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Dear GitHub

github.com

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Re: Dear GitHub

#121

Post by decisiveness »

monkmartinez wrote: post #42

I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational. Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are maintainers of JS/HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare JS to projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For example, there is a strong correlation between +1'ers and JS…

Stack Overflow tried preventing +1/-1 comments[1], and the community came to the consensus[2][3] that those comments can be useful.

[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277314

[2]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/277319

[3]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/283935

Re: Dear GitHub

#122

Post by radlad »

detaro wrote: post #81
mynewtb wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would lose the issues.

True, but thanks to the API and their relatively simple structure it's reasonably easy to at least copy their contents as well. Linking them correctly to user accounts on a new platform is probably the biggest issue.

Users with public SSH keys would be easy: https://github.com/JohnMaguire.keys

When a new user signs up, ask them for their existing Github username and to upload an SSH key that matches.

Re: Dear GitHub

#123

Post by Sir_Substance »

beshrkayali wrote: post #73

I do like Github, and I understand how it makes the entire process of maintaining a code repo a lot easier, but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing? I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain, but I see it as the only real solution. Developi…

>but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing?

Github is a great advertising and marketing platform for large OSS projects. Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge (sorry FOSShub, it was a bold try), with all that implies.

The thing I really don't get is why people use it for small projects. Like Facebook, Twitter and basically every other social media site out there, it's a drama factory. It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.

That's the last thing small OSS projects need, and I'd have thought most 5-15 man projects would be vastly better off throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business. I acknowledge that this reduces discoverability by some amount and thus risks taking a hit to your developer acquisition, but I'd love to see some hard numbers on how much. I'd wager that much like the Apple app store, if you're not in the top 50 on github, you're no one.

But hey, I'm apparently an old fogey born young, and I prefer to self-host when I can, so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.

Re: Dear GitHub

#124

Post by semi-extrinsic »

maxaf wrote: post #78
ketralnis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's just monkey see->monkey do. As soon as one person said +1, everyone that saw it thought that that's just how you voted for stuff. It's the same reason you see comments on HN or reddit that just say "This." or that if you leave your shoes by the door, everyone else will do the same. I doubt these people keep doing it if you ask them not to.

There's an old story about this man who stood quietly next to a closed door in Moscow, said nothing to no one, and did nothing else of interest. Eventually others joined him, and before long a queue has formed. No one knew what they were standing in line for. Monkey see - monkey do.

One of Milgram's experiments (not the infamous one) tested this, using people standing on the sidewalk looking up.

https://youtu.be/P0e6zG8IbE8

Re: Dear GitHub

#125

Post by pvorb »

The problem is that GitHub has a monopoly and is considered _the_ current standard for Open Source. But I think that once some of the major projects move to alternatives like GitLab (which has many of the features described in that letter) GitHub will have to obey its user base. Unfortunately no Open Source project with a large user base will dare to do the first step.

Re: Dear GitHub

#126

Post by dragonsh »

fweespeech wrote: post #108
jballanc wrote: post #97

It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant. GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008 . Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque…

Yeah, I'd honestly like for a website that actually focused on "Social Coding" rather than the Enterprise Money that GitHub is focusing on. Tbh, that is what GitLab, Bitbucket does also which is why they really are only effective as replacements rather than improvements upon. I wonder if threads like this keep popping up if people will say "Fuck it" and build an OSS Github clone that focus on being the Reddit of Code…

Recently even Python language planned to move its repositories to github.com for network effect, instead of helping projects like kallithea SCM and trac by partnering with software conservancy or gnu. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.

I hope they change the decision to support one of the project like Kallithea or trac by migrating their system and build network effects.

Re: Dear GitHub

#127

Post by bnegreve »

jonobacon wrote: post #116

Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre, My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in. Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pa…

There are more authors on the second page.

Re: Dear GitHub

#128

Post by Mickydtron »

runn1ng wrote: post #104

All this problems seem to me like good problems to have. They all seem to stem from the fact that github is too successful . And too many people are on github and too many people are using it, often in wrong ways. Of course github should solve them all. But still, it's still better to have problems with too many people and too much interest, than have the opposite problem - dying platform that people are leaving (see…

Being too successful is of course a good problem for github to have, but for the individual maintainers, it's still a source of frustration that can lead to maintainer burnout. If too many people get frustrated and leave, then it can quickly turn from a problem of too many people to having too few.

Re: Dear GitHub

#129

Post by robmaister »

asb wrote: post #61

There's been no mention of phabricator yet so I thought I'd give it a shout out. It's used by LLVM, FreeBSD, Blender, Wikimedia and others and I love it. It's under very active development and even if it doesn't solve every issue in this letter, by using an open source tool for development you of course have the option to customize it to the needs of your community.

Phabricator is pretty great overall, love that it's under such active development.

Only gripe is that some parts of it are still highly coupled, so doing something like adding a custom button to the text editor view or writing your own internal application very quickly becomes a huge mess, an effect that is multiplied by the active development and no promise of stable public APIs.

Your experience will be great as long as you don't try and do anything custom, at least for the next year or two.

Re: Dear GitHub

#130

Post by krschultz »

jonobacon wrote: post #116

Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre, My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in. Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pa…

An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box. I've been on GitHub since 2008 and I have been paying every month for years, but other than emailing support I have no idea how to vote for a feature request.

My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. There are a lot of other people with the same frustration [2], but we have no idea how to get that on GitHub's roadmap.

[1] http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-reques... [2] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144

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