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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

github.com

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#151

Post by laserbeam »

sshine wrote: post #60
SCdF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but tbf hosting on github doesn't (yet!) box you out of just moving back to that system. It's still just git. It's still distributed, in the sense that if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back. Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by dist…

> if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back. You could, but generally people can’t. They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond. GitHub use translates into GitLab use, but not into general git use workout a central repository. > Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a stor…

> You could, but generally people can’t. They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond.

The point is you CAN. Joe can in theory do it, and Steve can make an alternative piece of software to do it for Joe. In most other centralized places (like social media), you CANNOT. Joe cannot take his data off of Facebook and interact with it outside of the platform or move it to another platform.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#152

Post by m-schuetz »

bandrami wrote: post #12

Pretty cool that Linus Torvalds invented a completely distributed version control system and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place.

I have no use for a distributed source control system. I want my stuff consolidated at one place.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#153

Post by mashlol »

mmis1000 wrote: post #43
IshKebab wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people use Codeberg and Gitlab. And it's still distributed - I don't need to lock files and ask coworkers if I can work on them. Maybe if Git had native support for PRs and issues this wouldn't have happened. (And yes I'm aware of git send-email etc.)

I think it would be great if git have some kind of soft lock by default (like attach a text on some file without make it into actual commit). It could probably make peoples' live easier when you and teamates need to communicate what files you are changing thus reduce the chance of conflict.

FWIW git lfs does have support for locking files.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#154

Post by adrian17 »

antalis wrote: post #95

Firefox Mobile (Fenix) had just moved to Mozilla's Mercurial mozilla-central repository after using GitHub including for issues. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcom... Now, both the desktop and the mobile version will be on Github, and the "issues" will stay on Bugzilla. This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system. As a former Firefox an…

> I have to say that I used local search instead of trying to find something on the mozilla-central website.

On the contrary, I find searchfox to be the best code navigation tool I used. It has nice cross-language navigation features (like jumping from .webidl interface definition to c++ implementation), it has always-on blame (with more features too) and despite that it's really fast and feels extremely lightweight compared to GitHub interface. I really wish I had this with more projects, and I'll be sad if it ever dies.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#155

Post by SCdF »

nextaccountic wrote: post #148
SCdF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but tbf hosting on github doesn't (yet!) box you out of just moving back to that system. It's still just git. It's still distributed, in the sense that if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back. Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by dist…

Unfortunately the project is not just code. It also has issues, PRs and other stuff. Github has two kinds of lock in, a) your stuff is there and if you move elsewhere you probably will wipe your issues etc (huge loss of institutional knowledge), and b) there is a network effect because everyone has a github account and people are used to just hop on a repository and file an issue (rather than being greeted by a log i…

> Unfortunately the project is not just code.

The literal project we are discussing is just code. It's literally just code. It doesn't have issues, PRs are disabled as much as they can be (by a GitHub action that automatically closes all PRs with a note that code should be submitted elsewhere), and all "other stuff" is disabled.

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#156

Post by guappa »

flohofwoe wrote: post #79
sshine wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back. You could, but generally people can’t. They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond. GitHub use translates into GitLab use, but not into general git use workout a central repository. > Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a stor…

> They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond. And tbh, that's how it should be for a version control system. Before git with its byzantine workflows and a thousand ways to do the same thing, version control (e.g. svn) was a thing that's just humming along invisibly in the background, something that you never had to 'learn' or even think about, much like the filesystem. I don't need to know how a fi…

Have you ever actually used svn?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#157

Post by arp242 »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #80
swiftcoder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that their issues are blamed on "dual SCM", not on Mercurial itself. I guess just the weight of contributors expecting Git as the default is sinking the big Mercurial projects these days.

Isn't mercurial abandonware? Or maybe I'm just remembering that gitlab dropped support. If it's not dead yet seems to be getting there

They had a release just a few days ago. It's definitely not abandonware.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#158

Post by jgraham »

(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition)

To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any:

The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI.

In the short term the mercurial servers still exist, and are synced from GitHub. That allows automated systems to transfer to the git backend over time rather than all at once. Mercurial is also still being used for the "try" repository (where you push to run CI on WIP patches), although it's increasingly behind an abstraction layer; that will also migrate later.

For people familiar with the old repos, "mozilla-central" is mapped onto the more standard branch name "main", and "autoland" is a branch called "autoland".

It's also true that it's been possible to contribute to Firefox exclusively using git for a long time, although you had to install the "git cinnabar" extension. The choice between the learning hg and using git+extension was a it of an impediment for many new contributors, who most often knew git and not mercurial. Now that choice is no longer necessary. Glandium, who wrote git cinnabar, wrote extensively at the time this migration was first announced about the history of VCS at Mozilla, and gave a little more context on the reasons for the migration [1].

So in the short term the differences from the point of view of contributors are minimal: using stock git is now the default and expected workflow, but apart from that not much else has changed. There may or may not eventually be support for GitHub-based workflows (i.e. PRs) but that is explicitly not part of this change.

On the backend, once the migration is complete, Mozilla will spend less time hosting its own VCS infrastructure, which turns out to be a significant challenge at the scale, performance and availability needed for such a large project.

[1] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=4346

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#159

Post by arp242 »

nirava wrote: post #88
calcifer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ill-received or poorly stated? Try as I might, I can't find a joke in your comment.

I can. It was funny. No serious engineer will read that line and think, "wow, how malicious of mozilla, they just made the move to close all bug reports at once".

> No serious engineer will read that line and think, "wow, how malicious of mozilla, they just made the move to close all bug reports at once".

Never underestimate the cynicism of HN commenters.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#160

Post by LtWorf »

littlestymaar wrote: post #35
SCdF wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but tbf hosting on github doesn't (yet!) box you out of just moving back to that system. It's still just git. It's still distributed, in the sense that if github goes down you could still generate patches and email them around, and then push back to github when it's back. Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by dist…

> Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story That's what Github is though, it's not about the code itself it's about all your project management being on Github, and once you move it, moving out isn't realistic.

I managed to move to codeberg all my projects. There's everything except the secret deals with pypi to directly publish from github. Which is massively insecure anyway.
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