[Discuss] seeking places for good discussion about GNU/Linux programming topics

[grg-webvisible+blu at ai.mit.edu (grg)]

On Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 06:45:55PM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
> I'm looking for lively and welcoming discussion boards to chat about
> programming topics, with a focus on C coding. Some sample topics might be
> using Wayland or the layers compositors are built on, such as KMS/GBM/DRM;
> GL and/or Vulkan both with and without Wayland; inter-process communication
> and shared memory; setting up the process address space, and user space
> fault handling.

imho no better way to learn than to start doing among experts who have a
vested interest in your getting it done right.  start by joining an active
open-source project, read the mailing list, look over the code and even
review some pull requests, grab some coding tasks that are closest to your
interests and get suggestions on approaches/code reviews/other feedback
(thick skin often helps here ;).

if there are close "competitor" projects to the project you're founding
(I can't tell from your description exactly what that might be) you could
join in a couple of those; else going off what you wrote the mesa3d project
or the wayland project seem like they code in the space you're interested in
and have active communities; I bet both even have some developer docs on how
they work.

mesa3d:		https://www.mesa3d.org/
dev docs:	https://docs.mesa3d.org/repository.html  (& following pages)

wayland:	https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
(mailing list, irc, dev docs, repositories are all linked there)


> An (almost) unrelated topic is alternatives to GitHub for git hosting.
> GitHub has nice features and a large community of developers, but I'd like a
> backup plan.

backup plan in case of what?
(fwiw, I find it extremely unlikely github just goes away without notice...)

git is distributed - any one of your clones is as good as the upstream, so
even if github gets nuked you're never more than a couple commands away from
having new git hosting.  if you're thinking of hosting your project on "an
old laptop [you] ssh into for git/backup" (don't!), that git push is all
there is to re-hosting.

except you really want more than that -- you want an issue tracker, you want
ci(/cd), you want pull request management, you want a project homepage, you
want a mailing list, etc -- gitlab and github both offer all these, and there
are tools for moving much of the content between them in case you want to
re-host (and I think all(?) of it can be moved between gitlab servers).

mesa3d and wayland are both hosted on freedesktop.org and use the gitlab
they run there.  your new project sounds like it has a good chance of
qualifying for free hosting there, with the huge advantage that it's where
the community of people who code this stuff already hangs out:
	https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/NewProject/


On Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 11:19:48AM -0400, Daniel M Gessel wrote:
> Maybe I haven't found the right link, but it looks like GitLab is going
> commercial and placing restrictions on their free offerings.

"GitLab Ultimate and 50,000 CI/CD minutes are free for qualifying open
source projects."
	https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/


freedesktop.org might be your best option, gitlab would be a good option,
github would be a good option... imho running a git server on an old laptop
is not a good option if you want anyone other than yourself to ever have
anything to do with your project.  but jump into a couple projects first to 
learn not only what you wanted to learn but also some open-source project
management tools and techniques along the way.

--grg