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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

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Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#91

Post by brudgers »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
kibwen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Progress relies strongly on people working together toward a common goal. If being "unreasonable" works for Linux, that's fine. But before others go trying to blindly emulate Linus, I'd suggest attempting to be reasonable first.

What people really don't seem to get is that Linus' cultural background is Finnish, and that Finns tend to be extremely outspoken and that they couldn't lie or polish their words if their life depended on it. http://www.karelia.fi/welcomingguide/the-finnish-way-of-life What to American sensibilities are grave insults to Linus is most likely just him speaking his mind without any filter in place, the way he was brough…

Torvaldes is not proud of his behavior, https://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_lin...

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#92

Post by khedoros1 »

shmerl wrote: post #78
iamcreasy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.

Also, should it really be called merge request? What exactly are they pulling during the merge?

They're pulling changes from another repository. A pull request is a request for someone else (the maintainer) to pull the changes that you're submitting into their repo. You aren't pushing; you're requesting for them to pull.

GitLab apparently does call them merge requests, though.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#93

Post by solox3 »

croddin wrote: post #79
mi100hael wrote: post #3

There's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > I don't do github pull requests. > > github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a > valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is > also deficient and useless. > > Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github > instead decided to replace it with their own tot…

It looks like github's pull requests and other features Linus had problems with have improved since 2012. Here is a pull request that Linus opened recently: https://github.com/Subsurface-divelog/libdc/pull/7

None of those commits are signed. Apparently people on GitHub can commit as torvalds if the author email matches his: https://github.com/amoffat/masquerade/commit/9b0562595cc479a...

(You can't fake a fork without hacking the torvalds account, though, so maybe it really was him.)

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#94

Post by thethirdone »

shmerl wrote: post #78
iamcreasy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.

Also, should it really be called merge request? What exactly are they pulling during the merge?

You are pulling the commits from another repository.

The base repository is behind the forked repository and the forker is asking the base to incorporate (pull) the changes (commits).

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#95

Post by pessimizer »

jcranmer wrote: post #88
oh_sigh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, so many small and large organizations choose to use Linux and git over BSD and Mercurial, 'despite' Linus' management style.

If GitHub were based on Mercurial rather than git, we'd very likely see hg as the major VCS and git the lesser alternative. If FreeBSD weren't the target of a lawsuit in 1992 and 1993, it's plausible (by no means guaranteed) that it could have been the major OSS Unix distro instead of Linux. Technology choices are largely driven by network effects, and small variances in the seeds of the networks can ultimately dicta…

Github rode on the back of widespread adoption of git, not the other way around. It isn't like Bitbucket didn't exist.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#96

Post by thethirdone »

__jal wrote: post #32
jacquesm wrote: post #11

I'm fine with that. Github is 'too large to fail' already, adding the Linux kernel to the pile and forcing the kernel team into Github's workflow are two big negatives. It would be great for Github but bad for everybody else.

Seriously. Linux will likely outlive GH[1], and more importantly, it doesn't need GH. The current workflow works fine, and I hardly think any potential kernel hackers are choosing not to work on the kernel because it is email-driven. [1] Nothing against them that I don't have with any other commons that depends on corporate beneficence. But companies fail all the time; I can't think of a reason GH is immune.

> The current workflow works fine, and I hardly think any potential kernel hackers are choosing not to work on the kernel because it is email-driven.

I'm not so sure. If the kernel development was on Github, I may have looked into contributing, but as it stands, its not worth the trouble to try to contribute (as I don't have anything specific to help with). And, I suspect there are more capable developers who are closer to the edge than me.

Anyway, having a slightly lower bar to get started may not get more developers involved, but instead my get them involved more quickly.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#97

Post by KekDemaga »

shp0ngle wrote: post #84
__jal wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Linux will likely outlive GH[1], and more importantly, it doesn't need GH. The current workflow works fine, and I hardly think any potential kernel hackers are choosing not to work on the kernel because it is email-driven. [1] Nothing against them that I don't have with any other commons that depends on corporate beneficence. But companies fail all the time; I can't think of a reason GH is immune.

It's not like open source projects are immortal. Some die due to poor management, lost developer interest, lost funding, or some fork becoming more popular. Or all of the above.

For me Linux is the core of the open source movement. If it dies the rest of it might die with it.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#98

Post by eridius »

jacquesm wrote: post #87
eridius wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good excuse for someone who's communicating with other people outside of his culture. He's had many many years to learn that his style of communication doesn't mesh with most people.

> He's had many many years to learn that his style of communication doesn't mesh with most people. Well, considering that Linux is pretty much powering the world it seems to me that his style of communication tends to mesh perfectly well with the people that he's working with and that they actually get the job done. As opposed to a whole pile of floundering competitors which are of course much better from a technical…

He surrounds himself with people that are willing to put up with his communication style. That doesn't mean he has a good communication style.

> If you're easily offended don't contribute to the Linux kernel.

That's a pretty shitty attitude to take. And you don't have to be "easily offended" to dislike interacting with Linus.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#99

Post by jcranmer »

monorepoman wrote: post #58

Lost me at "And lots of people learned that monorepos are really painful, because past a certain size they just stop scaling." Plenty of counterexamples of monorepo projects much larger than Linux kernel.

Actually, my experience is that monorepos scale better than non-monorepos. Probably the largest project that isn't a monorepo is OpenJDK--and even then, that's only barely true, as the entire JDK (effectively, rt.jar) is itself a single repository.

If you're arguing it's not a (implied-to-be-evil) monorepo because, well, it's really managed as independent fiefs who do all their work in separate integration stages... well, that's basically how every other major monorepo project does it. So if Linux isn't a monorepo, then there's no such thing as a monorepo in practice.

Re: Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community

#100

Post by BinaryIdiot »

snakeanus wrote: post #55

I can't really see the obsession that everyone has with centralised and closed services like github. We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy while being open standards and without having the need to have any account in any centralised service, why drop all these features away?

> We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them.

It seems this topic comes up quite frequently on HN. Unfortunately, while it sounds great in theory, no one ever has a practical way of doing this. The main problem here is the user experience.

When using GitHub I can find an open source project, copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request. A little bit convoluted but overall it's a very simple workflow. Now try decentralizing away from GitHub. If you have to add any steps then you increase friction likely lowering the UX and making adoption harder.

Now, if you can figure out a way to decentralize a service while maintaining the same level or less friction from the centralized version then you have a real winner and things can start happening. Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream.

In my opinion, of course. I love the idea of decentralizing things like GitHub I just can't imagine a good UX way of doing it.

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