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NGINX has moved to GitHub

The NGINX team has announced that official NGINX open-source development has moved away from Mercurial to GitHub, and the project will now be taking contributions in the form of pull requests:

Additionally, starting today, we will begin accepting bugs reports, feature requests and enhancements directly through GitHub, under the "Issues" tab. Moreover, we've moved our community forums to the GitHub "Discussions" area, where you will now be able to engage in conversation, ask, and answer questions.

[...] We understand that changes like these may require adjustment, so to give you more time, we will continue accepting patches and provide community support via mailing lists until December 31st, 2024.



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Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 7, 2024 0:23 UTC (Sat) by python (guest, #171317) [Link] (6 responses)

How many major projects still use Mercurial? I thought git had taken over the world already (for major projects).

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 7, 2024 1:57 UTC (Sat) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Not open-source, but AFAIK Facebook/Meta uses Mercurial. In fact, it migrated from Git to Mercurial.

Facebook seems to be bucking the trend, through. Mozilla and NGINX both left Mercurial for Git.

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 7, 2024 2:45 UTC (Sat) by cfsmp3 (guest, #126750) [Link] (1 responses)

Facebook doesn't use Mercurial.

https://sapling-scm.com/

Which yes, started using Mercurial, but the backend was replaced ages ago. Not sure about the front end. I mean, it's "compatible" (well, you use sl instead of hg, but the args are identical or were not too long ago).

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 9, 2024 9:15 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Sapling didn't start as Mercurial. There was already a rewrite of mercurial (backend completely different; maybe some bits of front-end still had some hg left) ages ago. Then an effort was started to rewrite the rewrite in Rust - "monoke" (IIRC). This sapling-scm is (I assume) that Rust rewrite of the already "not mercurial"-hg that Facebook had been using.

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 7, 2024 2:46 UTC (Sat) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link] (1 responses)

I've been playing with Prosody recently who still use it (https://hg.prosody.im/); apparently sudo also does (https://www.sudo.ws/repos/sudo)

The Mercurial website says that Facebook, Mozilla, and Nginx use it. Mozilla announced their move off of Mercurial almost a year ago (but haven't actually done it yet), so I guess now it's just Facebook :)

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 8, 2024 2:42 UTC (Sun) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

The Mercurial website is hideously outdated. Google is using Mercurial as a Piper front-end, and has been for quite some time. I'm not sure I'm allowed to go into further detail than that, but I can point you to https://github.com/martinvonz/jj (which is *not* the Mercurial front-end, it's an entirely different thing that might or might not replace it at some point, maybe).

Mercurial feels "old"

Posted Sep 9, 2024 17:44 UTC (Mon) by auc (subscriber, #45914) [Link]

Why "old" ?

Mercurial remains a relatively user-friendly dvcs with a superset of git capabilities. It is clearly dying but certainly not of old age.

That certainly makes me sad.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 7, 2024 8:59 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (18 responses)

It had to be Github. Depressing.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 7, 2024 9:27 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (8 responses)

> Depressing

No, in fact quite the opposite.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 7, 2024 11:31 UTC (Sat) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (7 responses)

Care to elaborate? What is the opposite of depressing and why?

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 7, 2024 12:32 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (6 responses)

> Care to elaborate?

After the GP does.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 0:54 UTC (Sun) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't think these comments are helpful.

It is obvious that GP meant github is a closed-source platform owned by Microsoft (even though you can interact with it with open-source tools), and perhaps GP had additional concerns.

The opposite of depressing is, I guess, exciting: why?

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 1:37 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

It's now easier to contribute to nginx.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 8:00 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

Only for people willing and able to accept github TOS and get a github account.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 8:21 UTC (Sun) by laf0rge (subscriber, #6469) [Link]

For some people it's not just whether they're "willing" to get an account, but whether github will actually give one to them.

A friend and colleague of many years (not a Russian citizen) happends to have previously worked for a Russian IT security company that ended up on some US embargo list, so without warning his github account was closed. He was not working for that company anymore at that time for several years, and certainly as a junior low-level employee he never had any cotrol over their business decisions, their ownership structure, etc.

People should keep that in mind when starting to use github. Not only is it a proprietary single-point-of-failure, but it also takes decisions like this, unilaterally with very little chance of a successfuly appeal. If your project self-hosts a repository, you're in a much better position to judge if you think that you need to suspend an account for legal reasons or not, rather than having to apply a pre-emtive carpet-bombing approach.

I also know at least one other project that tried to use the official process to get ownership of an 'organization' transferred after the only person with admin access passed away. In theory there's a documented process, and it was attempted to follow that - without success. I guess its merely an aspect of the size of the organization, an like any organization at such a massive size it's hard to impossible to reach some human being with a common sense and decision making authority.

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 7:13 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> The opposite of depressing is, I guess, exciting: why?

Being the language pedant, I'd have said "uplifting" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Another one bites the dust.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 10:09 UTC (Sun) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> I don't think these comments are helpful.

Yeah, starting with the OP's one.

I really dislike concern trolling.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 15:52 UTC (Sun) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (8 responses)

Sure there's some niche folks that can't use GitHub, or a slightly larger group that refuses to use it for RMS-like reasons, but for the majority (on a scale of multiple 9's) having nginx on github is a huge improvement for being able to contribute to the project, report bugs, etc, compared to the previous mailing-list approach.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 17:10 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

The objection is to github specifically, not forges in general, or even "hosted forges", as there are multiple offerings that use nominally F/OSS solutions.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 8, 2024 17:37 UTC (Sun) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]

Which is what I wrote as well, that the complaints were specific to the site in question, and I suppose RMS references don't catch hold these days as well but I intended that as a shorthand for "it's not FOSS enough" more or less.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 9, 2024 6:00 UTC (Mon) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (5 responses)

Thanks, exactly this.

What is even more depressing is to see so many capable nerds doing Microsoft's job for no pay. They should know better.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 9, 2024 6:57 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

> What is even more depressing is to see so many capable nerds doing Microsoft's job for no pay. They should know better.

Or maybe they ARE being compensated!

"Pay" encompasses a lot more than money. That is the big problem behind FLOSS - people need to eat, people need a roof over their head, people DON'T need money! You can't eat pound notes!

Yes money is the universal medium of exchange by which people acquire things they need, but it's not the only way of getting them. FLOSS needs to sort out how people DO get paid, in things that they NEED/WANT. MS just isn't paying in cash.

Cheers,
Wol

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 9, 2024 16:30 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> You can't eat pound notes!

I feel like this is a missed premise of a Monty Python sketch. Or a Mr. Bean scenario on a misinterpretation of "pound cake".

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 10, 2024 5:42 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (2 responses)

You're right, in a way.

See, I watch my young colleagues (web devels) being sucked into the VSCode universe until the point they don't even /know/ there's something else "out there", let alone have the capability to switch -- while keeping their jobs.

I observe Microsoft trying to pull off what Google did: dominate the "full stack", server-side (search) and client-side (Android, Chrome) -- but in the IT pro realm. LinkedIn, Github, VSCode. A question of time until VSCode nudges, then practically forces you to "share" your code on Github, for ChatGPT [1] to digest it.

And they are succeeding.

[1] Yeah, yeah. Let me use that as an abbreviation.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 12, 2024 6:28 UTC (Thu) by demarchi (subscriber, #67492) [Link] (1 responses)

kmod maintainer here, talking about my experience with a similar move.

Currently the official git repo for kmod is on git.kernel.org, but I started mirroring kmod in Github a release or 2 ago. For last release I also started using github issues for tracking tasks, improvements, bugs, github-actions for CI and more actively track and review PRs, considering it not only a mirror, but also a place for development. This attracted new developers and developers who eventually contributed through the mailing are simply dominating on number of commits/changes. I'm glad that for next release I as maintainer won't be the almost sole developer working on it.

Things that we didn't have before and I don't really have time to maintain infrastructure for all these things to host them myself, besides the normal time I dedicate to maintain the project afloat.

So from my POV it was a very positive thing and I think nginx probably went through similar considerations to move to github. It could be gitlab, it could be some other forge. But when any of those allow an open source project to be better maintained, I think it's a win, regardless of how much one is more or less opensource than the other. If today I have to move it elsewhere, there wouldn't be much to lose: most of CI is kept generic with few .yml integrating in their infra... this could be easily ported over to e.g. gitlab. Issues can be easily migrated, etc.

For the hyper-majority it's a huge improvement.

Posted Sep 14, 2024 7:57 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

I hear you, and I understand your motives. Above all, I do respect your decision (or that of Nginx's devels) -- after all it's you the ones doing the hard work. And I see that it's a short-term benefit (which still might make or break a project's survival, so...)

Long-term, though... I don't believe it's a good idea to put so much power into Microsoft's hands to let them shape how free software is being made.


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