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

Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 481 posts

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#171

Post by sakjur »

xrdev wrote: post #142
mritzmann wrote: post #133

What is the source of “Firefox Moves to GitHub”? It could be a mirror, just like Linux also has an mirror on GitHub. https://github.com/torvalds/linux // EDIT: Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970574

My thoughts as well, even more so after seeing the only GitHub Workflow they have is actually for closing Pull Requests with a default response: https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/blob/main/.github...

It’s interesting how pull requests remain the only tab (apart from code) that cannot be disabled by the repo owners.

I get it from GitHub’s perspective, it’s a nudge to get people to accept the core premise of ”social coding” and encouraging user pressure for mirrored projects to accept GitHub as a contribution entrypoint. I’m impressed by their successes and would attribute some of that to forced socialization practices such as not allowing PRs to be disabled. I’ve grown to dislike it and become disillusioned by GitHub over the course of a long time, but I’m in awe of how well it has worked for them.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#172

Post by arccy »

danpalmer wrote: post #10
reddalo wrote: post #6

Why GitHub? If they truly cared about open-source they would've chosen something else, such as a self-hosted Forgejo [1], or its most common public instance Codeberg [2]. [1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/

I would argue that part of "truly caring" about open-source is being where the contributors and community are. That's probably a large part of the move to GitHub, and neither of these other options would achieve that. As much as one can say "git is distributed, the server doesn't matter", the centre of the community very much does matter, and for better or worse that's currently Github.

If you maintain a popular project, you'll quickly find that github prs are a massive source of spam and low quality prs with people that don't even bother to follow up.

Bad PRs all around, with just a constant stream of drive by "why no merge?!?!?!" comments.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#174

Post by SCdF »

Flimm wrote: post #55
SCdF wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but distributed git As Torvalds Intended™ doesn't solve those problems, so it's not related. For the actual event we are commenting on, they have disabled all features other than code hosting and PRs.

It's impossible to disable PRs on GitHub, sadly. See https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/84

Interestingly mozilla has effectively done this here, by using a GitHub action that automatically closes any PR with a message explaining that PRs are not to be used.

It's very silly they have to do this, but at least they can I suppose.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#175

Post by aktau »

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…

This is one area where Gerrit Code Review is (was? I don't know if it changed) is superior. It stores everything it knows about in git repositories (preferences in a separate meta git repository, comments, patches). With the right refspec, you can pull it all down and have a full backup.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#176

Post by berkes »

fhd2 wrote: post #170
floriangosse wrote: post #83

I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower. I think you can dis…

In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.

You just showed the poster-child of gatekeeping that is harming Open Source.

Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute".

Any bar to entry is bad, it certainly never is the solution to a different problem (not being able to manage all contributions). If anything, in the longer run, it will only make it worse.

Now, to be clear, while I do think GitHub is currently the "solution" to lower barriers, allow more people to contribute and as such improve your Open Source Project, the fact this is so, is a different and other problem - there isn't any good alternative to Github (with broad definitions of "good") why is that and what can we do to fix that, if at all?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#177

Post by sneak »

berkes wrote: post #176
fhd2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.

You just showed the poster-child of gatekeeping that is harming Open Source. Every contributor is valuable, it's in the name, the definition of "contribute". Any bar to entry is bad, it certainly never is the solution to a different problem (not being able to manage all contributions). If anything, in the longer run, it will only make it worse. Now, to be clear, while I do think GitHub is currently the "solution" to…

Not all PRs are created equal.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#178

Post by berkes »

kristel100 wrote: post #173

Honestly surprised it took this long. For a project that depends so much on community contribution, being on GitHub just lowers the barrier for new devs. Curious to see if this revives contribution velocity.

In the very least, it will open up FTEs that can now work on what makes Mozilla projects unique, rather than on building and maintaining generic fundamentals.

It's a pet-peeve and personal frustration of mine. "Do one thing and do that well" is also often forgotten in this part of Open Source projects. You are building a free alternative to slack? spend every hour on building the free alternative to slack, not on selfhosting your Gitlab, operating your CI-CD worker-clusters or debugging your wiki-servers.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#179

Post by berkes »

pparanoidd wrote: post #113
mentalgear wrote: post #84

Would have been great if they used an European alternative ( like Codeberg ).

lol codeberg is down right now, bad timing

I've used Codeberg for some projects and while their work and services are impressive and their progress steady and good, it's really not a proper alternative to Github for many use-cases.

"It depends", as always, but codeberg lacks features (that your use-case may not need, or may require), uptime/performance (that may be crucial or inconsequential to your use-case), familiarity (that may deter devs), integration (that may be time-consuming to build yourself or be unnessecary for your case) etc etc.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#180

Post by Lightkey »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #18
reddalo wrote: post #6

Why GitHub? If they truly cared about open-source they would've chosen something else, such as a self-hosted Forgejo [1], or its most common public instance Codeberg [2]. [1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/

To assert that an organisation doesn't "truly" care about open source simply because they've chosen a tool that isn't is ridiculous. Even before this Mozilla almost certainly used hundreds of closed source tools, including things like Slack, Excel, Anaplan, Workday, etc.

Using proprietary software in-house for management is one thing, forcing outside contributors to use them, another. That is why they went out of their way to avoid Slack when the time came to leave IRC behind and they chose Matrix instead.
Post reply on HN