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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#311

Post by elric »

IshKebab wrote: post #304
elric wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Jira and bugzilla are vastly superior to GH Issues. I think you're in the tiny minority with that opinion. > Most of what makes Jira awful is the people using it. Not even close. Yes, people aren't good at administering it, but there are soooo many reasons that it's shit apart from that. Not least the hilarious slowness. Jira Cloud is so slow that not even Atlassian use it. Also I don't think you can just say "you'…

> I think you're in the tiny minority with that opinion.

I'm not. The whole "I hate Jira thing" is a meme among a very vocal minority of tech enthusiasts. They don't have tens of millions of users because Jira is awful. The reason why so many people cry about it (apart from the meme-factor) is that people conflate Jira with their team's failed approach at scrum.

Sure, it has rough edges, and sure, Atlassian as a company sucks. I have a bug report open on their Jira for some 20 years and I don't think it will ever get fixed. And yes, Jira Cloud is very slow, it's ridiculous. And in spite of that, GH Issues is still objectively worse. It's so far behind in terms of features that it isn't even a fair comparison.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#312

Post by AlienRobot »

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…

If you really want bug reports just make it a single form without the need to create an account. Github, Gitlab, etc., is a wall for 99% of web browser users.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#313

Post by baobun »

immibis wrote: post #280
GuB-42 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acce…

At least you had the choice. Many potential contributors live in countries to which GitHub does not support SMS verification but still requires it. So there's a second tier of effectively blocked countries besides the officially sanctioned ones.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#314

Post by noobermin »

I guess the dream is dead. Even in open source, we have consolidation with no real hard monetary markets involved.

EDIT: skimming these comments, I like how none of the top comments are talking about the bigger story here which is the move away from mercurial to git and instead everyone is focusing on github itself. This has essentially sealed hg away to obscurity forever. Do people not realise git is a program that runs on your computer and github is just a service that uses git? May be this is an old man gripe at this point but I'm surprised at the lack of technical discussion around this.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#316

Post by noobermin »

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…

I get moving to Github being a change but I'd imagine the real story is the move from mercurial to git, although I'd guess the the social considerations might have influenced the technical decisions.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#317

Post by baobun »

lpln3452 wrote: post #182
fhd2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

> but what exactly is being lost by moving the repository to GitHub?

Contributors who can't use GitHub because either 1) they are fresh and can't activate a new account 2) their old grandfathered account is no longer usable or 3) their old account id doxxed and they can no longer safely contribute under the old identity.

Once you trigger phone-number verification requirement your account is globally shadowbanned and support blocked pending SMS code verification. Aside from the privacy issue it's completely blocking people in countries to which GitHub won't even try to SMS/call.

Remember that registering a second account would be violating GitHub ToS.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#318

Post by amanda99 »

elric wrote: post #210
arp242 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent quite some time writing a patch for FreeBSD and Linux a few months ago, including getting to grips with their contribution process. Both patches have been ignored thus far. That's okay, I understand limited resources etc. etc. Will they ever be merged? I don't know. Maybe not. I'm okay with all of this, it's not a complaint. It's how open source works sometimes. But it also means all that time I spent figurin…

In all likelihood, if the patch had been a pull request, the pull request would have been ignored as well. Much like the thousands of pull requests that are often ignored by various larger open source projects. Ain't nobody got time to triage drive-by pull requests from unknown contributors, especially on large projects. There's no easy solution. Much like the recent curl security kerfuffle, the signal:noise ratio is…

I think the OP's point here was that if it's a PR and it's ignored: you spent a bunch of time writing a PR (which may or may not have been valuable to you, e.g. if you maintain a fork now). On the other hand, if it was an esoteric contribution process, you spent a lot of time figuring out how to get the patch in there, but that obviously has 0 value outside contributing within that particular open source project.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#319

Post by JeremyNT »

fguerraz wrote: post #302
emigre wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the context. IMHO I don't think Mozilla should have decided to move to a closed-source platform owned by Microsoft.

Thanks to the decentralised nature of git, this should matter only moderately.

Exactly, now they have the best of both worlds: let Microsoft host the code using a standard VCS, but avoid lock in by continuing to use their own issue tracker and project management software.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#320

Post by baobun »

antalis wrote: post #95

Firefox Mobile (Fenix) had just moved to Mozilla's Mercurial mozilla-central repository after using GitHub including for issues. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcom... Now, both the desktop and the mobile version will be on Github, and the "issues" will stay on Bugzilla. This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system. As a former Firefox an…

> This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system.

The source browsing has detoriated severely relatively recently IME, to the point where i can't be called "good" anymore.

It now loads asynchronously (requiring js) and lazily, randomly breaks on shaky connections and in-page search is broken.

The recent issues/PRs revamp is also a pretty major step back. Try searching in PRs with all uBlock Origin lists enabled.

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