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FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

code.ffmpeg.org

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Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#261

Post by pmontra »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #257
pmontra wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FFmpeg seems to have dealt with that problem when they still were on github. This is the paragraph at the end of the readme: > Contributing > Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored. An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patc…

Why is it a major pain? Isn't it part of git workflow? Or is this because most developers got complacent in only using GitHub and similar?

Because only a few people used that. The usual workflow I saw before GitHub made PRs popular was:

one local repo per developer (or more repo if they wished so),

one central shared repo,

push a feature branch to the central repo,

somebody pulls the branch, reviews the changes and poss the merge them in the preproduction branch, or go back to the developer,

some test build deploy procedure,

acceptance tests, pass or go back to development,

merge in the production branch,

test build deploy.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#262

Post by krapp »

twelvedogs wrote: post #260
zakki wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So AI made human browsing inconvenient?

Yes it did and it's only going to get worse, ai crawlers are going to continue to make running a website more and more painful. Don't blame the anime girl, she's just trying to fight the bots

She's doing her best!

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#263

Post by RyJones »

BoredPositron wrote: post #244
reconvene1290 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all in the approach: start with a “thank you for the project”, and a “hope you don’t mind but I’ve corrected a few typos” and nobody will shout you down. Only go with a blank PR description and it’ll come across as arrogant and spammy.

There are people hunting double spaces or typos in code? For what contributor credits?

Yes. I have a lot of long, boring stories about exactly this.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#264

Post by skydhash »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
sergiotapia wrote: post #27

How exactly does mailing list contributions work? I've only ever seen a few urls of messages but they are extremely obtuse. You would need to click parent parent parent to get context on the message you originally read. I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.

The web view is meant to be the publicly searchable archive, not the primary interface. Developers are supposed to use an email client and git integrations. You can follow a number of different guides to get set up to contribute but it’s not actually easy to use the workflows. To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for…

> To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved.

If you’re using the git tool, it’s very easy to get it working and easier to use afterwards. It allows you to use you own environment and not someone else’ web app. If you’re the maintainer, people send you patch and you can script out the review phase. If you’re a contributor, it’s actually a few command to send a patch to anyone. And learning how to cleanup your commits is always good.

I can understand the pain if your only email account is gmail. But there are good smtp providers out there.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#265

Post by Macha »

bakugo wrote: post #184
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #162

The comments on this page are a complete cesspool. A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more. Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at t…

> A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it) If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equa…

Do these same people refuse to use Go because the homepage has a gopher mascot that could be straight from western children's cartoon courage the cowardly dog on the homepage?

FreeBSD because of the cartoon devil? Bash because of the GNU goat with the facial expression that could be read as smug or stoned? Google's logo is some printed characters in primary colours, is that too childish?

Nah, that people have such a visceral reaction to the anime girl is not just because it's "childish" as so much else of our industry is "childish" and passes without comment, or sometimes even causes criticism when it gets taken away for blandness (see all the complaints when projects redesign their logos to Helvetica work marks)

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#266

Post by rs186 »

Aurornis wrote: post #163
rs186 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish a certain open source project would take notice of the reasoning here...

The friction and overhead of mailing list development is seen as a feature, not a bug, for certain devs who prefer an exclusive environment. Moving to a modern platform with real collaborative development features is a mature move.

I have seen people arguing "mailing patches is better than github" more than once here on HN.

I am like, whatever.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#267

Post by omnimus »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #220
jraph wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The comments on this page are a complete cesspool. I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards. I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for. Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases…

I do have a sense of unease about most smaller hosting services and self-hosting solutions, in that I don't trust them to stay up in the long term, once no one is left to care about projects on them, or at least not about the old versions. (This isn't so big an issue for something as big as FFmpeg, but I'm talking about the general case.) Just try to download some old version of a minor library from the late 90s or e…

I think it is OK that repos and content in general disappear. It is healthy. If somebody is caring about hosting the thing it most likely means it is healthy project. If not you shouldn't probably be using it.

This obsession with saving everything forever leads to information overload. In 20 years the github namespaces will be so full that finding good name for a project will be impossible. People often bring up social media but i think that's even worse. If you like some of photos just keep and save them yourself. I don't think it's healthy to be randomly reminded (what facebook does) about what somebody was doing 8 years ago on this day. People are unable to forget and forgive. We should allow for this to happen automatically like our memories.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#268

Post by cyphar »

BoredPositron wrote: post #244
reconvene1290 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all in the approach: start with a “thank you for the project”, and a “hope you don’t mind but I’ve corrected a few typos” and nobody will shout you down. Only go with a blank PR description and it’ll come across as arrogant and spammy.

There are people hunting double spaces or typos in code? For what contributor credits?

As a maintainer of a few open source projects, yes it happens a lot.

I want to believe some people just want to send small patches to projects when they notice something (I tend to do the same for projects I use) but my impression is a lot of them do it so that it shows up as "contributions" on the GitHub profile which they can then add to their resume (or get some other kind of street cred).

At least typos are actual fixes, far more often you get complete spam (people copy-pasting the contents of PRs and issues from 5 years ago, sending bizzare pull requests with hundred of commits as a merge commit, leaving cryptic comments on 5 year old commits). The spam reporting process on GitHub is kind of annoying to go through, but I trudge through it every time we get one of these PRs. There was one year of Hacktoberfest where some streamer told people that if they just spammed projects with 5 PRs they would get a free shirt and every open source project was DoSed by hundreds of garbage PRs made by accounts created the same day.

Personally as a maintainer, if someone is fixing one typo in order to "get started" contributing to a project I would prefer that they go through and check for any other instances of typos in the project to make a more complete fix (or even better, add a CI job that runs codespell or similar spell checkers). That feels more like someone actually interested in fixing something about the project, as opposed to sending a one-line drive-by patch to pad their resume. (I'm still happy to take the patch of course!)

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#269

Post by akk0 »

mpalmer wrote: post #60

With the calm, respectful understanding that everything is subjective and there's no accounting for taste - and in my personal capacity - I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site. With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Clo…

You would be horrified to spend any time in Japan then, where such characters are used in official capacity for anything from shops to corporations to government agencies, police stations and street signs.

It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.

> very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)

Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#270

Post by l0b0 »

cyberpunk wrote: post #189
lotyrin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Issue with GitLab is their "Enterprise" maximalist feature set. Seems like they want to be the solution for the entire SDLC for every conceivable team. I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish th…

A decade out? They do Code, Artifacts and CI basically that all works. What missing sdlc features are going to take them a decade to write?

Just about every week I find "new" GitLab bugs which, after a quick search, turn out to be 5+ years old, with lots of community engagement, but seemingly zero movement from GitLab itself. I wonder what GitLab devs actually work on, because none of the new features in the last couple of years seem as impactful as fixing one of those bugs would be. (I still prefer it to GitHub, especially the CI model.)
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