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Dear GitHub

github.com

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Re: Dear GitHub

#131

Post by jonobacon »

bnegreve wrote: post #127
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.

Oops: I posted too quickly. Updated.

Re: Dear GitHub

#132

Post by ergothus »

decisiveness wrote: post #121
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

From skimming, they found "+/-1, because REASON" to be valuable, not "+/-1". Indeed, in the open letter, they mention these are valuable, but the current implementation is a pain.

Re: Dear GitHub

#133

Post by rlaferla »

Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.

Re: Dear GitHub

#134

Post by rlaferla »

Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.

Re: Dear GitHub

#135

Post by electic »

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…

As a software engineer, I am reminded of when I go to Home Depot and ask someone for help and they say, "Oh, I do not know. I am new here...". I think it is best to come prepared with the right answers. As you can see from the doc, there are a lot of maintainers who have signed this. Perhaps:

- Note the feedback.

- Bring in the right folks to consult with on your end.

- Write a public response with concrete information (should be first interaction).

- Finally, reach out to the authors of this post. Perhaps, getting them more clarity on your roadmap and your thought process will go a long way in resolving matters like this with high profile maintainers.

Re: Dear GitHub

#136

Post by pvorb »

bnegreve wrote: post #127
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.

That's why you shouldn't use Google Docs for such an article (even if it comes in the form of a letter). Nobody expects the concept of pages on the web (as in books, not as in web page).

Re: Dear GitHub

#137

Post by ggreer »

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…

I maintain a C repo[1] and user idiocy is much lower than what I've seen in JS projects of similar popularity. Still, I agree with these criticisms of GitHub. I hate +1 spam enough to delete such comments. Sometimes I even ban those who do it. I'm frustrated by people who open idiotic issues[2][3][4][5]. I procrastinate on bad pull requests because my options are:

1. Close the PR with little or no comment. People then think I'm an asshole.

2. Spend hours explaining why the code is terrible and why it can't be improved. In addition to being a big time sink, PR submitters often don't understand the criticisms. Half the time, they still think I'm wrong.

People even defend stuff as obviously wrong as adding a thousand lines of GPL'd code to an Apache-licensed project.[6] Then they say I should remove .gitignore support from ag because it doesn't implement 100% of .gitignore syntax. As if users would be happier with tons of extraneous results instead of some extraneous results.

A lot of this is cultural, but GitHub could help steer things in a better direction with the features proposed in this letter. I hope they take this letter seriously.

1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

2. User accuses ag of hard-locking his computer: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/791

3. User wants ag to always print filenames, unlike every other tool out there: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/749

4. User wants ag to replace PCRE with a totally different, incompatible regex library: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/698

5. User aliases 'ag' to 'grep', then complains ag doesn't work: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/578

6. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/614

Re: Dear GitHub

#138

Post by stingraycharles »

dikaiosune wrote: post #46
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…

The same question about JS repos struck me. I suspect that if you write a shared letter then you just ask your network to sign it instead of , but I would be curious to know if these grievances are disproportionate in different communities.

I'd like to think that someone who writes this kind of letter would take such a thing into account. It's really possible that there is a strong correlation between a language and people being more involved with Github. I wouldn't be surprised that many developers from other language ecosystems just don't care.

Re: Dear GitHub

#139

Post by [deleted] »

dominotw wrote: post #118
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…

> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is. I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees. https://twitter.com/agelender https://twitter.com/_danilo https://twitter.com/rachelmyers https://twitter.com/nmsanchez https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating https://twitter.com/ammeep https://twitter.com/davystevenson Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?

[deleted]

Re: Dear GitHub

#140

Post by mpdehaan2 »

kmfrk wrote: post #8

Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience. It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented aw…

I wonder if the whole "managerless culture" is to blame and is unfixable? (In other words, why hasn't SOMEONE had this thought about issues in N years? One is they deem it not a problem, another could be that they think to optimize for the filer, and the maintainer doesn't matter, or... there's no organization at all?)

There could be (theoretically) no one to make anyone do anything, and perhaps the issue tracker is either a quagmire of a codebase or something no one wants to touch because something else is more exciting?

That's one theory.

My other theory is they spend a lot of time on scaling problems and/or GitHub enterprise (which I haven't seen) -- and don't really do features anymore.

But it does feel there is no vision for changes to GitHub (maybe they think it's "solved") and it's ceasing to evolve in noticeable ways in any direction.

Can't really be sure. But I find it interesting. Again, the core is good. It's just curious to watch it so closely and not see the needle moving in any perceptible way.

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