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Dear GitHub

github.com

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431–440 of 491 posts

Re: Dear GitHub

#431

Post by rco8786 »

jondubois wrote: post #364
rco8786 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The request was to allow maintainers to define a template or have the ability to add fields. So the formats would be on a project by project basis. > Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with. This is just silly.

Not so. For my project, I noticed on several occasions that different people were asking the same questions and that prompted me to rethink the design of the project a bit and it greatly improved the community engagement as a result.

That's my point. Questions are a good thing. You don't "design away" user's questions.

Re: Dear GitHub

#432

Post by krschultz »

cookiecaper wrote: post #334
jeddawson wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. Maybe 98%. I think that's a big part of the disconnect I'm seeing here in the comments. Those of us that live in private repos are likely pretty happy with how things currently work especially since we're the ones paying to use the service. If it wasn't working well for our teams, we'd find somewhere else to spend our money. That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform.

>That being said, we're certainly the minority when it comes to users on the platform. But you're the huge majority of people who give GitHub money. It makes sense not to prioritize the pain points of open-source projects when you lose money by hosting them.

We have the diamond level plan from GitHub and have >260 private repos at my company.

We only chose GitHub because we wanted to host our open source repos there. If they don't prioritize the open-source projects then we have no reason to pick them over BitBucket or something else like that.

Re: Dear GitHub

#433

Post by Lawtonfogle »

jballanc wrote: post #97

It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant. GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008 . Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque…

Mayhap it is related to their abandonment of being a meritocracy as doing such was being divisive? Success can be very devise as well so perhaps they are making a noble sacrifice to avoid dividing people.

Re: Dear GitHub

#434

Post by jasode »

ams6110 wrote: post #292
jasode wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adds cognitive overhead to the process Yes! The maintainers deliberately want to add cognitive overhead so the quality bar for creating issues is higher. By having simple zero-friction forms, you haven't removed cognitive overhead. You've simply shifted the cognitive load into the followup messages asking for clarification of "reproduction steps", "version tested". The issues' threads therefore begin with "meta" ty…

So use a real issue tracker. Most of the big ones integrate with github. Why should they reinvent this wheel?

>So use a real issue tracker.

That's a reasonable answer -- but it's an answer to question I wasn't addressing. Whether github reinvents the wheel is not relevant to my point.

I was specifically debunking the illusion that "simplicity of the issues submission form == no cognitive overhead".

If the "issues creation" web form is lightweight, the submitters will eventually expend "cognitive overhead" by clogging up the threads with clarification messages.

If the project maintainer uses your solution of an external tracker, that means the submitter still expends cognitive overhead by noticing that the project's "issue tracking" has been disabled, and then reading front page README.TXT or CONTRIBUTIONS.TXT to figure out what external website he's supposed to use to submit issues. No doubt the web forms[1] on those external trackers will have the checkboxes and dropdowns that some people are suggesting people avoid.

The "cognitive overhead" required to clarify and provide meta-descriptions for bug reports is inescapable. You're only deciding whether it is structured or unstructured and where it is shifted.

Your reply is going in different direction from cognitive overhead and on that perspective, I don't know what makes the most sense. My guess is that many open source maintainers don't need a heavyweight tracker that can do things like assign tasks to multiple programmers, burn down dashboards, correlate activity hours to billing, etc. They don't need all that. They just want a template to improve how users file issues. Maybe a survey would provide insight as to whether your answer is the most sensible.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=jira+submit+issue&source=lnm...

Re: Dear GitHub

#435

Post by alextgordon »

timv wrote: post #205
chris_wot wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like a genuine mistake. He apologised. You've never done something dumb and didn't realise it?

I think this gets to the root of the GH problem To the person raising the issue it's a simple mistake, sorry. To the person that has to deal with it, it's yet another issue being raised where the reporter didn't follow the necessary steps to diagnose the problem themselves and (implicitly) expected a bunch of other people to apply their own time to solving it. If the "New Issue" form had a place where the reporter wa…

All successful products will have stupid users. If you don't want to have stupid users, don't write successful software.

Re: Dear GitHub

#436

Post by jessaustin »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #56

While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects. What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?

...pretty strong indictment...

This is like blaming the schools for poverty. Yes it would be wonderful if Node module maintainers were a perfectly representative blend of all the races, genders, religions, and orientations on Earth. The gap between that vision of Node and the one we have pales in comparison to the gap between that vision of Earth and the one we inhabit.

Re: Dear GitHub

#437

Post by pron »

talmand wrote: post #426
pron wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now they are in the business of regulating the content of open source projects That is a very good thing. At this point in time we're beyond speculation. We have some good evidence about the direction online communities take with and without content moderation, and the serious players (most recently Reddit) have come to realize that top-down moderation is absolutely necessary. Fringe, unmoderated activity has a pla…

And who exactly gets to decide what is "fringe"?

I guess that the majority gets to decide. It doesn't really matter what is mainstream and what isn't, as long as there's a place for both. Broadway and off-Broadway are both fine, but mixing them can cause confusion and for both audiences to be disappointed.

Re: Dear GitHub

#438

Post by hobarrera »

minimaxir wrote: post #41
diezge wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surprised I didn't see my personal favourite mentioned - the unlimited free private repos!

To be fair, GitHub has to make money . None of the complaints are about the GitHub business model, which is IMO pretty fair.

GitLab offers pretty much the same as GitHub and is free (as in FLOSS). Their hosted version also offers free unlimited private repositories.

Re: Dear GitHub

#439

Post by eric_h »

oneJob wrote: post #419
jonobacon wrote: post #116

Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre, My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in. Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pa…

Respectfully Jono, I think your reply is symptomatic of the issues at the heart of the matter. GitHub is, whether it expected to be or not, whether it wants to be or not, now at the heart of the OSS community. For the "Director of Community" at a company which plays such an important role in the OSS community, which itself plays an enormously important role in the broader software and civic communities and is populat…

At least he responded, and promptly. Let's not jump to conclusions just yet.

Re: Dear GitHub

#440

Post by pluma »

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #56

While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects. What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?

There is plenty being done in JS/node communities (plural! because there is more than one) at all levels. It just turns out that change doesn't happen over night.

Conferences already reverse discriminate by aiming for a gender balance in speakers (despite the submissions they chose from being very imbalanced). User groups have adopted CoCs to protect female and minority members. There are even female-only special interest groups. There's also this: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity

Besides, the list you're referring to is not an exhaustive list of important JS projects. It's a list of maintainers who have signed this open letter. What does their gender add to the conversation?

Inclusivity in programming comunities and JS/node in particular has drastically improved throughout the past decade. But structural changes take a long time to show results. The distribution you're seeing today represents what was being done in the past, not what is happening today.

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