Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Those of us who run some of the most popular projects on GitHub feel completely ignored by you. We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them. Since our own work is usually done in the open and everyone has input into the process, it seems strange for us to be in the dark about one of our most important project dependencies.

— The authors of the "Dear GitHub" open letter, requesting features from the popular code-hosting service.

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github wishlist

Posted Jan 21, 2016 10:08 UTC (Thu) by lacos (guest, #70616) [Link] (7 responses)

> Since our own work is usually done in the open and everyone has input
> into the process, it seems strange for us to be in the dark about one
> of our most important project dependencies.

It is not strange at all. GitHub is a privately held for-profit company;
they spend their resources wherever they see fit. I'm sure if the users
who have signed the "petition" thus far coughed up $$$ too, GitHub would
implement these features in zero time.

Making GitHub one of a project's most important dependencies may not
have been the smartest move. Personally, I don't store anything of
permanent value on github as a primary location.

In any case, Bugzilla runs circles around GitHub's issue tracker.

github wishlist

Posted Jan 21, 2016 10:26 UTC (Thu) by mina86 (guest, #68442) [Link] (2 responses)

People's over-reliance on GitHub always confused me though I guess it is somewhat user friendly so that could be a reason. Then again, if you find yourself at the point where your project is big enough that the infrastructure is no longer sufficient, there's always kalithea-scm.org and Bugtraq which are both free software thus provide transparency.

github wishlist

Posted Jan 21, 2016 11:17 UTC (Thu) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link]

Well, as was mentioned in the posting on python moving to github, it's interesting that 10+ years ago, the desire to have something open source that was just about good enough was the driving force for many. Now it's switched to having something that's "easy to use" (no idea how git itself qualifies here) and looks pretty. I think it's going to take a few years of people getting burnt through vendor lock-in before the pendulum swings back the other way.

10+ years ago, everyone learnt how to install Linux and ran and maintained a server of some sort. People would configure their SMTP servers and run DNS themselves. These days no one wants to learn anything of the sort.

(Obviously, by "everyone" and "no one", I mean the apparent vast majority of devs. Some actual surveys and stats would be useful.)

github wishlist

Posted Jan 23, 2016 15:34 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (subscriber, #34940) [Link]

You mean https://kallithea-scm.org/ (with double "l")

github wishlist

Posted Jan 21, 2016 13:10 UTC (Thu) by Trou.fr (subscriber, #26289) [Link] (3 responses)

> In any case, Bugzilla runs circles around GitHub's issue tracker.

I consider Bugzilla to be so painful to use that I usually give up instead of reporting bugs when the project is using it. Compared with Github's easy interface, this is a no brainer.

Just _looking_ for an existing bug is painful with Bugzilla.

github wishlist

Posted Jan 21, 2016 20:56 UTC (Thu) by rriggs (guest, #11598) [Link] (2 responses)

I would have agreed with you a few years ago, but Red Hat's Bugzilla, with its millions of reported bugs, has become considerably more usable (easy to search, responsive) in the last few years. There are some really bad implementations out there, but this one, the one I interact with the most, shows that it can be done well.

Nowadays I feel despair when needing to hit Boost's Trac bug database. For my utter contempt, just ask me to use sourceforge.net for anything.

github wishlist

Posted Jan 22, 2016 19:03 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

The icing on the cake has to be RT - I saw a complaint about it the other day that you can't *directly link to a bug number* because it throws up an XSRF error page. Using the horrible search interface is mandatory.

github wishlist

Posted Jan 24, 2016 16:33 UTC (Sun) by jdulaney (subscriber, #83672) [Link]

I can directly link to bugs in bugzilla all day long, and many find it useful to just give out the bug id.