I was posting on Planet Source Code before SourceForge existed.
Before GitHub
61–70 of 255 posts
Re: Before GitHub
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trac was great. But, my first issue tracker was bugzilla. Setting that up was a bit of a pain, and it didn’t integrate well with anything, but it was very satisfying to see “Zarro Boogs”.
Bugzilla was relatively painless to setup but it already had a bit of the Jira going on - in that it had SO MANY OPTIONS! I remember being interested in MantisBT and a few others (Launchpad for BZR?) mainly because it seemed they made a bunch of decisions for me.
It's a bit fuzzy, but what I remember was getting it running was painless -- but there was a ton of effort in getting it configured.
In retrospect, it was probably the flexibility of projects like Bugzilla that heralded the "opinionated" approaches to software that followed. In many ways software also follows the patterns of the language they are written in . Bugzilla was written in Perl, so of course there is more than one way to do anything.
I had forgotten about Mantis, but that was the first tracker that the non-programmers in our group were comfortable using. It is a bit funny how quickly we all migrated to Github as a larger community as it became the default for just about everything.
Re: Before GitHub
#63I absolutely loved Trac. Getting a Trac setup as step 1 in starting a new open source project was just an unbelievable amount of friction. Fun fact: Django is still running on Trac today, and has been for more than 20 years now: https://code.djangoproject.com/timeline (I was not involved in setting that one up, though it's possible I helped get the private Trac that pre-dated it running, I honestly can't remember!)
Weirdly, I also have fond memories of Trac despite absolutely despising it at the time for “doing too much and excelling at nothing as a result”. I guess that award goes to Gitlab now, which I will probably also remember fondly.
> I guess that award goes to Gitlab now
Painfully true - I remember a company I was at replacing GitHub and a bunch of other tools with GitLab because it was better to pay for one tool that does it all. Kind of.
Re: Before GitHub
#64I think I was one of the first people to try Flask. I learned Python so I could take advantage of AppEngine for free and easy modern hosting, which put me in the right spot when Flask launched. I've long been an admirer of Armin's, and recognized his domain before I clicked the link. As he points out, in those days, you didn't default to GitHub. His post is a response to Mitchell's, from just a few hours ago. I'm imp…
> His post is a response to Mitchell's, from just a few hours ago.
Is there a link to Mitchell's post somewhere? I can't find one in the article.
Re: Before GitHub
#65I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…
You can (and people did) do same kind of tooling based off git protocol and storage. Hell, even one for distributed code reviews. It just... never was something majority actually want so they didn't really get any traction. Issues wise you also get few nasty cases where you really do not want to keep it with project, like having clients send a bunch of screenshots or even videos of triggering some bugs can grow stora…
Those screenshots and videos are taking up space SOMEWHERE, whether it be your inbox or your filesystem, why not have them as unversioned artifacts in your db? (Fossil supports this). Of course if you have multiple people working on it and many assets, other solutions would be better (shared cloud drives, etc). But for my use case of a storing textual information only (and perhaps a demo video, which many Git users often keep a video in their source and link it in the readme), Fossil works great to keep all my stuff together in the same context.
I explicitly dislike the idea of using Git as the backing store. Forget the fact that Git is not native on Windows and is immensely bloated; the actual .git folder is a mess for backup systems when working locally compared to a single database file.
Re: Before GitHub
#66I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…
> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git.
I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred.
I'm not really sure VCS were ever differentiated for there to be a wide world of them. They all solved the same set of problems so similarly that it felt, to me, that there had to be one winner. Right now most of the competition is in the Git Porcelain space.
N.B. I actually have a soft spot for darcs, which was my first actual DVCS. I just loved it so much more than svn and refused to use svn in college and used darcs to actually manage my projects and push them to svn after.
Re: Before GitHub
#67> But maybe the most underappreciated thing GitHub did was archival work: GitHub became a library. It became an index of a huge part of the software commons because even abandoned projects remained findable. I think this is a bad thing actually. Having something that's centralized but helpful-99%-of-the-time atrophies our collective archival skills. If everything had to be seeded by someone to keep it alive, everyone…
Yeah first thing I do when I come across a repo I like is to clone it. I've seen a few reverse engineering projects disappear before my eyes.
Re: Before GitHub
#68I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…
When I tried Fossil it had things weirdly separated.
I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.
Re: Before GitHub
#69I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…
> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git. I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred…
I'm still using Mercurial whenever I can (including work!). The Tortoisehg GUI is good for doing reviews, and the command line is comfortable.
I grew up on CVS and then Subversion. Played with Bazaar a little, mainly because it could use an SFTP location as the back-end.
And I still avoid Git if I can help it. I would/do figure it out when I have to, but it never feels comfortable. Such is my avoidance that I'm dabbling with Jujutsu although I'll still need to really sit down and read through it some more to grok the way it works.
Re: Before GitHub
#70What is GitHub’s decline? I’ve used it extensively since 2011 ish (to lazy to look up when) it’s only gotten better. What’s the issue?