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Before GitHub

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Before GitHub

#171

Post by mtlynch »

>For a while, leaving GitHub felt like a symbolic move mostly made by smaller projects or by people with strong views about software freedom. I definitely cringed when Zig moved to Codeberg! But I now see people with real weight and signal talking about leaving GitHub. The most obvious one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who announced that Ghostty will move.

I didn't understand this. I perceive the Zig project and Mitchell Hashimoto / Ghostty to be at similar levels of "weight and signal." Especially because Ghostty is written in Zig.

It feels kind of like saying, "Oh, I didn't take this seriously when it was just Fabrice Bellard, but now that an actual influential person like Guido van Rossum is doing it, it's real."

Re: Before GitHub

#172

Post by bsenftner »

edf13 wrote: post #139

My first was this monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe

I remember that. I've been writing code since the 70's, and have lost count of the number of source code management systems I have been forced to learn. Early on they were over engineered, and a pain in the ass to learn. Then they'd go "out of fashion" and the next pain-in-the-ass over engineered nonsense was forced and learned. I resisted git FOR FUCKING EVER because i was so tired of relearning how to do the same fucking thing slightly different in some other convoluted over engineered system. But it looked like Git was going to be the forever winner, so I finally gave in and learned git through and through. Fuck now its dying!?

Re: Before GitHub

#173

Post by hdrz »

anotherevan wrote: post #68
wps wrote: post #21

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…

When I tried Fossil it had things weirdly separated. I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.

You can link the commit with the ticket by including its hash in the commit message, and then mark the ticket as fixed. See here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5761669/how-to-fix-a-tic...

Re: Before GitHub

#174

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

mtlynch wrote: post #171

> For a while, leaving GitHub felt like a symbolic move mostly made by smaller projects or by people with strong views about software freedom. I definitely cringed when Zig moved to Codeberg! But I now see people with real weight and signal talking about leaving GitHub. The most obvious one is Mitchell Hashimoto, who announced that Ghostty will move. I didn't understand this. I perceive the Zig project and Mitchell H…

It’s because the more visible people are, the stronger they have a pull on others. It’s not so much about person A vs person B but about what likelihood am I attributing to an individual or project to pull others along. For me projects moving off GitHub prior to Zig didn’t have that yet and even Zig itself didn’t feel that meaningful to me.

But you might think about it differently.

Re: Before GitHub

#175

Post by pidgeon_lover »

pidgeon_lover wrote: post #154
anotherevan wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I tried Fossil it had things weirdly separated. I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.

I wanted to host our company wiki in Fossil, but there is no way to import it because Fossil completely separates versioned project docs and the built-in Wiki function. Our git-based wiki could be imported into Fossil as "docs" but would not receive the nice formatting, GUI editor or dedicated page that the Wiki function does. There is also no benefit to manually converting it all to Fossil Wiki as some of our wiki e…

Found a link to the Fossil forum thread I opened about this very problem of the split between Fossil Wiki and docs:

https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forumpost/e19ed2bfea94fc91f544c...

Re: Before GitHub

#176

Post by vintermann »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #66
wps wrote: post #21

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…

> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git. I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred…

My first distributed VCS was Tom Lord's Arch. I may have started early, but it took me a long time to understand distributed version control, thanks in no small part to Tom Lord, lol. GNU.

Re: Before GitHub

#177

Post by theshrike79 »

mbreese wrote: post #11
simonw wrote: post #2

I absolutely loved Trac. Getting a Trac setup as step 1 in starting a new open source project was just an unbelievable amount of friction. Fun fact: Django is still running on Trac today, and has been for more than 20 years now: https://code.djangoproject.com/timeline (I was not involved in setting that one up, though it's possible I helped get the private Trac that pre-dated it running, I honestly can't remember!)

Trac was great. But, my first issue tracker was bugzilla. Setting that up was a bit of a pain, and it didn’t integrate well with anything, but it was very satisfying to see “Zarro Boogs”.

Bugzilla was too big/complex for pretty much every company I ever worked in :D

Trac was perfection. Self-hosted and just the right amount of features.

Re: Before GitHub

#178

Post by account42 »

kelnos wrote: post #56
prima-facie wrote: post #50

Smaller, decentralised forges actually make lots of sense from a digital sovereignty point of view. Over reliance on a single instance like GitHub is not healthy in the long run. The issue they would have to solve is federation.

Yeah, federation is really the sticky bit. It's very frustrating for people to have to create yet another account in order to file an issue or submit a pull request. And on top of that, spam is a huge issue. We've progressively further and further locked down new accounts on gitlab.xfce.org because the spam situation has just gotten so bad. We actually don't allow new "native" account creation at this point, and ask…

We already had federation for decentralized forges: Email

But that wasn't hip enough so everyone moved to GitHub.

Re: Before GitHub

#179

Post by ghc »

Things Fall Apart

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Re: Before GitHub

#180

Post by robertlagrant »

Chaosvex wrote: post #166
3form wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part. It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness fact…

Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.

It happened, but not as often as you'd think. In 2017 I was arguing with someone that the back button should work and URLs should be obvious in a fairly large project and they said "people are used to the back button not working - like a bank website".
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