- 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.
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.
“GitHub”
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’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.
They should try Bitbucket
Amazing
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.
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.
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.
Something like radicle?
Piping
curlintoshin install instructions is a fast track to me not taking a project seriouslyI’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) :)
Git is already decentralized
Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.
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.
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.
