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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

github.com

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#271

Post by [deleted] »

Philpax wrote: post #261
lpln3452 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#272

Post by dspillett »

jorvi wrote: post #262
monegator wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why github and not codeberg? badwidth? $$$ from microsoft? (traffic, free training for copilot, ..)

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

[not OP, but making educated guesses from what has already been said]

Given the post above, issues regarding self-hosting were at least part of the reason for the switch so a new self-hosted arrangement is unlikely to have been considered at all.

I don't know what the state of play is right now, but non-self-hosted GitLab has had some notable performance issues (and, less often IIRC, availability issues) in the past. This would be a concern for a popular project with many contributors, especially one with a codebase as large as Firefox.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#273

Post by [deleted] »

Philpax wrote: post #261
lpln3452 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#274

Post by elric »

IshKebab wrote: post #252
elric wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Jira and bugzilla are vastly superior to GH Issues.

Jira doesn't even deserve 10% of the hate it gets. Most of what makes Jira awful is the people using it. Bugzilla is getting a bit long in the tooth, but at least it's still free and open source.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#275

Post by lpln3452 »

Philpax wrote: post #261
lpln3452 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right. But as far as I remember, neither GitHub nor GitLab were really mainstream at the time.

I think the real competition began around the same time.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#276

Post by arp242 »

fhd2 wrote: post #226
berkes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In spirit, I agree. In practice, if you get dozens of PRs from people who clearly did it to bolster up their CV, because their professor asked them or something like that, it just takes a toll. It's more effort than writing the same code yourself. Of course I love to mentor people, if I have the capacity. But a good chunk of the GitHub contributions I've worked on were pretty careless, not even tested, that kind of t…

In my experience low-quality PRs aren't that common, but I do agree dealing with them is annoying. You can't just tell people to go away because they did spend their spare time on it. On the other hand it's also garbage. Sometimes it's garbage by people who really ought to know better. IMHO low-quality issues are the bigger problem by the way, a problem that existed well before GitHub.

But I just don't see how GitHub or a PR-style workflow relates. Like I said in my own reply: I think it's just because you'll receive less contributions overall. That's a completely fair and reasonable trade-off to make, as long as you realise that is the trade-off you're making.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#277

Post by dgb23 »

int_19h wrote: post #191
berkes wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not wrong, it's just based on the assumption that the projects wants contributors.

Quite obviously, any incidental friction makes this ever so slightly harder or less likely. Good contributions don't necessarily or only come from people who are already determined from the get go. Many might just want to dabble at first, or they are just casually browsing and see something that catches their attention.

Every projects needs some form of gatekeeping at some level. But it's unclear to me whether the solution is to avoid platforms with high visibility and tools that are very common and familiar. You probably need a more sophisticated and granular filter than that.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#278

Post by lpln3452 »

stevekemp wrote: post #249
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?

The number of emails I get "Your website is vulnerable to clickjacking attacks, PS. how much bounty have I earned?" suggests that there are many for whom a desire for literal rewards is their sole driver. Not to mention the AI-generated security "issues" that are reported against curl, for example, suggests there can indeed be negative value for reports, and contributions.

You're right. And that's not an issue with any particular platform, but with open source projects that accept issues and PR in general.

I don't think this is the place for a debate about the overall utility of open source.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#279

Post by dspillett »

lupusreal wrote: post #267
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 bu…

Moving the existing data over might not be a quick and easy task, so takes planning. Perhaps they intend to move over but didn't want to do everything in one go. Making many changes at the same time can be much more risky than a staged approach.

> are effectively gate keeping bug submission

Of course this could be a benefit… Have you seen the quality of bug reports coming from some people, even other devs? :-)

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#280

Post by immibis »

GuB-42 wrote: post #245
monegator wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why github and not codeberg? badwidth? $$$ from microsoft? (traffic, free training for copilot, ..)

I would say that using GitHub only for a public git repository is pretty good value. It is free and robust, and there is not much bad Microsoft can do to you. Because it is standard git, there is no lockdown. If they make a decision you don't like, migrating is just a git clone. As for the "training copilot" part, it is public, it doesn't change anything that Microsoft hosts the project on their own servers, they can…

I am banned from GitHub because I didn't want to give them my phone number. They ignored a legally binding GDPR request to delete all my data. I haven't got around to suing them yet.

Recently I also got "rate limited" after opening about three web pages.

Microsoft can do something to you, and that is to arbitrarily deny you access after you've built a dependence on it, and then make you jump through hoops to get access back.

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