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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#331

Post by encom »

Handler9246 wrote: post #293
Philpax wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can say that I've chosen not to bother when submitting a fix requires me to stray away from GitHub, and doubly so when it doesn't use a PR/MR workflow. There are only so many hours in the day, and I don't have the patience to deal with unconventional workflows when there are other things I could be doing with my time. For projects that I'd be interested in being a long-term contributor to, this is obviously differe…

Sad we're at a stage where people don't contribute to free software projects because the service it's hosted on isn't the proprietary, corporate giant. "Friction in signing up" being a big part for you is also weird, considering basically all free software GitHub alternatives (Gitea, GitLab, Forgejo) support SSO via GitHub.

Requiring a Microsoft account, and handing over my phone number is extreme friction in my book.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#332

Post by moralestapia »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #23
moralestapia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain?

Linus Torvalds invented git, which is what's used by GitHub and others like gitlab.

I know that, I just didn't get this part "and 20 years later we all use it to store our code in a single place".

And as I can see here, no one else did ...

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#333

Post by moralestapia »

joha4270 wrote: post #24
moralestapia wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain?

If GitHub went down, how much would it impact the open source world? Sure, there would be local copies everywhere, but for a distribution version control system, it's pretty centralized at GitHub

>for a distribution version control system, it's pretty centralized at GitHub

This is what I don't get ... what is the alternative to GitHub?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#334

Post by lupusreal »

dspillett wrote: post #279
lupusreal wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? :-)

I've been on the front line of user bug reports for much of my career, so I definitely know what it's like. I also have very little sympathy for the complaints. Devs want to only take bug reports from other devs, and more so, only experienced devs, and more so, only devs specifically with experience with that specific project... That's great for the short term interests of the devs but not for the long term prospects of the project.

It's really not that hard to sort through user bug reports, find and categorize the ones that are actionable and respond with boilerplate requests for more information to the rest. It's not super enjoyable, it's work, but it's absolutely manageable and devs need to keep some perspective when they complain about it. I think maybe a mandatory part of every CS education should be an internship in messy and difficult manual labor so that devs have some real context about what it means for a job to be unpleasant.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#335

Post by twic »

TheDong wrote: post #270
arp242 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not true that you need to start X11. GitHub's UI renders pretty well under Wayland.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#336

Post by lupusreal »

matkoniecz wrote: post #286
lupusreal wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I suspect that Firefox is not bottlenecked on number of bug reports they got.

Many times I have encountered Firefox bugs that either haven't been reported, or which bugzilla's shit search makes too hard for me to find. Usually that's where I give up because it's a pain in the ass to enter reports in bugzilla, the whole process seems intended to scare off anybody not in the organization.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#337

Post by lolinder »

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…

With GitLab specifically as an alternative: GitLab made it very clear a few years ago that they weren't particularly interested in hosting large-scale free projects when they introduced the Open Source Program as the only path to using GitLab for FOSS. I've heard over and over again that this process is painful and not worth the effort, and it has a bunch of extra requirements that would likely be dealbreakers for Mozilla [0]:

* "the Open Source Project does not, and does not seek to, generate profit from the sale or licensing of the Open Source Software to which the Open Source Project relates, or the sale of any services related to such Open Source Software;"

* "The Open Source Project agrees not to (nor to authorize any third party to): ... (b) modify or create any derivative works of the GitLab Software ... (d) copy ... the GitLab Software"

That last part is especially problematic for everyone: in order to use GitLab.com for a FOSS project you have to renounce your right to modify (or authorize others to modify) or to copy the FOSS version of GitLab. This might have just been lawyers adding boilerplate without thinking it through, but that in itself is evidence of a major problem at GitLab.

So, GitLab is out. Aside from GitLab Mozilla could have chosen maybe Codeberg, but with the entire point being to remove barriers to new contributors it makes sense to go with the option that almost all such possible contributors are already on.

[0] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/opensource-agreem...

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#338

Post by noobermin »

dzaima wrote: post #330
noobermin wrote: post #314

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…

This is far from the first project to move from hg to git; many people probably just generally expect that to happen upon any source code management change for anything still using mercurial, which has already been effectively dead for most people for years.

My point doesn't really dispute that hg is dead "for most people" whatever that means, it's just that what the hg people could point to in the past was firefox, but now they've lost that example. Now, we can surely say it is dead.

To be frank, I know of no other major project that used hg. In fact, I think firefox was how I learned about it in the first place many years ago.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#339

Post by frizlab »

kaichanvong wrote: post #149
frizlab wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like fossil?

while --it-is possible seeing how fossil confuses, for the Github conversation, it's not really in the same category, conversation, some clever happenings happening within fossil-scm, however, it's not really the same as the problem design-led github solves given people saying downtimes; sure, git, github; however how people using github, different–similar, git, however, github. However, were you to say liken-able (s…

I don’t get any of that. I tried, but no, it just makes no sense.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#340

Post by heftig »

upcoming-sesame wrote: post #309

Why did they choose the mozilla-firefox org as opposed to the already existing mozilla org ? https://github.com/mozilla

Different access rules, I guess. Or maybe they wanted some separation from the existing org so the custom automation has no chance of doing collateral damage.
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