SDL Moves to GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#201

Post by cdmckay » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:26 AM UTC

hyperion2010 wrote: post #107

zokier wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is als…

For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent l…

Can you give some examples of the fantastic failures?

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#202

Post by Jasper_ » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #185

Jasper_ wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're a kid, tinkering is exciting. When you turn 30, you just want your software and tools to work. Janitoring your computer is not fun when it's in the way of your actual day job.

My worry is that this has bad long term implications. Modern computing environments aren't very good, and most of the core abstractions haven't changed / improved since the 80s. Those core abstractions have so much stuff built on top of them now that they're very difficult to change. You used to be able to make a usable operating system in a month or two if you knew what you were doing. Now a simple web browser takes…

> So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[1]?

No, probably not, as much as I would love to, because there are still people who believe that POSIX's design ideals are to be aspired to, even as the world has aged heavily around them. The POSIX model and philosophies are very outdated, but as long as people see value in the nonsense that is "everything is a file" (except for all of the ones that you can only ioctl to) or "do one thing and do it well" (except text parsing, that famously secure and not at all haunted thing apparently belongs in every app), we won't see big shifts in production OS architecture. Maybe research kernels, but those don't run PostgreSQL installs.

I don't think that has anything to do with this complacency, however.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#203

Post by sofixa » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:29 AM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #132

rockooooo wrote: post #2

"So in moving it to GitHub, we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day. And I grew up during the heydey of the Free Software Foundation, so I know this is a trap, but I’m tired and don’t have the energy to be a server admin for something that’s held together with scotch tape and prayers when I’m really supposed to be writing OpenGL code." This…

Depends on the specific software. Plenty of Free and Open Source software 'just works' just about perfectly. Firefox and Notepad++ for instance. In the specific instance of GitHub, I have to agree it's nicer and better polished than the alternatives, but I'd also say the Free Software alternatives (GitLab, SourceHut, etc) are catching up, and are already usable. Hosting your own GitLab instance gives you a far nicer…

I wouldn't say GitHub is nicer or more polished than GitLab. Both have similar feature set ( GitHub did well to catch up after years of stagnating, with Actions, docker/package repositories, etc) even if GitLab still has an advantage there, good ecosystems ( GitHub has more tools integrating with it than GitLab), and both work and are fully polished.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#204

Post by brigandish » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #168

lazypenguin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. I spent a significant amount of time playing around with servers and never developed "mastery". I think that server administration has gotten more complex and the tools haven't changed much to help. A simple example is setting up an HTTPS/TLS/SSL endpoint. In the past, you just ran the HTTP server and you were off. Now there's a whole load of extra ceremony to setup a CA and sign your own cert or downl…

If anything TLS has gotten easier since Lets Encrypt came along. You just install one of the clients for it, configure a domain and periodic renewal and you're done.

For a public facing computer, yes, for a private one, not so much[1].

I use mkcert[2] for this but it's still fiddly.

[1] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/certificates-for-localhost/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#205

Post by sofixa » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #156

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder why they did not pick GitLab since it is significantly better for FOSS ideals and has the same niceness of GitHub

Sorry but GitLab is utterly horrendous from a developer's perspective compared to GitHub. It's massive enterprise bloatware (like most Atlassian products for example) that is nigh unusable without an entire team of people to manage it. My company uses it and it causes me problems almost every other day. Things that should "just work" never do. Further when something gets reported to GitLab they automatically close ol…

I have the exact opposite experience, and it just works in ~90% of the cases, ~5% being behind a feature gate, 4% behind a paid tier, and 4% bugs.

It's easy to manage either via Helm or omnibus packages, and does a ton of things well enough. It still has significantly more features than GitHub.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#206

Post by smarx007 » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:46 AM UTC

smarx007 wrote: post #131

ta988 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For academics, it take a few minutes to get a github academic account. For gitlab you have to write justifications and wait and wait, to maybe get it...

Yep, our university has GH Enterprise and refuses to “procure” (as it requires the central body to agree to the ToS) free Gitlab for academia as “another” git solution. Our project team on Gitlab cannot get into that program for academics because they only let one application per institution. I understand each side but still don’t see how we can solve this problem. Would love to find a way!

Update: seems like Gitlab removed the requirement of having one application per institution from https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/, I just applied again.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#207

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:49 AM UTC

moonchild wrote: post #198

pjmlp wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I worry - will we ever replace the crufty parts of POSIX[ For sure, many of us don't use OS where POSIX has any relevant meaning.

The majority of the world is on linux. A small remaining fraction is on windows, where there is no less cruft. Yes, there are embedded OSes (l4); ibm i&z; etc. (L4 and ibm i are actually super cool.) But those are tiny drops in the bucket and aren't replacing linux any time soon.

What world?

ChromeOS and Android? POSIX APIs are not exposed to app developers.

Cloud? Language runtimes and serveless make POSIX irrelevant.

IoT? Linux is largely irrelevant in the world of real time OSes and bare metal language runtimes.

Desktop? How is that 1% going?

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#208

Post by pjmlp » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:50 AM UTC

fartcannon wrote: post #195

pjmlp wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a money in the bank at the end of the month, regardless of the UI/UX.

It might? It might also not have money in the bank? Is that relevant? Bad UX is subjective. Money doesn't change that.

It changes where most people are willing to spend their skills.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#209

Post by jillesvangurp » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 8:57 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #44

This is poignant for me, for reasons that have nothing to do with the technical merits of git vs mercurial, or github/Microsoft specifically as a company. > It’s not just Bugzilla. It’s the wiki, the mailing lists, the quaint little Mercurial web interface. The little open source thing that we rely on but no one is working on and probably has security holes in it. It’s all janky, and it causes developer friction. It…

You can self host Gitlabs. I did that a few years back and it's quite nice. It has a similar feature set to Github. Gitlab these days is a perfectly good alternative and it's popular as well though not nearly as popular as Github.

Self hosted gitlab is nice, until you realize that you can get the same functionality for free from Github and any second of devops spent on your self hosted thing is technically just money down the drain. In our case, I got a little worried about our flaky backups and the fact we were using a single node vm in AWS to host this. The fix would have been increasing cost by spending on more vms and devops. Instead, we switched to Github. And that was before they had free plans with unlimited repositories and developers. We actually paid for it and saved money (not to mention stress). These days it's a no-brainer because at 0$ per month you get source hosting, CI via github actions, and all the rest. I'd actually gladly pay for it before considering other options. But it seems MS has decided that's not worth the effort.

The thing with OSS is that it's not the world you want but the world we all build together. Plenty of people that want stuff but rarely enough that go out there and actually build it, persist with building it, find the right people to collaborate with to get things done, and then collectively deliver results. That takes a platform to collaborate on and for better or worse that platform is Github and git.

Mercurial just never got of the ground as a mainstream solution and fell behind as Git got more popular. It had a shot as long as it was the third option (along with subversion and git) on Sourceforge before Github was a thing. But then Github happened and offered a nice UI for pull requests and that turned out to have been the killer feature developers wanted and needed.

Re: SDL Moves to GitHub

#210

Post by rleigh » Wed, Feb 10, 2021, 9:23 AM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #69

xyst wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The influence of a single linux kernel developer is the reason it's adoption is so high - Linus Torvalds.

Eh, that's a bit reductionist. Git was developed by Tovalds because BitKeeper had shortcomings he kept grating against, and it really needed to be a DVCS for kernel development. So he created something that fit the kernel development needs well, and it happened to also fit the needs of other companies as well. That it was free and open source was icing on the cake. That Torvalds created it just meant that there was a…

As you say, it can't be understated just how much of a conceptual leap git was.

It wasn't developed in a vacuum. And there were several interesting distributed open source version control systems around at the time. After moving on from CVS and Subversion, I tried using Arch (tla) for a project. It was interesting, but still tied to the old way of thinking of version control as a series of deltas, both in its conceptual model and in its storage implementation. In fact, its storage was a tarball of a "base revision" plus a series of patches. Checking out a branch meant unpacking the tarball and applying patches in sequence. It was distributed, and elegant in its own way, but it didn't make the conceptual leap which Linus took with git.

In contrast, the hash-based blob/tree/commit model of git was groundbreaking. The storage doesn't use deltas (except as an implementation detail--as an optimisation in pack files). Deltas are computed on demand. Operations on and synchronising between blob stores is simple and fast. That one change is what made git revolutionary. It opened the door for doing so much more with the version control system.

Still, others took that step around the same time, and the git interface is not what one would call intuitive. But for various reasons it had the momentum and took the crown. It's not perfect, but it's still an absolutely superb tool.