Frequently asked questions

Why no GitHub?

Because I don’t use Git (see below) and I don’t like having to depend on something else that can do evil things when they want. Having to rely on a unique cloud service may lead to a SPOF.

I also don’t want to host my projects on closed source forges. Do you remember when sourceforge was the de-facto standard in the past?

See also:

A lot of people are saying that cloud is “the future” and that hosting projects yourself is something that you usually do when you’re a teenager because it’s a waste of time not spent on development. As a quick note, setting up nginx and hgweb is a matter of ten minutes process and the hgweb.config didn’t change in more than a decade on this server.

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.

I also have already heard statements like ”I can’t contribute because you’re not using Git”. This is quite a disappointing and bad excuse. There are numerous projects still not using Git and even though they are having contributions anyway (OpenBSD, NetBSD and some using Mercurial, CVS, Subversion, Fossil or even Bazaar). In the era where there weren’t SCMs people used to send patches no matter how the project was hosted, those days people tend to think that Git is required otherwise you can’t contribute.

That said, Mercurial is the only one SCM used at Malikania and there will never be any kind of SCM repositories in other forms.

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. The infrastructure has advantage of not requiring billion of dependencies that GitLab require.

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

Maybe this screenshot of a discord server will tell you why IRC is still the best IM.

Lots of emojis

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.