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Dear GitHub

github.com

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Re: Dear GitHub

#251

Post by simoncion »

pvorb wrote: post #136
bnegreve wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Comments like these baffle me and I have to wonder

* Are "we" in such a huge hurry that we don't look at our scrollbar to see if there's more to the document that we're viewing?

* How did "we" get so incurious that we don't even attempt to scroll down to see if there's more information to read?

I mean -seriously- the intended audience for this particular open letter is technical people.

Re: Dear GitHub

#252

Post by Perceptes »

bsder wrote: post #188

Distributed revision control users whining about centralized repository lacking features. Ummm ... anybody getting the irony here? And, from a GitHub business perspective, why do I hear Lily Tomlin: "We don't care. We don't have to." Everybody anointed GitHub as "the chosen one" over strenuous objections from some of us that creating another monopoly for open source projects is a bad idea . Pardon me for enjoying som…

I'm an open source project maintainer and share many of the pain points outlined in the document, but I also totally agree with you. Giving control of your project to a company means losing control and having to resort to desperate pleas like this. This is simply what happens when you can't fork it yourself like you could with an open source project.

It's likely that GitHub will alleviate these pain points in time, but the lesson is the same: let a company control your destiny and you can no longer have what you want or need when their interests diverge from yours, even if their system is the best there is and was radically better than everything else at the time you switched to it.

Re: Dear GitHub

#254

Post by hboon »

guessmyname wrote: post #80

Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of dev…

> why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript?

I also noticed that most of the repositories seem to be based on Javascript.

> JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.

My guess:

Based on numerous sources [1][2], Javascript is the most popular language on GitHub. So there are more developers, more repositories, more activity involved. It just happens that one (or a few of them) talked this through and gather up other folks in their community.

[1] http://githut.info [2] https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github

Re: Dear GitHub

#255

Post by urda »

zzzeek wrote: post #141

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…

> If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations,

There is no longer an "if". It's absolutely true that GitHub is cruising at this time. For example: They are more interested in hiring community managers / community "heroes" instead of actual engineers in SF.

Re: Dear GitHub

#256

Post by ajsharp »

I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people (cough guys) that maintain these repos, but there's something telling about it that it's all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:

> Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!

LOL. I can't tell if this is "go-fuck-yourself"-level passive aggression, or mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github (or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after reading this would be "mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y'can g'fuck yr'self", while the second thought would be "yea, you're not wrong". Generally, passive aggression gets you nowhere when you're asking for something from someone/something who owes you nothing (I know, I know, they "owe" their customers everything).

The Node/React/JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish. The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it's mind-boggling, because they're not wrong about anything they're asking for. But it's how they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.

Re: Dear GitHub

#257

Post by throwaway999888 »

hk__2 wrote: post #165
zzzeek wrote: post #141

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…

> We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. Why distributed? You need a central place to report bugs and track them to ensure they’re not duplicated everywhere.

Why distributed version control? You need a central place to pull from and push to, to ensure that forks and patches are not duplicated everywhere... ;)

Re: Dear GitHub

#258

Post by zzzeek »

zanny wrote: post #237
monkmartinez wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not Michael Bayer (but I hope to be more like him someday)... that said, what I think he means or could mean is that issues would be distributed along with the repo. Maybe something like a git log for issues that are attached to and/or part of the repo itself. Thinking about it, something like this would be sweet. I would immediately have a snap shot of things that might go boom when I run said software. eta: In…

Problem is for that system you need per-user authentication mechanisms to verify the interacting party in a bug report. If you can't do that, people can impersonate project members and you're going to have a bad time. Centralized issue tracking is not winning because of implementation details, its winning because you need some central authority to verify people are real and who they say they are. You would have to si…

All of those issues would apply to DVCS as well, I can clone any project and commit whatever crap I want to it, I just can't push to the main repo of the project.

Distributed issue tracking would use a similar pull model, but in reality wouldn't normally need people to be "cloning" it or anything like that; more realistically, a project would have just one place that is the "official" bug tracker just like they do a git repo now. But with "distributed", you can now have read-only mirrors of it elsewhere, you can have alternative GUIs that can push to the "official" repo as long as you have an account on that "official" host (which may as well be github), etc. It's not as important that it's truly "distributed", more that this is a set of issues that as a body of information about a project can and does live in many places, just like the version control does, just like the mailing list does, just like the IRC logs do. Right now issue tracking is like none of these other things.

Re: Dear GitHub

#259

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway999888 wrote: post #257
hk__2 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. Why distributed? You need a central place to report bugs and track them to ensure they’re not duplicated everywhere.

Why distributed version control? You need a central place to pull from and push to, to ensure that forks and patches are not duplicated everywhere... ;)

[deleted]

Re: Dear GitHub

#260

Post by whyever »

hendry wrote: post #168
zzzeek wrote: post #141

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…

Suckless have discussed this several times and have fallen back to an email mailing list. http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1201/index.html#msg10574 Last one proposed by someone: http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1504/26210.html

The problem with mailing lists is that patches and bug reports get forgotten.
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