- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.
They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.
They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.
M$‘s priority is to draw new people on their products and make people upgrade to higher tiers. Existing users are none of their concern. There are business models who will put the product team to focus on existing users. One way is an open source product run by the users community, another way is product relying on the effect of word of mouth.
Give a hacker a github, they’ll commit for a week.
Give a hacker a mailing list and an ssh, and they’ll be selfhosting for the rest of their life.
Right, because mailing lists are easier to use
Hiring the barrier of entry is one way to reduce your ticket load. And, uh, not having any ticket system at all.
“Hiring”? Is “raising” a better word?
Fediverse version of github when? Unless it already exists?
It’s called git. It’s been distributed from day 1. GitHub was an attempt to centralize it.
Yeah… does git have issue tracking? actions? C’mon: it’s not like github & co. are just git.
It doesn’t have discussions, it doesn’t offer pull request management with commented/annotated code reviews, it doesn’t have built-in ssh and key management features, no workflows, no authorization tools of any kind…
In short I find the “just use git itself lmao” to be an exceedingly weird thing to say and I find it even weirder that it gets said as often as it does and it gets upvoted so much. Git by itself is not very useful at all if there are more than one a half people working on the same code.
A server hosting a copy of the repo, git send-email, a mailing list and a bugzilla instance is all that an open source project really needs.
The advantage of github/gitlab et al. is that it merges all of the above functionality to one place, however it’s not absolutely essential. Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.
Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.
I love how much spare time you have to learn and maintain your infrastructure unnecessarily instead of working on the code. It’s like being a bus driver by day, and mechanic all night.
Depends how interested you are in the infrastructure I suppose. Obviously it’s not essential for any project. I see a few that have both self hosted resources and additionally a Github mirror.
An advantage to the “old school” approach is that you don’t end up tied into a large SAAS platform like Github.
Again, like OP said, those are typically distinct functionality: issue tracking, source control, deployment etc. GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization. The more stuff you add to a platform the harder it makes it to leave or replicate.
But no, technically speaking you don’t need to have all of it in one place. There’s no reason for which you must manage everything together.
I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks. The fact it still doesn’t have a decent history visualization to this day is mind-boggling.
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools. GitHub’s “one size fits all” approach is terrible and only holds because people are too lazy to look for any alternative.
I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.
I agree with this part.
GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.
Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.
The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.
What combination would you recommend to replace most common GitHub functionality?
It depends a lot on the setup you have, how many people, release flow etc. Issue tracking depends on the kind of software you do and whether you want a programmer-only flow or a full support flow.
Deploy pipelines will usually depend on the infrastructure, cloud solutions usually can integrate with several and there’s also common solutions and even FOSS ones, like Terraform vs OpenTofu.
Git frontends are a very mixed bag, generally speaking their main purpose is to hide Git as much as possible and allow programmers to contribute changes upstream without knowing much beyond the nebulous “PR” concept. Basically they’re mostly useless other than enabling people to remain dumb. A good Git tutorial and a good history visualization tool (git happens to include one called
gitkout of the box) will do so much more to teach people Git, and there’s really no substitute for communication – using annotations to discuss pros and cons for a PR is badly inadequate.Forgejo should work
I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.
It’s not that complicated… people use it because everyone has an account there and so your project gets more visibility (and your profile too, for those who plan to flex it when they look for the next job) and more contributions. Even a lot of projects that aren’t on github have some sort of mirror there for visibility.
Suppose you wanna contribute to gnu grep (or whatever)… do you happen to know off the top of your head where the source repo and bug tracker are? And do you know what’s the procedure to submit your patch?
If you are a company doing closed source, I agree that I don’t see why you would choose github over the myriad alternatives (including the self hosted ones).
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools
That’s a great way to spend your resources developing yet-another-source-forge-thingie instead of whatever your actual project/product is supposed to be :)
But you don’t have to develop anything. There are plenty of ready-made excellent tools you can just drop-in. The main fallacy is that what Github does is actually useful, or that the pieces it integrates are useful. 90% of Github is subpar for any given purpose. Consider all the possible types of software being developed and all the different release flows and support/issue flows, how could they possibly be shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all? Yet people try their damnest to do exactly that.
To do software development you need (A) issue tracking, (B) a clear release flow, and © a deploy mechanism that’s easy to use. A is a drop-in tool with lots of alternatives, B is unrestricted since Git is very flexible in this regard, and C is typically included with any cloud infrastructure, unless you’re doing on premise in which case there are also drop-in tools.
A, B, C are three distinct, orthogonal topics that can and should be handled separately. There’s no logical reason to shape any of them after the other. They have to work together, sure, but the design considerations of one must not affect the others.
But you don’t have to develop anything.
I interpreted your “look for ways to do things separately” as “look for separate tools that do the various things” (and you have to integrate), but I see now that you meant “look for ways to do things differently”. My bad.
I used gerrit and zuul a while back at a place that really didn’t want to use GitHub. It worked pretty well but it took a lot of care and maintenance to keep it all ticking along for a bunch of us.
It has a few features I loved that GitHub took years to catch up to. Not sure there’s a moral to this story.
Forgejo is what you’re wanting
That seems to be it. I didn’t know that existed.
I’m glad I get to introduce you to it! The biggest instance is Codeberg. Fediverse integration isn’t there yet but the general consensus is its coming very soon since that’s Codeberg’s main focus for the forgejo project right now
Git is already decentralized
They’re asking for a federated forge, not decentralized VCS.
I should be able to log into my own instance and use that account to open a bug report with your project, for example.
Forgejo is working on that, but it’s not there yet.
Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.
Gitlab and forgejo
Something like radicle?
Piping
curlintoshin install instructions is a fast track to me not taking a project seriouslyYeah, like Lemmy
Excited for Sublinks…
I’ve heard this over and over… what’s the difference security-wise between sudo running some install script and sudo installing a .deb (or whatever package format) ?
@gomp try comparing it with
apt install, not with downloading a .deb file from a random website - that is obviously also very insecure. But the main thingcurl|shwill never have is verifying the signature of the downloaded file - what if the server got compromised, and someone simply replaced it. You want to make sure that it comes from the actual author (you still need to trust the author, but that’s a given, since you are running their code). Even a signed tarball is better than curl|sh.Installing a .deb is what I was thinking about.
Even a signed tarball is better than curl|sh.
If you have a pre-shared trusted signature to check against (like with your distro’s repos), yes. But… that’s obviously not the case since we are talking installing software from the developer’s website.
Whatever cryptografic signature you can get from the same potentially compromised website you get the software from would be worth as much as the usual md5/sha checksums (ie. it would only check against transmission errors).
@gomp Why would you be taking the signature from the same website? Ever heard of PGP key servers?
That would be “a pre-shared trusted signature to check against”, and is seldom available (in the real world where people live - yes, there are imaginary/ideal worlds where PGP is widespread and widely used) :)
A deb is just a zip file that gets unpacked to where your binaries go. A shell script you curl pipe into shell could contain literally any instructions
Binary packages have scripts (IIRC for .deb they are preinst/postinst to be run before/after installation and prerm/postrm before/after removal) that are run as root.
BTW the “unzip” part is also run as root, and a binary package can typically place stuff anywhere in your system (that’s their job after all)… even if you used literal zip files they could still install a script in ways that would cause the OS to execute it.
Yeah I’m over simplifying on purpose here. The bottom line is piping into
shis dangerous
Just install it manually via cargo then.
I once heard of torrent git
I’ve read that GitLab is experimenting with the concept.
I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.
It was bought by Microsoft and all efforts are going towards AI shit. Once they have your subscriptions to copilot, windows, github, etc, they dont give a fuck about making anything easier for you
Hey now. A lot of that effort has been poured into turning a code forge into a corpo social media platform like Microsoft LinkedIn as well as a way to siphon out a percent chunk of donations via Sponsors too.
It’s kind of neat you can launch a version of Visual Studio code by pressing ‘.’ though.
Still not sure why, especially given that it’s pretty much impossible to find out that you can even do that.
I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.
Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.
The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it.
I feel like this has been the case for a while now. Luckily they offer other search tools so its a gotcha that you only have to hit once.
In edit mode they capture the crtl-f keystrokes and offer their own search and replace tool. An argument could be made that they should offer a custom search tool for read mode if they are going to break the browsers built in tooling.
It captures it even outside of edit mode while in git blame.
“GitHub”
I want to see good forges for alternative DVCSs. Git itself feels like legacy software full a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults that just keeps bloating. Most software makers at this point have never even used a non-Git VCS.
legacy software full [of?] a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults
You need to learn about xargs. It’ll make you cry. But when I needed to properly parallelize a RHSatellite run - wow is pulp ever a bag of shit - so it would finish in under 9 hours and not trip over itself with 105 (no shit) different repos, it was integral.
There are three different kinds of regular grep, and they have incompatible command line switches.
I’m not gonna list the plethora of tools with arcane and/or lengthy option lists, but I do wish I could impress upon you the idea that every tool evolves , and evolution is usually coupled with growth and specialized additions.
I’d like to add my opinion that git is definitely not the worst offender
Based on the article, the problem is that Github isn’t being treated as legacy software, but isn’t able to load a full file using the currently popular JS framework they are using.
They should try Bitbucket
Codeberg is where it’s at
Whenever I encounter a project that is not hosted on GitHub, such as https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot I get totally delighted because navigating and browsing it actually works.
In GitHub if I am browsing the source code I now have to open it in a raw page without highlighting, because GitHub’s features absolutely gunk it up. I have no intention of ever putting a new project on GitHub again. Bad user experience, untrustworthy leadership, and bad values (I.e. Silicon Valley ones)
lol we used to call it Buttbucket at my old work where we used it. Should be a relatively easy product to deliver but Atlassian just couldn’t keep it up and bug free
Atlassian is one of those companies that I equally laugh at, love, and hate.
They’re in so many markets in software and project management, and have so many large clients that pay for Confluence, Jira, BitBucket, etc. Despite this, people almost universally despise their products, with bugs being left open for years, features blissfully ignored, etc.
I often imagine what it would be like to work for Atlassian, and what “that” code based must look like. Working there must be fun as hell given the impact and breadth of opportunities, equally frustrating if you dogfood your own products, and infuriating given just how much stuff must be utter shit under the hood.
We tried to pronounce “atlassian” like “half-assed-ian” .
I meant if they think GitHub feels like legacy software, they should try Bitbucket. That’s real legacy software.
Amazing
