221–230 of 255 posts
The link leads to a blog post saying how they mercifully unblocked the users in Iran, but that was some time after they first suddenly blocked those users without any recourse and any way to even download their data and private repositories hosted there, without any advance warning…
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…
Yes, I am someone who, when my branch code-wise is ready to be merged, I will still take however long it needs to clean the history into a coherent, bisectable set of patches.
To be fair, Fossil is kinda cool in many ways, but it's a downgrade for my dev UX. Also the configuration interface for access controls and suchlike to the repo server, issue tracker, etc. is... eccentric. I wouldn't be surprised to find some incorrectly/unsafely configured repos in the wild.
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BitTorrent has supported trackerless torrents for twenty entire years :p https://github.com/sparkslabs/kamaelia/blob/master/Sketches/...
Torrent doesn't magically find peers, even with DHT the torrent files have seed nodes baked in. A middelman required for both the centralized trackers and trackerless torrents.
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Their own example is an example of this. I've heard the name Fabrice Bellard but don't know who he is and don't know why I'd care, but Guido is a well-known name among python users and does hold weight. Looking up what Bellard is known for, I kind of expect this to be true of more people than not.
You don't care about the man, myth, and excellence himself who has created FFmpeg and QEMU, two of the most influential pieces of software ever made?
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The problem is GitHub spends on the order of $100m/year on providing free CI. Nobody else can compete with that. It's possible they could make it shit enough that a large number of projects will say "screw this we'll just pay for CI", but people really like free (and easy!) things so I think we are a long way from that point.
"Nobody else can compete with that" My laptop is on all the time, make a WASM slave and thousands of developers can give their CPU/Memory/Disk for build slaves. Like bitcoin mining, there could be some competition between 3 parallel builds to pick the winner if the output is the same.
My theory is that we waste lots of resources on CI because it's invisible. If you can hear your fans spin up you might try to optimize more, even if the financial cost is still negligible. Back when every developer built the software and ran the tests on their own machine, slow-building projects were the exception not the norm. There was also a much faster feedback cycle for changes to the build and test processes.
Tooling around a self-hosted CI workflow really needs some work to make it as convenient as even the very difficult GitHub Actions.
> 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…
I agree with you. But I do see one crucial difference between the Zig and Ghostty announcements, namely that Ghostty did it purely for service degradation reasons while Zig did also mention ideological reasons such as GitHub’s relationship with ICE and their push for AI. Those were, naturally, much discussed points on HN. I can’t help but wonder if that contributed to the “cringing”.
If it wasn't for GitHub self-hosting and open-source development would be much more difficult. Like the article says open-source development was obviously still happening but it was a smaller space. I appreciate how many apps I've interacted with because of GitHub like OpenGOAL, IINA, and Ghostty along with the services running on my servers at home like Immich, Glance, Filebrowser, and audiobookshelf. I even used Gi…
A bigger space isn't necessarily a better one if it's flooded by low-quality content. Does a one-person project on GitHub have any advantage over one that uses a local git repo? I don't think so. It has a disadvantage because you're dependent on GitHub, and even worse, that first-year student learning development now thinks GitHub is an integral part of development.
If projects had to start with a local git repository and a local process, before being able to migrate to GitHub upon gaining minimal notability, developers would be more accustomed to the idea that a project isn't its hosting and that platforms like GitHub are optional. I think this would encourage more local-first attitudes instead of centralization, and that would be good. It wouldn't be seen as weird to send someone a zip file of the thing you're working on.
Plus (only tangentially related) imagine where the JavaScript ecosystem would be if packages like is-array and left-pad couldn't get accepted to npm.
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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…
I really like the idea of distributed forges, but am not familiar with viable solutions for federation. Are there good options available right now? Or at least a not-terrible option? (Edit: Turns out there’s a very obvious and widely used option. git format-patch + git send-email is used to develop major open source software such as Linux, GCC, and Git itself.)
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…
Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…
being a software project makes the environmental connotation less important (using a different project would also cost server energy etc...) so its more clearly tongue in cheek
And, at the same time, we have these AI tools that make it super easy to roll your own version of something. Feels like there's a big push from both sides to start reducing external dependencies.