to Ryan C. Gordon, one of the project leaders, Mercurial is still the best source control system and Git has implemented a number of poor architectural solutions, but In the modern world Mercurial is becoming an outcast and all development tools and workflows are focused on Git.
Most developers work with Git And participating in Mercurial-based projects requires learning an additional tool.
After moving to Git, old system backers can use a subset of Git commands to perform the same tasks Mercurial did, but everyone else will be able to use a tool that is more convenient for them.
The reason for choosing the GitHub platform is familiarity with this service for most developers and the ability to get rid of the burden of maintaining server software.
The disadvantage will be the loss of control over the infrastructure.a, since GitHub is an external service controlled by a third party.
SDL used to rule that all infrastructure should belong to the project. But over time, the project stopped using its own physical servers in favor of servers leased from Digital Ocean, which made it possible not to worry about the maintenance of the equipment and, in case of problems, to restart the service from a backup copy of another supplier.
The price of such freedom was the need to independently maintain obsolete infrastructure elements, and there was not enough time and resources to carry out the modernization.
For example, Bugzilla is pretty much the same as 20 years ago and has a mountain of unsolved issues and links that cause headaches every time the distribution is updated. Mercurial's wiki, mailing lists, and web interface also remained archaic.
The maintenance of all these systems required a lot of manual work and raised concerns about the possible presence of vulnerabilities in the code of the semi-abandoned projects used.
According to Ryan, he realizes that moving to GitHub is a loss of control, a cheat, and a step away from the principles of the Free Software Foundation, but he no longer has the strength to write OpenGL code to deal with the job of an administrator. of systems that are about to explode, it continues to work thanks to patches of duct tape and prayers.
GitHub is supported by a large team of paid engineers, and if for some reason Microsoft disconnects GitHub, this will not only affect SDL and become a global problem for the entire open source ecosystem, which can be solved with another migration to a new service.
For those who do not know about the library SDL, you should know that this, provides tools such as hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics output, input processing, audio playback, 3D output via OpenGL / OpenGL ES and many other related operations.
SDL it is officially compatible with Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS and Android, although it has the support for other platforms such as QNX, in addition to other architectures and systems such as Sega Dreamcast, GP32, GP2X, etc.
Simple Direct Media Layer is written in C, works natively with C ++ and there are links available for several other languages, including C # and Python, it is distributed under the zlib license. This license allows you to use SDL freely in any software.
Despite being programmed in C, it has wrappers to other programming languages such as C ++, Ada, C #, BASIC, Erlang, Lua, Java, Python, etc.
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