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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

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Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#361

Post by LegionMammal978 »

skydhash wrote: post #343
dgb23 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proj…

> Many might just want to dabble at first, or they are just casually browsing and see something that catches their attention. You can easily craft an email for that. No need to create a full PR.

"Crafting an email" in the format required by many email-based projects is hardly easy for the average user, who's most likely using a webmail service that does not have much control over line wrapping and the like. Accepting patches in attachments (instead of the email body) helps with this, but naive users can still easily get caught by using HTML email, which many project maintainers love to performatively turn up their noses at.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#362

Post by LegionMammal978 »

elric wrote: post #217
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #106

On one hand, centralization at a commercial provider isn't great. On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.

> Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise Surely most open source projects have a link to their source code? Whether it's github, gitlab, sourcehut, or anything else?

Many GNU and GNU-adjacent projects will happily list their release tarballs, but make it annoyingly difficult to find the underlying repos that most of them use. Usually the link is squirreled away somewhere in the "contributing" guidelines.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#363

Post by majewsky »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #353
int_19h wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a binary. Many projects do want PRs, but it doesn't mean they have to accept any random PR, or fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one. It's perfectly fine to "gatekeep" on quality matters, and that does mean acknowledging the fact that not all contributors are equally valuable.

> fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one It's that sense of superiority that pisses me off. Many maintainers condescendingly reply "contributions welcome" in response to user complaints. People like that had better accept whatever they get. They could have easily done it themselves in all their "high quality" ways. They could have said "I don't have time for this" or even "I don't want to…

> People like that had better accept whatever they get.

FOSS maintainers are not a unified mind. The people who go "contributions welcome" and "#hacktoberfest" are somewhere near one end of the spectrum, and the folks dealing with low-effort contributions are somewhere near the other end of the spectrum.

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#364

Post by matheusmoreira »

majewsky wrote: post #363
matheusmoreira wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fawn over every contributor who creates an obviously low-effort one It's that sense of superiority that pisses me off. Many maintainers condescendingly reply "contributions welcome" in response to user complaints. People like that had better accept whatever they get. They could have easily done it themselves in all their "high quality" ways. They could have said "I don't have time for this" or even "I don't want to…

> People like that had better accept whatever they get. FOSS maintainers are not a unified mind. The people who go "contributions welcome" and "#hacktoberfest" are somewhere near one end of the spectrum, and the folks dealing with low-effort contributions are somewhere near the other end of the spectrum.

Of course not. That's why I singled out a very specific kind of maintainer: the type who thinks himself superior to users even when they engage at their level. Guys so good they can't be bothered to do it themselves but complain when others do it.

Good maintainers may be firm but they are always nice and grateful, and they treat people as their equals. They don't beg others for their time and effort. If they do, they don't gratuitously shit on people when they get the results. They work with contributors in order to get their work reviewed, revised and merged. They might even just merge it as-is, it can always be refactored afterwards.

That's hard to do and that's why doing it makes them good maintainers. Telling people their "contributions are welcome" only to not welcome their contributions when they do come is the real "low effort".

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#365

Post by burkaman »

alabastervlog wrote: post #305
immibis wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Recently I also got "rate limited" after opening about three web pages. People who haven’t used it logged out recently may be surprised to find that they have, for some time, made the site effectively unusable without an account. Doing one search and clicking a couple results gets you temporarily blocked. It’s effectively an account-required website now.

Just opened a private window to try this, I did one search and clicked on four results, then a second search and got a 429 error. That is wild. I guess it's an anti-scraper measure?

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#366

Post by mdaniel »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #362
elric wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise Surely most open source projects have a link to their source code? Whether it's github, gitlab, sourcehut, or anything else?

Many GNU and GNU-adjacent projects will happily list their release tarballs, but make it annoyingly difficult to find the underlying repos that most of them use. Usually the link is squirreled away somewhere in the "contributing" guidelines.

AFAIK https://savannah.gnu.org is the "sourceforge" for GNU projects. I was thrilled when they stood up a GitLab instance but recently locked it down so one can't even browse without being logged in https://emba.gnu.org/explore -> sign in

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#367

Post by [deleted] »

LadyCailin wrote: post #299
immibis wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is kind of a weird hill to die on, but you’re well within your rights, so you do you. However, it is clearly not correct to say that you were banned from GitHub. It’s like saying “I was banned from Google because I refuse to use computing devices.” Not really a ban, just self flagellation, which, again, whatever works for you.

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#368

Post by mdaniel »

nicce wrote: post #125
smallnix wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could search on GitHub without logging in

They used to have 64 core 32 machine cluster just for search. You may want to reduce unnecessary search. https://github.blog/engineering/the-technology-behind-github...

This from a company that uses Ruby for their webapp and hosts probably one of the bigger CI build farms probably in the world. I have a very hard time crying because they have to run a beefy search cluster. I would guess that a very non-trivial portion of the horsepower for such a thing is about ingest of the constant updates moreso than the actual search part

Re: Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

#370

Post by mdaniel »

DennisL123 wrote: post #70

A BUILD.md could be useful.

the readme is literally 21 lines long, and about 25% of them are blank lines, with the 2nd URL pointing to "how to contribute" and that link has a dedicated "how to build and run" https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/contributing/contrib...

The bad news is that their build system is extremely hand-rolled, and so if it works for you, count yourself lucky, because when it doesn't work you're in for 4 hours of python hell

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