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New tools for open source maintainers

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Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#51

Post by u801e »

fake-name wrote: post #19
kazinator wrote: post #12

I get all this by not using github. Minimized comments: I run the mailing list and can enable moderation at any time. Retire namespace: I control the web server and so every aspect of the URL after the domain name. Unwanted pull requests: no different from unwanted anything else.

Downside: Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible . Major downside: You miss a huge percentage of possible contributors.

> Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible.

What do you find terrible about them? When browsing email lists like the one used for developing git itself, I find it very easy to go through various patch sets and follow the discussion they have on each commit. My client makes it easy to search for subjects, expand or collapse threads, search for authors, etc.

The emails themselves are easy to read and don't require an excessive amount of scrolling to go through even if the patch set has multiple commits. It's quite easy to see comments on a patch set inline with the patch itself.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#52

Post by u801e »

drej wrote: post #34
fake-name wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downside: Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible . Major downside: You miss a huge percentage of possible contributors.

This is fairly sad, because a lot of software is still maintained using mailing lists. Often not because it's the best solution, but because it's the least bad (for some). Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favo…

> Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world.

Unfortunately, email lists are not easy to browse if you're not subscribed and browsing past messages from before you described isn't that easy. The easiest way I've found around that problem is to use an email to NNTP gateway like gmane. Though that makes me wonder why project discussion isn't managed via a newsgroup as opposed to an email list.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#53

Post by anarazel »

u801e wrote: post #52
drej wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly sad, because a lot of software is still maintained using mailing lists. Often not because it's the best solution, but because it's the least bad (for some). Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favo…

> Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. Unfortunately, email lists are not easy to browse if you're not subscribed and browsing past messages from before you described isn't that easy. The easiest way I've found around that problem is to use an email to NNTP gateway like gmane. Though that ma…

Postgres' archives aren't that bad. You can find things via $search_engine, view by time, thread view crosses months etc: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#54

Post by anarazel »

drej wrote: post #34
fake-name wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downside: Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible . Major downside: You miss a huge percentage of possible contributors.

This is fairly sad, because a lot of software is still maintained using mailing lists. Often not because it's the best solution, but because it's the least bad (for some). Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favo…

> (actually, I didn't completely give up, I just browsed the Github mirror, which was the only usable part of their version control).

What makes our git own git repo unusable?

https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;

I personally find that quicker to get around in than github.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#55

Post by dflock »

raimue wrote: post #44

> [...] The author is not a bot account [...] How does GitHub identify "bot accounts"? I thought there is just one type of user accounts. You can give the API tokens generated on that account to a bot. But there is no flag in the settings to make it a "bot account".

I think when GitHub says bit, they mean app.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#56

Post by sctb »

daeken wrote: post #50
falanjito wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you see the users of your library as SPAM you might as well kill yourself.

'dang: Suggestion in light of this comment: Maybe users should be autobanned if they have N flags within M minutes of account creation. This is an obvious troll account, but as of now it'll take way too long (IMO) for them to be banned. Something to think about!

Thanks for the suggestion, we've added it to our list! Meanwhile we've banned the account, of course.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#57

Post by kazinator »

anarazel wrote: post #54
drej wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fairly sad, because a lot of software is still maintained using mailing lists. Often not because it's the best solution, but because it's the least bad (for some). Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favo…

> (actually, I didn't completely give up, I just browsed the Github mirror, which was the only usable part of their version control). What makes our git own git repo unusable? https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git ; I personally find that quicker to get around in than github.

Man, why doesn't gitweb serve up the clone links as links that you can right click and copy?

You have to swipe the cursor over "https://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git" and copy; how lame.

CGIT is so much nicer. It also serves up tarballs out of tags. If you do a "git tag foo-123" and push it out, then on your CGIT interface, there will be a foo-123.tar.gz URL for download (as well as .bz2 and .zip), pulled right out of the repo.

Still, either is light years ahead of github's presentation of repos.

> What makes our git own git repo unusable?

I know; WTF? From grandparent's comment I got the impression that Postgresql must be using CVS, or just tarballs in a FTP directory or something (and that someone kindly made a git repo and put it into GH).

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#58

Post by u801e »

anarazel wrote: post #53
u801e wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world. Unfortunately, email lists are not easy to browse if you're not subscribed and browsing past messages from before you described isn't that easy. The easiest way I've found around that problem is to use an email to NNTP gateway like gmane. Though that ma…

Postgres' archives aren't that bad. You can find things via $search_engine, view by time, thread view crosses months etc: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/

It apparently doesn't present a threaded view like a mail/news client would and downloading the mbox file requires one to authenticate with the server.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#59

Post by anarazel »

u801e wrote: post #58
anarazel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres' archives aren't that bad. You can find things via $search_engine, view by time, thread view crosses months etc: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/

It apparently doesn't present a threaded view like a mail/news client would and downloading the mbox file requires one to authenticate with the server.

> It apparently doesn't present a threaded view like a mail/news client would

Not the same as a mail client, but once you opened an individual email there's threaded structure.

> and downloading the mbox file requires one to authenticate with the server.

It does, but also says “Please authenticate with user archives and password antispam” - it's just to make automated extraction of email addresses a bit more work.

Re: New tools for open source maintainers

#60

Post by kazinator »

u801e wrote: post #58
anarazel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Postgres' archives aren't that bad. You can find things via $search_engine, view by time, thread view crosses months etc: https://www.postgresql.org/list/pgsql-hackers/

It apparently doesn't present a threaded view like a mail/news client would and downloading the mbox file requires one to authenticate with the server.

Not all mailing list archivers are created equal.

For my own site, I rejected the awful Pipermail (default archiver with GNU Mailman) with its brutally ugly presentation format and text-only.

I found an alternative called Lurker, with a better web interface and some of the features you're mentioning, like threading.

I further customized Lurker. I gave it a button bar with custom icons, and hacked it to support in-line HTML (when people post HTML to the mailing list, it is integrated into the archive as HTML). Because that is dangerous, of course, I wrote a comprehensive HTML cleaner for that.

I welcome HTML in my mailing lists; it's time for mailing lists to retire "text only" rules. It improves the formatting of text, letting you use typewriter fonts, italics and bold appropriately, and real bullets.

Here is an archive message with in-line images, another benefit:

http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20131110.004036.5ed128...

Here is discussion where you can see a branched tree view:

http://www.kylheku.com/lurker/message/20121127.210005.0ca78d...

Lurker mods: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/lurker/

HTML cleaner: http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/hc/tree/

This lexically analyzes the HTML and filters out all unwanted tags, or unwanted attributes of otherwise wanted tags.

mbox archives reveal people's e-mails; you have to control access to those.

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