Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Give up GitHub: The time has come

sfconservancy.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 585 posts

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#171

Post by MacsHeadroom »

ryanmcbride wrote: post #131
brundolf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the uni. Mine focused on fundamentals, almost to a fault; we learned algorithmic complexity and relational normal-forms but never touched eg. JavaScript, Python, or - ironically - git. Practical skills were very much not the entrypoint; I had to learn most of that myself.

Yeah I had to learn Assembly in college. We also had to physically print out our C++ code and turn it in to the professor. Did it make me a better programmer? Maybe but to this day I still haven't had to use it. Most of my practical skills I picked up on the job. P.S. I've seen the professor grading the printed out programs and he'd do it by flipping to the last page which was supposed to have the result output, and…

My C class had weekly written programming tests.

Not multiple choice tests. We had to write a program by hand and hope to god it would compile without any errors.

Horrible way to teach C imho.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#172

Post by SftwrSvior81 »

10x-dev wrote: post #65
parentheses wrote: post #43

GitHub is a business and currently provides free storage and a pretty nice interface to it. It’s easy to say “our rights are being stripped away” but the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services with the common good in mind is ludicrous!

It is objectively not ludicrous. It might go against the commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profits, but it is not unreasonable to create a system where businesses have to keep the common good in mind. There is a difference between 'how things are now' and 'how things could be'. Imagining and wanting a different status quo is not by itself ludicrous (especially since we all stand t…

It's not just a "commonly taught idea that businesses should focus solely on generating profit", it's the fundamental principle upon which economies are built today almost anywhere in the world. Sure, there are other ways of organizing economic systems, but to suggest that we are simply or easily going to switch to one is unrealistic. Imagining and wanting a different status quo will not lead to a different status quo, especially if all we are doing is making demands on others to change their behavior and use their property in ways that we want. In other words, if we want a different status quo, we won't get it by bitching about GitHub but by building a competitor company that does things the way we want it.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#173

Post by josephcsible »

ipaddr wrote: post #154
josephcsible wrote: post #122

> If it is, as you claim, permissible to train the model (and allow users to generate code based on that model) on any code whatsoever and not be bound by any licensing terms, why did you choose to only train Copilot's model on FOSS? For example, why are your Microsoft Windows and Office codebases not in your training set? This is my favorite question about Copilot ever.

My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.

The reasons that Windows is awful have nothing to do with code quality. Windows is awful because of intentional choices Microsoft made (e.g., bloatware that gets reinstalled with every update, mandatory Microsoft accounts, and mandatory telemetry).

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#174

Post by avgcorrection »

dcz_self wrote: post #86
NoGravitas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally the ones I don't mind losing. If anyone can't figure out how to send a git pull request or patchset by email, I'm happy for them to email me with questions on how to, which I will answer as best I can.

I can figure out how to send you a patch set via email (see my Linux kernel contributions), but if I can avoid doing that, sure as heck I will. Your project must be really important to me, or I have to get paid. As for the reason, it's simple: the process of submitting patches sucks. I wrote about it: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/git-botch-email

Seconded. It can be a lot of effort to just set up a client which won’t mangle patchset emails. Maybe Mutt etc. users get that for free, though.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#175

Post by _gabe_ »

This article doesn't compel me to give up github. It seems like it basically talks a lot about how proprietary software is evil and then complains about Copilot.

Then it drops this:

> GitHub's business model has always been “proprietary vendor lock-in”.

How is this Github's business model? Unless you're using Github specific features like Github actions and workflows, it's fairly easy to switch to another Git based host.

Then the article provides "alternatives" that are all lacking important features.

> If you're ready to take on the challenge now and give up GitHub today, we note that CodeBerg and SourceHut0 are excellent options right now.

The article immediately talks about drawbacks with all of these alternatives and then mentions a guide on how to self host using git lab. Why would I go through all the trouble of swapping to a different version control host if I don't gain any value? In addition to not gaining value, I'll also lose features that are very nice to have.

This article doesn't convince me at all. Yes Copilot is questionable and we should pursue the ethics behind what it does, but if you want to convince people to give up Github you should at least be prepared to give an alternative that offers a great deal of feature parity.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#176

Post by seadan83 »

As a leader of a FOSS project that is on github, and migrated off of sourceforge because SVN and email patches were not scaling - I'm a bit confused by this article.

Co-pilot has issues, ergo github is going the way of sourceforge, and so now we must abandon github? Do I have that reasoning correct?

We need to:

- migrate the bug queue

- have all links in commit history break

- application integration with githib for bug reporting be removed

- update documentation

- find a new website host (and no longer github.io)

- find a new CI/CD (we were already burned by travis, github workflows are nice)

- teach our user contributors to actually use git! There has been a lot of heartache from them that they have to use the pencil icon on a web ui to edit config files, now we have to take them back to using a git GUI client! We were on github before that blessed pencil icon feature came out, there was no end to the wailing about how unapproachable the process was (super frustrating when users see they have to do something.. frustrating for us because our users wanted to just email is stuff so we could then do the uploading to git work)

- lose all PR history

- migrate project tracking

- find a new place to host release artifacts

- update our website to use a new distribution URL (the website scrapes github api to get latest version for download link; it's nice never updating website as we do releases on every merge)

- figure out and migrate repository permissions. (We have a hundred repositories of user generated plugin content, everything about migrating that would be a lot of work and missing important features)

- lose our search ranking and rebuild our SEO

What else to add to this pile.. and all because co-pilot smells?? Meanwhile all of that work is busy work, and not at all feature-pare. That kind of migration would take a long time, seems like that pivot without good reason is the worst kind of churn. Convince me this article is not a temper tantrum about copilot...

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#177

Post by SftwrSvior81 »

NoraCodes wrote: post #93
RoddaWallPro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. They use the word "problematic". Any time I see someone using that word, I close the tab instantly to avoid the brain damage that would result from me reading the rest of the piece. The word is meaningless and cowardly. Say what you think. Quit tap dancing around the conversation.

> The word is meaningless and cowardly. It literally just means "has problems."

And by not at least naming one of the problems, the author is being cowardly and/or lazy. It's like describing a reviewed item as "good". It conveys no information other than "I like it". The word "problematic" does the same thing here. It signals that the author doesn't like something but doesn't tell us anything about why. In other words, it's fucking useless.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#178

Post by sofixa »

xigoi wrote: post #44
johnnypangs wrote: post #15

What are peoples opinions on gitlab? It wasn’t mentioned in this article, I’m wondering if it was a willful omission.

In my experience, GitLab is extremely slow compared to other Git hosts.

I see you haven't had the displeasure of using Bitbucket.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#179

Post by NicoJuicy »

josephcsible wrote: post #173
ipaddr wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite answer is: if you included Microsoft source code the quality of suggestions drops below viable product.

The reasons that Windows is awful have nothing to do with code quality. Windows is awful because of intentional choices Microsoft made (e.g., bloatware that gets reinstalled with every update, mandatory Microsoft accounts, and mandatory telemetry).

Support for legacy features is always #1, code-wise

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#180

Post by yonaguska »

brundolf wrote: post #88
prepend wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

I say this as a senior dev with 8+ years of experience working with git: git is nightmarishly complex. Highly stateful, insanely large CLI surface, huge amounts of terminology/concepts relative to the complexity of what you're actually trying to do with it. I've learned to navigate its waters over the years, fully appreciate the difference between git and GitHub, etc etc, and I don't blame anybody for being scared aw…

It might be hugely complex, but at the same time, I'd posit that 90 percent of devs use only 1 percent of its functionality, 95 percent of the time they use it, and get work done.
Post reply on HN