Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
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Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
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Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#2The last paragraph is making me think...
"Really I think you need a 3rd system that's radically different."
I think he's right. I'm not sure what that 3rd system would look like. I wonder if a meta-service piggybacking on both Github and Launchpad would work?
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#3> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL.
I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#4It's definitely annoying when you are trying to find the "canonical" fork of a project on Github, but it's not THAT hard to just look under the project name and click on the "forked from xyz/project" link (projects rarely go more than a couple of forks deep), or in the worst case click on the network tab and look at the tree.
Edit: If it's a Ruby Gem, you can also look up the gem on rubygems.org and click the Homepage link.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#5> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL. I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.
Especially with organizations being free (for open source projects at least), I think this usage will increase for github.
As for Zed main argument, I am not sure it is the whole story. I think the launchpad vision is great, but the delivery mostly a failure. The fundamental idea of being able to track downstream bugs in a project sounds really right to me, but launchpad UI is really a big mess: you need a lot of hoop to get the code. Sure, you can do lp:foo for project foo, but few people know bzr, and for a long time, there were numerous issues between different incompatible bzr versions (which have been fixed ever since I think). Forcing people to use bzr has been one cause of failure I think.
I also wonder how much differences can be attributed to how the things came to life: launchpad wanted to do many things from the start, wherease github grew organically.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#6It's definitely annoying when you are trying to find the "canonical" fork of a project on Github, but it's not THAT hard to just look under the project name and click on the "forked from xyz/project" link (projects rarely go more than a couple of forks deep), or in the worst case click on the network tab and look at the tree. Edit: If it's a Ruby Gem, you can also look up the gem on rubygems.org and click the Homepag…
See? That's the same as me telling you that to find the code on Launchpad you just... A packager doesn't want to navigate the bizarre tree of forks and junk, they just want official releases. A programmer could care less though.
Then, because projects live under a person, if they want to transfer ownership, the whole damn project basically goes dead and you have to track it down again. Again, if I'm a sysadmin that sucks since I have to keep up on their internal politics. If I'm a programmer I go, meh, and just pull the new stuff.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#7It's not just Launchpad that's "SysAdmin" friendly. Sourceforge and Google Code are much closer to the Launchpad model than to Github's.
I know Zed Shaw isn't saying one is better, but doesn't the popularity of Github compared these sites tell us something?
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#8It's definitely annoying when you are trying to find the "canonical" fork of a project on Github, but it's not THAT hard to just look under the project name and click on the "forked from xyz/project" link (projects rarely go more than a couple of forks deep), or in the worst case click on the network tab and look at the tree. Edit: If it's a Ruby Gem, you can also look up the gem on rubygems.org and click the Homepag…
See? That's the same as me telling you that to find the code on Launchpad you just... A packager doesn't want to navigate the bizarre tree of forks and junk, they just want official releases. A programmer could care less though. Then, because projects live under a person, if they want to transfer ownership, the whole damn project basically goes dead and you have to track it down again. Again, if I'm a sysadmin that s…
Haha, I guess I'm proving your point since I'm a programmer and I'm having a problem seeing why navigating forks is such a bad thing.
Plus, I usually just let Moonshine/Puppet take care of the sysadmin part for me and trust that it will grab all of the right packages. The people who write the Puppet recipes would probably feel very differently though.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#9> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL. I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.
That was a joke. You know, those things that make people laugh? In seriousness, it sort of doesn't matter if you're a programmer. Either way works so long as the first thing you get is code. If you're a sysadmin or packager though, that's annoying as hell. You want to just go to /project and not worry about the who's-who of forks.
Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder
#10> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL. I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.
Especially with organizations being free (for open source projects at least), I think this usage will increase for github. As for Zed main argument, I am not sure it is the whole story. I think the launchpad vision is great, but the delivery mostly a failure. The fundamental idea of being able to track downstream bugs in a project sounds really right to me, but launchpad UI is really a big mess: you need a lot of hoo…
I don't think the launchpad UI is a mess, if you don't expect to be able to browse code in it. The code browsing is horrible. But, the PPA, branch tracking, bug tracking, and other stuff is great.
I can tell you from personal experience though that github's bug tracking is stupid as all hell. Remember that whole blow-up over my book and people turning one damn bug into a massive flame war? That all happened because I couldn't figure out how to contact the project owner directly and figured the bug was the best way to do it. Little did I know that this would turn into a massive idiot festival with no way to turn the damn bug or emails off.
So, I disagree, launchpad's UI is only broken if you're into code. Github's is broken if you're into projects. Too bad they both can't just make both use cases a nice experience.