Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#61

Post by kunley » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 12:06 PM UTC

uxp wrote: post #57

kunley wrote: post #42

There's also one issue not mentioned in this article: Lots (if not most) of the code has documentation so poor, that there's no way to determine what it's really worth other than looking at the code, examples, tests. Github does it right by enabling you to browse the code right away and make your opinion. This is also the reason why Sourceforge and other *forges are doomed - and to a lesser extent google code too. Th…

When I visit a GitHub page of a new project that I find interesting, I would like to hack on or use as an end-user I don't even have to click on the clipboard icon to get the URL. I just take the URL straight from my browser and put it into my terminal to obtain a local copy over https, or by changing https to git and adding .git at the end: git clone https://github.com/USER/PROJECTNAME git clone git://github.com/USE…

> Can you tell me off the top of your head how to checkout the source for $RANDOMPROJECT on sourceforge?

I can't. That was the point, I'm always lost there..

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#62

Post by kunley » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 12:12 PM UTC

bradleyland wrote: post #52

zedshaw wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: FWIW, I never notice folks' names on github. The important thing for me is that the code is right there front and center. If I want to download it, I click the clipboard button and then go clone it. Boom. Yeah, I think "BOOM!" is right. If you can't see the flaw in stuff like this: http://drnicwilliams.com/2009/11/04/hacking-someones-gem-wit... http://groups.google.com/group/gemcutter/browse_thread/threa... T…

I definitely live more in the sysadmin camp than the programmer camp, so I can see exactly what you're saying without even reading the links. A programmer is prepared to dive deep. The programmer writes tests that validate their assumptions at ever level. The programmer lives intimately with their project. Contrast this to the sysadmin. The sysadmin lives wide. He/she has to support many developers and many applicati…

Even worse nightmare is pretending that the code is more stable just by labeling it as "package vX.Y.Z" and hiding the actual meat behind such "profesionally" looking cortain.

And yes, I'm an admin for 15 years.

My experience is when software is bad, it's just bad. No packaging system will help it. If I have a suspicion it's bad, I want to see quickly just how bad it is and check if I can repair it in half of an hour or drop entirely. Github helps with such decision greatly.

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#63

Post by pyre » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 2:50 PM UTC

bradleyland wrote: post #53

pyre wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, because package management build systems have obsoleted the need to package managers to be actual people that keep track of the packages that they manage...

It's not a "people" issue. How does one discern the canonical source of a package on GitHub? Take GitX as an example: The "top parent" project: https://github.com/pieter/gitx Andre Berg's fork: https://github.com/andreberg/gitx The Brotherbard fork: https://github.com/brotherbard/gitx Which is "the project"? The answer is all of them AND none of them. That's the nature of GitHub. Zed's point is that for a sysadmin, a…

I was responding to Zed complaining about automatic build systems knowing where to pull their sources/builds from.

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#64

Post by bradleyland » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 4:30 PM UTC

kunley wrote: post #62

bradleyland wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely live more in the sysadmin camp than the programmer camp, so I can see exactly what you're saying without even reading the links. A programmer is prepared to dive deep. The programmer writes tests that validate their assumptions at ever level. The programmer lives intimately with their project. Contrast this to the sysadmin. The sysadmin lives wide. He/she has to support many developers and many applicati…

Even worse nightmare is pretending that the code is more stable just by labeling it as "package vX.Y.Z" and hiding the actual meat behind such "profesionally" looking cortain. And yes, I'm an admin for 15 years. My experience is when software is bad, it's just bad. No packaging system will help it. If I have a suspicion it's bad, I want to see quickly just how bad it is and check if I can repair it in half of an hour…

I'm not making the argument that giving a package a static label makes it better, I'm arguing that it makes it more consistently identifiable. When you're trying to figure out what's breaking your system, consistency is the key to isolation.

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#65

Post by electrum » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 5:08 PM UTC

mpk wrote: post #54

davidw wrote: post #38

Good open source projects are projects , which are made up of code and people. I've never cared for the idea that a project belongs to one person on github.

Well, github can do that too. You can set up an organization that isn't tied to any particular account and manage repos from there. Projects start out as one person messing with code. Of course the project belongs to one person at that point. As more people join in you can re-structure the project into an organization with multiple owners. Check out the announcement from June 2010 https://github.com/blog/674-introduc…

The problem is that GitHub has no way to point the original project to the official project. The new organization project will still say "forked from" the original person's project.

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#66

Post by binspace » Wed, Mar 09, 2011, 6:40 PM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #9

binspace wrote: post #3

> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL. I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.

That was a joke. You know, those things that make people laugh? In seriousness, it sort of doesn't matter if you're a programmer. Either way works so long as the first thing you get is code. If you're a sysadmin or packager though, that's annoying as hell. You want to just go to /project and not worry about the who's-who of forks.

Zed, I'm a robot, so I'm impervious to jokes, especially deadpan sarcastic ones without proper metadata :-)

And I agree with your serious statement. Yay, happy!

Re: Zed Shaw: Launchpad vs. Github/SysAdmin vs. Coder

#67

Post by xiongchiamiov » Fri, Mar 11, 2011, 7:42 AM UTC

zedshaw wrote: post #20

jacques_chester wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I misunderstand how MacPorts works, but I vaguely recall seeing it pull source code directly from projects.

MacPorts? I was using NetBSD pkgsrc, which does either source builds or packages from the same system. So, you can lock it at a particular source revision/release and make an official package like a .deb, or do a gentoo/MacPorts style source build.

As I understand it, Arch's pkgbuilds are similar. The nice thing is that they have the flexibility to do whatever you want, whether it be updating a svn repo, downloading a binary, curling a script, building from source, whatever.