Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows • Hacker News Board

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#141

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #135

jessaustin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that seem like a reasonable license to you? Admittedly, it doesn't matter, because these authors don't have the resources to hire lawyers from abroad, but all this stuff about "illegal activity"? This is a git client. It gives us no functionality that does not already exist in git. What am I going to do, rob a convenience store with it? Why would the author care if I did? Why are the terms more onerous than thos…

Even in the US, it's common to have clauses about specific illegal activity, such as breaking embargoes or similar. For example, you might be banned from using the software in, or cooperating with someone located in, Iran. You could do both of those with a git client. This is more generally phrased than the very lawyer-written EULAs you generally find, but it's not unreasonable or unprecedented.

Assuming for the sake of argument that I'm not supposed to collaborate with someone in some particular place... why again do the authors of these clients care about that? Are the black-bag squad going to disappear them because they didn't warn us to be good? Actually the charitable interpretation is probably that this is a sort of cargo-culted license without much informed decision-making behind it.

Embargoes and sanctions have no ethical force behind them anyway. They are merely a way to harm poor people while ginning up more pretexts for more wars. Anyone who can oppose such monstrosities using git should do so.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#142

Post by jessaustin » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:32 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #139

jessaustin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that seem like a reasonable license to you? Admittedly, it doesn't matter, because these authors don't have the resources to hire lawyers from abroad, but all this stuff about "illegal activity"? This is a git client. It gives us no functionality that does not already exist in git. What am I going to do, rob a convenience store with it? Why would the author care if I did? Why are the terms more onerous than thos…

It seems reasonable because they're within their rights to license their software however they want, subject to the laws of the Czech Republic. Whether it's enforceable, sure, that might be questionable.

It would be within my rights to repeatedly batter my own head with a hammer. It would not seem reasonable, however. Most of the thinking behind this license is of the cargo-cult variety, and these valiant defenses of developers' rights are just silly.

If I cared about a git client for these platforms, I would file a bug about the license. Fortunately that is not the case.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#143

Post by apocalyptic0n3 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:35 PM UTC

Morphion wrote: post #121

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've found that our repos get bad branches and bad merges far less often with them. For a long time, we had issues where a repo would have to be completely rebuilt (or replaced with all history lost) after a dev who thought he knew the Git CLI did a merge incorrectly or force pushed something. Detached HEAD branches locally and remotely, incompatible remote branches, inability to merge without conflict, etc. It was…

All your troubles would be solved if you simply locked down master and only allowed pull requests with limited merge options like fastforward and squash. I work at a small shop with 6 devs. We do this. No issues.

We did this at one point, but at the scale we work at (our GitLab has 671 projects, about 150 of which have been worked on in the last 4 months), that kind of lock down creates a major bottleneck for updating projects unfortunately. We had to disable it shortly after starting it because it was simply too much to manage with our current workforce. It's too much extra work for us compared to just saying "use a GUI", which has had a great success rate so far.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#144

Post by wheresvic1 » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:44 PM UTC

Why not linux? :(

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#145

Post by ukyrgf » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

cridenour wrote: post #114

MrGilbert wrote: post #104

Hm... Looks nice so far, except for the Google Analytics call upon startup. Would love to see an option to disable it - and you should add a privacy policy, if you keep it in your application. Other then that, it doesn't seem to send anything else.

It looks like you can, under Preferences -> Updates.

Ah, not an option in the Windows version. I wonder how else they differ.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#146

Post by ukyrgf » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 6:06 PM UTC

josteink wrote: post #28

Quick feedback to whoever maintains the web-page. I'm looking at the introduction, the screenshots and all looks nice. Then at the bottom of the screen I get the text "Download Fork for Mac", and nothing else. No Windows-download. Had the headline on HN not been explicit about there being a Windows-version, I wouldn't have gone looking... And therefore not found the tiny "For for Windows" navigation item on top of th…

It's definitely Mac-centric. Mac in all the screenshots. Mac link in the menu has a blue border to make it stand out and the Windows one doesn't. Like you said, the bottom of the homepage is a link to download the Mac version. Release notes are all for Mac, no Windows. The blog talks about "Fork", which is a Mac app, and then a separate "Fork for Windows".

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#147

Post by xorcist » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 6:32 PM UTC

duchenne wrote: post #105

rsp1984 wrote: post #79

On the plus side I find Fork to be performant and clean. I prefer it over Kraken and Tower and I find it vastly better than SourceTree. I also find it somewhat similar to GitX-dev on the Mac, which is a good thing. On the minus side (and it's a big minus), it's not open source. As a developer of commercial software I basically have to trust the Fork developers not to do anything fishy with all the source code / IP th…

It is very disappointing that in 2019 we still have to rely on trusting a software vendor or reading the app souce code if it is available. That would be great to we have an OS-level system to give fine-grained permissions and restrictions to desktop apps, like on lineageOS?

> like on lineageOS?

Android/LineageOS is Linux.

Just type adduser and sudo, it's not too bad.

You'll probably find, however, that it might not be all you were looking for. It can still steal your source code and credentials, which might have been what you were worried about.

You will also miss out on your editor, compiler, zip utilities, and whatever else that's not included in your git client. Anything useful would probably look more like privileges (where opening a file can be ok but a network socket forbidden). There's been a ton of research in this area and some very mature systems such as SELinux.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#148

Post by xorcist » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

Interactive staging (add -p) can be very useful with a GUI.

Otherwise I don't know. Command interfaces familiar to you are hard to beat.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#149

Post by t1amat » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 6:41 PM UTC

vintagedave wrote: post #120

t1amat wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It did not seem that they were used by the poster to patronize, they were there to describe a task (creating laws for make-believe countries) that they performed at one stage of their life (middle school).

Is not a direct comparison between the author and middle school attitudes and conduct and being juvenile extremely patronising? (Almost by definition, given the description 'juvenile', ie youthful or child-like.) There's conduct and commentary that follows the Hacker News ethos, and there's conduct and commentary that does not. This does not. It is a pity to read it.

Not being the author I can not definitively express their intent.

You seem to desire to be an enforcer of rules in this thread, which is admirable, but ultimately not your authority or responsibility to do. I would respectfully suggest you leave moderation to those with the authority to do so.

Re: Fork: A fast and friendly Git client for Mac and Windows

#150

Post by ryanwinchester » Wed, Jul 24, 2019, 7:45 PM UTC

groundCode wrote: post #33

As someone pretty comfortable with got on the command line, what advantages would a GUI give me? I’m not trolling, it’s an honest question. Anyone with good got command line skills move to something like this and find it offers them a better workflow?

I use both command line and GUI as part of my workflow.

I use GUI mainly for doing "visual" stuff like looking at diffs, and commit and merge history (especially across branches), etc. In my opinion, this stuff is quicker and easier and looks better on a GUI.

I also use GUI if I have several changes and I only want to stage some of them (or partials). It's easy to go through and stage/unstage things on a good GUI.

For everything else I use the command line. Almost any time I want to actually DO something (like commit, push, pull, etc), I do this through command line.