[J3] [EXTERNAL] (SC22WG5.6189) RE: [ukfortran] October meeting visa invitation letter

[Ondřej Čertík]

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020, at 12:39 PM, Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) via J3 wrote:
> Bill
> 
> (Seems like strict adherence of policies might prevent such orgs from 
> participating in WG5 at all given that the labs have representation on 
> it. But let’s leave that aside for an interesting discussion after 
> hours at the next meeting …)
> 
> > Actually, I have used GitHub. And find it really jargon-laden in the areas used for software development. But it is a widely used platform for distributing open source software. However, collaborative software development and discussions about wording in the standard are pretty different animals. Arguably, GitHub is too complicated for what we need. 
> 
> Technically, GitHub is not just for software, but for collaborative 
> projects involving documents managed under Git. Those documents are 
> often software but need not be. Committee papers fit very nicely within 
> the GitHub+Git model.

Yes. And in addition, we *already* used this model for the last meeting for the 4 papers that I mentioned. For example here is a Pull Request (PR):

https://github.com/j3-fortran/fortran_proposals/pull/145

that collaboratively improves the document that later was submitted as:

https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/20/20-107.txt


So this is not something hypothetical that would never work in practice. It works and we have already used it for a few papers.

> 
> > 
> > (One alternative, Google Docs, is even worse. Its registration process asks for personal information that is only requested for purposes of later ad spamming. The company privacy and cyber security policies pretty much ban the use of Google Docs. )
> 
> Google Docs really only scratches the surface of the kinds of 
> capabilities we are talking about with GitHub. The review process, 
> traceability, commentary, branches, people with different levels of 
> responsibility / authorization.
> 
> All of the hosting environments I listed in my original email have some 
> sort of enterprise version that could be installed anywhere we deem 
> appropriate. The issue is cost, which is usually proportional to the 
> number of users. I think one of them may have a free enterprise version 
> for non-profit organizations. It would have fewer features, but likely 
> has the ones that we want/need. E.g., we don’t need sophisticated 
> workflows nor continuous integration tests. 

The free (open source) version of GitLab allows the above workflow and even has continuous integration (CI) tests (that's minor, but it actually might be helpful to check using a CI that the paper can actually be uploaded to j3-fortran.org --- for example it doesn't like accents in my name and other things, see https://github.com/j3-fortran/fortran_proposals/pull/10 for all the changes I had to make).

Here is a full comparison of self-hosted GitLab, we would do the Core (free open source) version:

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-comparison/

Ondrej