Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#251

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC

fhd2 wrote: post #170

floriangosse wrote: post #83

I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower. I think you can dis…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#252

Post by IshKebab » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC

elric wrote: post #222

IshKebab wrote: post #25

Not for PRs or issues though which are arguably the biggest reasons to use GitHub. Still this is definitely an improvement.

GitHub's issue tracker is easily the worst issue tracker I've ever used. It's at the same time incredibly limited in features, but somehow hard to navigate. As for PRs: I'm sure Mozilla welcome contributions, but accepting GitHub PRs is going to be a recipe for thousands of low-value drive-by commits, which will require a lot of triage.

Count yourself lucky you haven't had to use Jira! Or bugzilla for that matter.

I agree it is rather basic but I don't see how it's hard to navigate.

> accepting GitHub PRs is going to be a recipe for thousands of low-value drive-by commits, which will require a lot of triage.

I don't think that really happens based on what I've seen of other huge projects on GitHub.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#253

Post by cubefox » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

I assume this is now one of the largest (lines of code) projects on GitHub.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#254

Post by [deleted] » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #241

lpln3452 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contribution isn’t driven by a desire for rewards, but by goodwill. Friction only gets in the way. If the friction is worth it, fine - but what exactly is being lost by moving the repository to GitHub?

> what exactly is being lost by moving the repository to GitHub? Alternatives to github We lament Google's browser engine monopoly, but putting the vast majority of open source projects on github is just the expected course to take. I guess we'll repeat history once microsoft decides to set in the enshittification, maybe one day mobile OSes replace Windows and they're strapped for cash, who knows, but it's a centrali…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#255

Post by groestl » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

baq wrote: post #86

groestl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how are we suppose to solve this problem? By creating distributed versions of every possible component of every piece of software? Seems unrealistic. That's how we started out.

Maybe that's the reason everything tends to get centralized.

It's an emergent phenomenon, it requires less energy expenditure overall. It's also the way of the Dodo.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#256

Post by lpln3452 » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #241

lpln3452 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contribution isn’t driven by a desire for rewards, but by goodwill. Friction only gets in the way. If the friction is worth it, fine - but what exactly is being lost by moving the repository to GitHub?

> what exactly is being lost by moving the repository to GitHub? Alternatives to github We lament Google's browser engine monopoly, but putting the vast majority of open source projects on github is just the expected course to take. I guess we'll repeat history once microsoft decides to set in the enshittification, maybe one day mobile OSes replace Windows and they're strapped for cash, who knows, but it's a centrali…

Did you ever use the alternatives before GitHub took off?

GitLab? It was awful. Slow, and paying for that kind of experience felt like a bad joke. It's much better now but it was borderline unusable back in the day.

Or SourceForge, before Git was mainstream? Also terrible.

GitHub succeeded because it quickly established itself as a decent way to host Git - not because it was exceptional, but because the competition had abysmal UX.

Unlike other lock-in-prone services, moving a Git project is trivial. If GitHub loses its advantages due to enshittification, you just move. Case in point: Mozilla hopping on and off GitHub, as this article shows.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#257

Post by cookiengineer » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:17 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #12

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.

To be fair: Linus didn't predict how painful email is in 2025. Self hosting email is a useless attempt if 99% of your emails land in spam anyways, and only spammer emails land in your inbox because they pay for azure or google business accounts.

The general issue that git has is making them interact with each other, I would love for git to get distributed issues, and a nice client UI that is actually graphical and usable by non-terminal users.

There were some attempts to make this distributed and discoverable via similar seed architectures like a DHT. For example, radicle comes to mind.

But staying in sync with hundreds of remotes and hundreds of branches is generally not what git is good at. All UIs aren't made for this.

I'm pointing this out because I am still trying to build a UI for this [1] which turned out to be much more painful than expected initially.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/git-evac

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#258

Post by NexRebular » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:18 AM UTC

1wd wrote: post #211

NexRebular wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

heptapod is GitLab with Mercurial support.

Which I used until they stopped releasing prebuilt packages without subscription.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#259

Post by prepend » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

Miaourt wrote: post #248

Macha wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure codeberg has managed two 9s of uptime while I've been using it. Manageable when it's just a public mirror for occasional publishing of my small hobby projects, but I wouldn't recommend it for Firefox sized projects

Maybe if Mozilla gave one hundredth of their CEO's salary in donation to Codeberg they would be more than happy and able to scale to nine nine :p

Maybe. Maybe not. If I was the person responsible for the code, I wouldn’t want to gamble on them becoming good enough for me to use.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#260

Post by bayindirh » Tue, May 13, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

tempaccount420 wrote: post #233

bayindirh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a guess and I never claimed it was 100% correct, and I'm happy to stand corrected. No hard feelings there.

"I guess..." != "I'm guessing..."

That's new to me. Can you expand on that a little?