I wish Github would add a "Discussions" tab for repos, so projects don't need to create a separate Google Group (which require a Google account!) for questions-that-are-not-quite-issues.
Dear GitHub
201–210 of 491 posts
Re: Dear GitHub
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
About number 5. I don't see anyone complaining about anything.
Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.
Looks like a genuine mistake. He apologised. You've never done something dumb and didn't realise it?
Re: Dear GitHub
#203I don't like the general feel of these suggestions. It sounds like more bureaucratic features, the lack of which is a big part of why GitHub is so pleasant. Making an issue or a pull request feels like having a casual chat with the project maintainers. Adding fields and other hoops to jump through puts distance between people.
I guess for maintainers of popular projects, everybody's "casual chat" (by people who did not read CONTRIBUTING.txt, do not supply the version of relevant software they are using etc.) is not as fun as it is for you.
Re: Dear GitHub
#204There'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.
[deleted]
Re: Dear GitHub
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe "complain" is too strong, but he created a GitHub issue –notifying several hundred people– without running ag --version. Heck, he didn't even look at the output of his command. It was immediately obvious to me, from the limited information he provided, that it was a bash alias.
Looks like a genuine mistake. He apologised. You've never done something dumb and didn't realise it?
I think this gets to the root of the GH problem
To the person raising the issue it's a simple mistake, sorry.
To the person that has to deal with it, it's yet another issue being raised where the reporter didn't follow the necessary steps to diagnose the problem themselves and (implicitly) expected a bunch of other people to apply their own time to solving it.
If the "New Issue" form had a place where the reporter was asked to paste the output from ag --version then it might have caught the accident before it wasted the developers' time.
I think it's an over reaction to describe the issue as a complaint, but it is an example of how the GitHub UI forces project admins to deal with incomplete and poorly investigated issues from users.
Re: Dear GitHub
#206Earlier 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.
StackOverflow tackled this by intercepting plus one posts and telling people to just vote. GitHub should do the same (with starring or following).
Yeah, and now look at SO, it's got so many "rules" that you can't look cross eyed at it without breaking one of them. "You don't have enough rep!" "A minimum of 15 characters per comment." "At least 5 characters per edit." "That's been asked before." Eventually, everyone just stands in line with blinders on, forced to stare straight ahead, mouth shut, one step at a time. There's never an end once you start "tackling" these so called problems.
Re: Dear GitHub
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
> instead of helping projects
This isn't how it works. You don't help projects by pretending the football-stadium-sized issues with them don't exist and using them despite their flaws.
Trac is an awful, awful piece of software. It's awful to set up, to use, to maintain, to gather feedback from, it's awful for just about everything. If in some very weird parallel universe it gathered even 1% of the following that Github has today, you'd find a 20 page google document at the top of HN about its issues.
This is me being nice. Kallithea is a lot better, but it's just a far poorer Github-like clone. You might as well use Gitlab.
The other advantage of Github is the network effect. You don't have to create yet-another account, which removes a barrier to contributions.
When you're an open source project, you can think of the "Submit issue" button as your payment form. Same UX rules apply: The user must be able to file the issue as easily as possible. You should not throw obstacles in their way. You should not ask 50 questions when they can't answer half of them, especially if they just want to tell you "You have a typo in decode.c" or even just say hi.
Time to enrollment. How easy is it to become a contributor? When I file an issue on your project, I am doing you a favour - you should help me help you. I have myself given up on several large scale projects because they use shit software for bug tracking. It's not fun.
A lot of people don't understand this today. Github has fixed these issues and this is a huge reason why they are popular. And before you say anything, this document here is about is not time to enrollment, but quality of life when you are already a developer (especially on large projects). I'd certainly love for GH to fix those.
Re: Dear GitHub
#208Hi 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.
Hypothetical link: github.com/github/github/issues
Re: Dear GitHub
#209While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects. What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?
Why did this get downvoted? Ugh.
Re: Dear GitHub
#210Hi 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…
@jono Will you be able to answer, if github has any plans in the roadmap to open source the code in 1-2 years and develop in open instead of closed rooms.
Given many open source project adopting it for their code repository its important question to be answered.
Otherwise sourceforge.net story will repeat again, this time with github. Many projects adapted it when it was closed source and then when they open source it slowly and later due to falling revenues just started crumbling.