Allow minors to register packages with JuliaHub?

I just registered to Julia Hub with my Gitlab account to be able to register packages. I was surprised to learn that only adults (18+) are allowed to register to Julia Hub.

This limitation seems to be a legal requirement, seeing as Julia Hub also provides paid services.

I can’t, however, help but think it’s also an unnecessary limitation, seeing as many minors do use Git and many are great at programming. I believe that both Gitlab and Github have the minimum age for registration to their services set at 13.

I’m an adult so this isn’t a problem for me, but I think it might be a problem for Julia adoption?

Perhaps it would be possible to somehow separate the paid services from package registration services, to enable ages 13-17 to register packages?

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You do not have to use JuliaHub to register packages, you can also do it manually by a pull request to the general registry or via the registrator github bot (which I have always used)

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Is this documented somewhere? Do the PR message or commit message need to have some machine-readable format?

Another option for manually registering packages is to use @GunnarFarneback’s amazing package LocalRegistry.jl. I use it on my several packages that are in the official registry but not hosted on github. You can see a simple example of my workflow here. I make a fork of General and in that directory just run bash updater.sh. I then just submit the PR on browser github.

Once the three day period is up, your best bet might be to go on the Julia slack and ask for a manual merge (issue ref).

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Just to be abundantly clear, this isn’t a Julia community restriction, but rather a restriction of JuliaHub’s terms of service (and I’ve updated the topic title to match). I think it’s just avoiding the legal challenges around the fact that minors can’t enter legal agreements themselves, but IANAL. I’ll ask.

Another route you can take is with the Registrator comment bot on GitHub… but it looks like you’re using GitLab.

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