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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#261

Post by Philpax »

lpln3452 wrote: post #256
Aachen wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

I believe GitLab post-dates GitHub, but I otherwise agree with the sentiment.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#262

Post by jorvi »

monegator wrote: post #204
jgraham wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, ..)

Why did you omit (self-hosted) gitlab..?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#263

Post by saghm »

notpushkin wrote: post #193
bayindirh wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's the CI/CD infrastructure. Pipeline and time requirement grows exponentially as the code supports more operating systems and configurations. I used a GitLab + GitLab Runner (docker) pipeline for my Ph.D. project which did some verification after every push (since the code was scientific), and even that took 10 minutes to complete even if it was pretty basic. Debian's some packages need more than three hou…

I think the CI/CD infra stays intact here though? (and even then, I imagine GitHub Actions bill would be enormous for a project like Firefox)

If the CI/CD is the most intensive part, it seems reasonable to move all of the other parts to a free provider to focus on the part that would be harder and more expensive to move. Even if they don't ever move any of the CI/CD over, I feel like I can understand the rationale for reducing the scope to just that rather than the source hosting. I've worked on plenty of projects with way less traffic than Firefox over the years that used GitHub for source hosting but alternate CI/CD; GitHub didn't even have built in CI for a while, so that was the only way to use it.

Given the frequency I see comments on this site about Mozilla trying to do far too much rather than just focusing their efforts on core stuff like Firefox, I'm honestly a bit surprised that there aren't more people agreeing with this decision. Even with the other issues I have with Mozilla lately (like the whole debacle over the privacy policy changes and the extremely bizarre follow-up about what the definition of "selling user data" is), I don't see it as hypocritical to use GitHub while maintaining a stance that open solutions are better than closed ones because I think trying to make an open browser in the current era is a large and complicated goal for it to be worth it to set a high bar for taking on additional fights. Insisting on spending effort on maintaining their own version control servers feels like a effort that they don't need to be taking on right now, and I'd much rather than Mozilla pick their battles carefully like this more often than less. Trying to fight for more open source hosting at this point is a large enough battle that maybe it would make more sense for a separate organization focused on that to be leading the front in that regard; providing an alternative to Chrome is a big enough struggle that it's not crazy for them to decide that GitHub's dominance has to be someone else's problem.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#265

Post by casenmgreen »

eru wrote: post #110
casenmgreen wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regard the Git docs as being fully equal to scientific Wikipedia articles. Everything is fully and completely explained, in terms which mean nothing.

I find both Wikipedia and Git docs typically more useful than this. Much more. (They ain't perfect, of course.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declination

"In astronomy, declination (abbreviated dec; symbol δ) is one of the two angles that locate a point on the celestial sphere in the equatorial coordinate system, the other being hour angle. The declination angle is measured north (positive) or south (negative) of the celestial equator, along the hour circle passing through the point in question."

Anyone who doesn't know what declination is, know from reading the introductory paragraph of this scientific Wikipedia article?

Anyone? no? :-)

I rest my case, m'lud.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#266

Post by TheDong »

bayindirh wrote: post #197
notpushkin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the CI/CD infra stays intact here though? (and even then, I imagine GitHub Actions bill would be enormous for a project like Firefox)

I think it can be done half/half. Do some, well-defined builds at GitHub and pull in for testing. Another comment tells that some users needed 10+ minutes to get a lock to pass their tests through CI, so maybe some sanity tests can be offloaded to GitHub actions. I'm not claiming that my comment was 100% accurate, but they plan to move some of the CI to GitHub, at least.

> but they plan to move some of the CI to GitHub, at least

Really? I've seen no indication of that anywhere, and I'd be amazed if they did.

They're not using github PRs, and github actions really fights against other development workflows... not to mention they already have invested a lot in TaskCluster, and specialized it to their needs.

Where are you getting that from?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#267

Post by lupusreal »

jgraham wrote: post #158

(I work at Mozilla, but not on the VCS tooling, or this transition) To give a bit of additional context here, since the link doesn't have any: The Firefox code has indeed recently moved from having its canonical home on mercurial at hg.mozilla.org to GitHub. This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking, phabricator for code review and landing, and our taskcluster system for CI. In the s…

> This only affects the code; bugzilla is still being used for issue tracking

Grim.

The best reason to be using github at all is to maximize the portion of your users who are comfortable submitting bug reports, as they already have an account and are familiar with how the platform works (due to network effects.) Projects which host code on github but chose not to take bug reports there are effectively gate keeping bug submission, by asking their users to jump through the hoops of finding the site, signing up for it, and learning to use a new interface. I've done this before, with Bugzilla and Firefox, to submit a bug report for an accessibility bug on MacOS and it was a pain in the ass that I put off for a long time before becoming annoyed enough to go through the process. (End result: the bug was confirmed but never fixed..)

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#268

Post by account-5 »

int_19h wrote: post #221
account-5 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I like fossil, it comes with most of the stuff I use built in, and you can deploy it as a website too. Use it for all of my personal projects and used it extensively for coursework at university.

The annoying thing about Fossil is that it doesn't let you squash commits, not even in your private branches - they have some kind of philosophical point about that. If you happen to agree with it, then yeah, it's great. If you like to commit quick and dirty and then tidy it up by squashing into logically complete and self-consistent commits, too bad.

I can certainly see the appeal of having neat commits but I tend not to worry about them. On a couple of occasions, with my university writing, having a immutable history helped me figure out, for example, how something had ended up in a final draft without citation. I'd deleted the citation which was a quick URL paste in a comment block in an earlier draft, and I'd never saved it to zotero. If I'd been able to tidy up my commits I'd likely have lost it completely.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#269

Post by sylware »

Bad Move.

github.com broke noscript/basic (x)html interop for most if not all core functions (which were working before). The issue system was broken not that long time ago.

And one of the projects which should worry about, even enforce, such interop, moving to microsoft github...

The internet world is a wild toxic beast.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#270

Post by TheDong »

arp242 wrote: post #201
struanr wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dealing with github is the boring and tedious thing, you have to run huge amount of proprietary javascript, keep up with their weird UX changes, start X11 to open a browser to render their html, overclock your CPU for a large PR review conversation to scroll without locking up your computer for minutes, constantly click "load more" since their webpage keeps hiding comments (while still lagging massively)...

Email is simple. It's just text, there's no weird javascript or html or lag. I don't have to open X11. I can just open mutt and read or write. I can type "git send-email". It's all open source, so I can read the code to understand it, and write scripting around it. It runs on any computer with ease. Even on a slow connection, it's quite speedy.

I totally agree with you about Phabricator though.

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