DEP8

Allow publishing on DUB from privately hosted repositories

Introduction

According to the documentation, if you wish to publish packages on DUB, you are obliged to first publish on one of GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. Github's take-over by MS has left many people feeling a little uncomfortable. Now we are shortly to be subjected to 2FA by Github, alegedly for 'security' reasons. Anyone who thinks about this for a moment can see how absurd it is. Clearly, many people feel that this is just an excuse to gather yet more data tying mobile numbers to email addresses and other online accounts. The alternatives, GitLab and Bitbucket lack many things which made Github attractive. Many, me included, will be left without a way to publish on DUB.

It is also surely to the advantage of the D ecosystem that as many people as possible are encouraged to publish their software tools. D has been, in my opinion, a little slow to be taken up as a serious programming language. The last thing we need is to put obsticles in the way of people publishing.

Proposal

My proposal is to add private repositories as an alternative to Github, GitLab and Bitbucket on which DUB can pull packages. Recently I found GitBucket, which is an open source clone of the Github website. I have installed it on my server ( testing on http://pearcey.net:8080 as of 2024-08-15). I am still evaluating it but so far it works very well. I intended to fork the project in order to provide some small enhancements.

I see no reason why a private repository shoud not be used for DUB packages. The process should be easy if the repository is mandated to be a well used Github clone such as GitBucket.

Getting Started

I am happy to provide a repository example on pearcey.net, running the latest version of GitBucket, on which to test against for any DUB development. Feel free to email me at john at pearcey dot net