211–220 of 481 posts
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.
It really is a tragedy that git monoculture is winning over Mercurial, Fossil and other better designed alternatives. Don't even have a nice github-like service for Mercurial anymore as Bitbucket decided to give up.
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Although I have certainly created pull requests before that have been ignored so not sure GitHub solves this problem.
GitHub PRs don't solve anything about that, but I wouldn't have to spend (waste) time figuring out the contribution process. At least I learned a few things writing the patches. I learned nothing of value dealing with git email or Phabricator. It's just work of the boring and tedious kind.
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People have forgotten just how bad centralised version control was in 2005. If you weren't connected to the internet, you couldn't do a thing. You couldn't checkout. You couldn't commit. You could create branches. The only thing on your computer was whatever you checked out last time you were connected to the server. People talk about SVN, but it wasn't that common in 2005. None of the project hosting platforms (like…
Pull requests aren’t part of git. They are a feature of one implementation.
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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.
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Again, I can only comment from the perspective of a user; I haven't worked on the VCS infrastructure. The obvious generic challenges are availability and security: Firefox has contributors around the globe and if the VCS server goes down then it's hard to get work done (yes, you can work locally, but you can't land patches or ship fixes to users). Firefox is also a pretty high value target, and an attacker with acces…
why github and not codeberg? badwidth? $$$ from microsoft? (traffic, free training for copilot, ..)
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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.
How can you judge the quality of people who don't contribute? They don't contribute, so what's there to judge?
A lot more contributions on GH, but the majority of them ignored guidelines and/or had low code quality and attention to detail. Just my anecdotal experience of course.
On one hand, centralization at a commercial provider isn't great. On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.
Surely most open source projects have a link to their source code? Whether it's github, gitlab, sourcehut, or anything else?
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As for European specifically, maybe the commenter was talking about data protection laws. If not, maybe (in many European countries at the moment) less national or business background of ruthlessness. I was thinking something different: I wonder whether Mozilla considered GitLab or Codeberg, which are the other two I know that are popular with open source projects that don't trust GitHub since it sold out to Microsof…
Given the Mozilla direction lately, the last thing they want is good data protection laws.
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People have forgotten just how bad centralised version control was in 2005. If you weren't connected to the internet, you couldn't do a thing. You couldn't checkout. You couldn't commit. You could create branches. The only thing on your computer was whatever you checked out last time you were connected to the server. People talk about SVN, but it wasn't that common in 2005. None of the project hosting platforms (like…
Pull requests aren’t part of git. They are a feature of one implementation.
And it was actually part of git. Even back in 2005, git included a script git request pull that generated these pull request emails. I'm pretty sure people called these emails "pull requests" before GitHub came along.
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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…
This is just blatantly wrong on so many levels. Proposed contributions can in fact have negative value, if the contributor implements some feature or bug fix in a way that makes it more difficult to maintain in the long term or introduces bugs in other code. And even if such contribution is ultimately rejected, someone knowledgeable has to spend time and effort reviewing such code first - time and effort that could h…