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Before GitHub

lucumr.pocoo.org

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21–30 of 255 posts

Re: Before GitHub

#21

Post by wps »

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 easily allows me to get right back into the context of a project, niche details and agreements had with a client, etc. No need to pollute the codebase or gather together a million emails or notetaking software just to get back up to speed.

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.

Re: Before GitHub

#22

Post by basilgohar »

Lammy wrote: post #9

> But maybe the most underappreciated thing GitHub did was archival work: GitHub became a library. It became an index of a huge part of the software commons because even abandoned projects remained findable. I think this is a bad thing actually. Having something that's centralized but helpful-99%-of-the-time atrophies our collective archival skills. If everything had to be seeded by someone to keep it alive, everyone…

Archival is easy but copyright and IP law gets in the way. If we removed obstacles to making information accessible, it would lead to less concentration of power.

Re: Before GitHub

#23

Post by pietervdvn »

flaburgan wrote: post #15

What we need is gitlab to finally integrate ActiviyPub so we can fork, comment, open merge request on all gitlab instances from our personal instance. Git is already decentralized, this isn't that hard to do.

Forgejo is slowly working on federation

Re: Before GitHub

#25

Post by alastairp »

> What GitHub Gave Us

To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue tracking(?), etc, etc...). It felt like the mental load of "oh this is just a quick thing" was a lot easier with github.

> It gave projects issue trackers, pull requests, release pages, wikis, organization pages, API access, webhooks, and later CI.

Although it didn't give us this all at once. I still remember when we created a new user account in order to simulate an organisation, before they existed. I distinctly recall discussing with friends if we wanted to set up a bug tracker software for our project with the assumption that "GitHub will probably release one in a few months anyway". In the end we just kept a text file committed in the repository. Issues were announced a few months later.

Re: Before GitHub

#27

Post by j16sdiz »

einpoklum wrote: post #4

> Before GitHub, Open Source was a much smaller world. Not that much smaller right-before GitHub and right-after it became available. > but in the number of projects most of us could realistically depend on. Most FOSS I realistically depend on I don't obtain from GitHub actually. > There were well-known projects, maintained over long periods of time by a comparatively small number of people. There were even more not-…

back in the day, I work in a web hosting company.

I know every name on mysql devel team.

The only reason i subscribe that mail list is: i reported some bugs and need to follows the release.

Signal to noise ratio on those mailing list was high. I can't say the same for github or discord

Re: Before GitHub

#28

Post by kkfx »

Radicle is a good answer, coupled with a reborn Usenet, maybe Nostr. We have like never before the ability to communicate and cooperate yet most fails to understand and implement that.

Nearly any of us could run an XMPP/Matrix server and federate with friends or Nostr/{0xchat,whitenoise}, all with audio, video, text, file exchange etc, yet less than 1% do that.

Simply people, techies as well, have forgot the meaning of personal ownership and therefore are owned by someone else.

Re: Before GitHub

#29

Post by conartist6 »

I'm working pretty hard on building what comes after Github, but I'm going full-tilt boogie and trying to also work out what comes after Git.

I'd love to have a longer conversation with you about how we can seed a better system, because on the off chance I'm successful I have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix past mistakes.

Re: Before GitHub

#30

Post by drbig »

Great through-history write-up! Thank you.

> That is one of the great ironies of modern Open Source. The distributed version control system won, and then the world standardized on one enormous centralized service for hosting it.

Cycles everywhere indeed. Perhaps we should ->

> GitHub wrote a remarkable chapter of Open Source, and if that chapter is ending, the next one should learn from it and also from what came before.

Indeed! Try to learn from the inevitable iterations to make the next instance at least that slightly better.

... Where the stuff meets the metastuff it seems all works under very similar forces. My thinking is step-by-step - it works on the individual level, and it scales up.

Day to day is step by step and a step today funds the step tomorrow.

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