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Dear GitHub

github.com

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141–150 of 491 posts

Re: Dear GitHub

#141

Post by zzzeek »

We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent. Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue trackers, which is really a huge part of a project's documentation, to a for-profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good interoperability.

If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it's time to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever having the advantage of "locking in" its users with extremely high migration costs.

Re: Dear GitHub

#142

Post by Permit »

This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub's simple approach:

>Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.

Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process and GitHub has historically taken a pretty solid stance against this.

From "How GitHub uses GitHub to Build GitHub"[1]: http://i.imgur.com/1yJx8CG.png

There are tools like Jira and Bugzilla for people who prefer this style of issue management. I hope GitHub resists the temptation to add whatever people ask of them.

[1] http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...

Re: Dear GitHub

#143

Post by z1mm32m4n »

curryst wrote: post #107
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…

It's a momentum thing I think. A big part of the Github platform mirrors a social media platform. When you meet a developer, you check out what they're up to on Github just like you might check on a friend's status on Facebook. Like Twitter, it's a way to get your name out there. Also, I don't want to have to maintain an account on a Gitlab (or equivalent) server for every project. Anyone who has enough interest to t…

Along the same line of thought: there's a lot of momentum regarding tooling surrounding GitHub. Continuous integration works smoothly. Slack works smoothly. github/hub and ghi let you interact with the issues and repos from the command line. Vim, Emacs, Atom, and Sublime plugins exist to integrate with GitHub. While moving to another hosting platform might fix some things, there is a lot of solid tooling built around GitHub.

Re: Dear GitHub

#144

Post by zzzeek »

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.

I'm looking very closely at Phabricator, it looks quite nice.

Re: Dear GitHub

#145

Post by ma138 »

neilgrey wrote: post #34

Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits. It'd be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know what's next up in my queue of things to do; right now I've got 5 tags called NextUp:1 -> NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a simple drag/drop widget. Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing what matters --…

We created ZenHub - https://www.zenhub.io/ - specifically to solve these problems.

The addition of a task board in the GitHub interface allows you to communicate both the priority and progress of GitHub issues.

While adding a +1 button to comments allows feedback without clutter.

Best of all, it is free for Open Source :)

You can read more on why we created ZenHub here - https://medium.com/axiom-zen/introducing-zenhub-2-0-c352a12c... and get in touch with us via our public support repo here - https://github.com/zenhubio/support

I hope we can help improve your GitHub experience!

Re: Dear GitHub

#146

Post by jonobacon »

electic wrote: post #135
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 informati…

My main goal in responding was to acknowledge the issues. This is just the start of the process, and by no means the end.

The next step, as you mention, is to bring the right people in. This is why I want to ensure this is raised with our teams inside GitHub to explore ways to rectify some of these concerns.

Re: Dear GitHub

#147

Post by msellout »

electic wrote: post #135
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 informati…

I appreciate the prompt response. Face-to-face at Home Depot you know the message was received. Online it's nice to get an immediate read receipt with the real reply coming later.

Re: Dear GitHub

#148

Post by jc123 »

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…

Perhaps Github Issues itself should be available as a mechanism for people to provide feedback about Github itself.

Re: Dear GitHub

#149

Post by onewland »

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?

I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.

I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".

Re: Dear GitHub

#150

Post by martin-adams »

electic wrote: post #135
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 informati…

I personally prefer someone to at least acknowledge someone now owns the issues than to wait in silence while they gather the right people and formulate a concrete response. That doesn't happen quickly in some cases and the silence can exacerbate the issue, which ironically is why this hit HN in the first place.
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