Source code hosting: migrate primary hosting from GitHub

[jayaddison]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
OpenCulinary/RecipeRadar doesn't use any of the GitHub Actions or Copilot (AI coding assistance) featues of GitHub, and has only had a single user account active in the organization for most of its' existence here.

Although Copilot is disabled globally at the organization-level settings for both openculinary and reciperadar, some new settings appeared yesterday with some of its functionality enabled by default. From reading the descriptions, I believe that in practice it was effectively disabled despite those, but even so: we weren't offered a choice about this.

Strangely, the settings in question appear to have disappeared from the relevant settings page (e.g. here for our api repository). I spent maybe ~20 minutes disabling them across all repositories in openculinary yesterday.

There were two sliders enabled-by-default under this heading:

Describe the solution you'd like
TBD - some evaluation of alternatives will be required. We'll also want to decide whether to continue mirroring code updates from there to here.

Describe alternatives you've considered
TBD

Additional context
This is partly initiated as a result of realizing that we're using Microsoft services (since Microsoft owns GitHub) yet don't feel comfortable entering into a Microsoft-provided service indirecly for a separate business matter.

[jayaddison]

This screenshot is strictly speaking from one of my personal GitHub repositories outside of the OpenCulinary organization -- however it does provide a representation of the options as they appeared. The two descriptions and sliders do not appear in OpenCulinary's repository settings any more at all - I would have expected them to continue to appear but with the slider option disabled, but they are completely absent.

Manual transcription below:

Code scanning with GitHub Actions is not available for this repository.
GitHub Actions is disabled on this repository.  To use code scanning please enable it, or submit code scanning results externally using the API.

Copilot Autofix
Selection: on
Suggest code fixes for CodeQL alerts using AI. CodeQL default or advanced setup must be enabled for this feature to work. Lean more about the limitations of limitations of autofix code suggestions.

Copilot Autofix for third-party tools (Beta)
Selection: on
Suggest fixes for third-party alerts using AI. Ensure that these tools are properly configured or that an analysis is uploaded for this feature to work.  Learn more about the limitations of autofix code suggestions for third-party tools.

It's the first of these paragraphs that gave me a sense that the feature is probably disabled for the repository (as I would like it to be). However it seems confusing that the selection sliders displayed an 'on' status by default despite that.

[jayaddison]

I think some of the factors to weigh up here are:

• Based on the increasing prevalence of AI on GitHub, something we're distinctly not interested in, it does seem like this would be a factor that we'd need to learn to accommodate.
• We are familiar with the workflows and practices of GitHub -- and despite the fact that we tend to use only the upstream git-scm and the GitHub web interface to interact with our repositories, there is a certain ease-of-use and reduction in effort-cost to remaining on the platform.
• From exploring a few alternatives, many hosted options use GitLab -- the web interface for which continues to react sluggishly in comparison to GitHub's, in my opinion. This kind of thing, even if it is only a marginal developer user experience effect on a day-to-day basis, does eventually have a compounding effect.
• Some alternative hosting options may be less experienced in terms of handling security, privacy and various other aspects of large-scale git repository hosting. On the flipside, becoming a user of those platforms could allow us to contribute marginally in the development of their experience in those areas.
• It would be extremely nice when communicating the principles and practices of OpenCulinary/RecipeRadar to be able to state that our git forge host itself is also open source. This would leave only our email/corp hosting as a proprietary/closed element of our service.
• Although we haven't experienced significant inbound interest compared to some other projects on GitHub, that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it likely makes sense to continue to maintain some kind of presence here.

A question that arises from this: some other code hosting forges support bi-directional mirroring of code. Does GitHub also offer that?

[jayaddison]

A question that arises from this: some other code hosting forges support bi-directional mirroring of code. Does GitHub also offer that?

My initial sense is that no, bidirectional mirroring isn't fully-supported by GitHub. It may be feasible for individual repositories (such as those in use by OpenCulinary/RecipeRadar) to implement on a per-repository basis by adding webhook handlers that initiate push events to remote repositories. I wouldn't initially be hugely keen on doing that because it would seem to add significant operational and security surface area, but it may be an option.