My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in.
Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pain points are. Constructive criticism is an important of doing great work. I appreciate how specific and detailed you were in your feedback. Getting a good sense of specific problems provides a more fruitful beginning to a conversation than "it suxx0rs", so I appreciate that.
I am still figuring out how GitHub fits together as an organization but I am happy to take a look into these issues and ensure they are considered in how future work is planned. We have a growing product team at GitHub that I know is passionate about solving the major pain points that rub up against our users. Obviously I can't make any firm commitments as I am not on the product team, but I can ensure the right eyeballs are on this. I also want to explore with my colleagues how we can be a little clearer about future feature and development plans to see if we can reduce some ambiguity.
As I say, I am pretty new, so I am still getting the lay of the land, but feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any further questions or concerns about this or any other issue. I am at jono@github.com.
An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box. I've been on GitHub since 2008 and I have been paying every month for years, but other than emailing support I have no idea how to vote for a feature request.
My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. There are a lot of other people with the same frustration [2], but we have no idea how to get that on GitHub's roadmap.
An open question is how the community should provide feedback.
Perhaps if Github used their own issues system to gather feedback on Github itself, they'd more rapidly improve it. I'm sure they'd feel a lot of these pain points in a far sharper, more visceral way if they were subjected to them daily.
> My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'.
What I came up to work around this is:
- Create an org named <YOUR-USERNAME>-deprecated
- Move the projects to the organization
- Set the avatar of the organization to your avatar, with desaturated colors (purely cosmetic, optional)
I've had pretty good success with feature requests in Github – but I agree that it at least _feels_ like it depends on who is replying to you (or even what state of mind they're in; copy paste responses has been had).
Anyway, a good example of a successful feature request – shared since it might help others in their quest for success – included me attempting to reduce the problem, scoping it and suggesting a solution. If you can find examples of this problem over multiple open source repositories (in my case nodejs) it seems to contribute to it getting fixed.
As a software engineer, I am reminded of when I go to Home Depot and ask someone for help and they say, "Oh, I do not know. I am new here...". I think it is best to come prepared with the right answers. As you can see from the doc, there are a lot of maintainers who have signed this. Perhaps:
- Note the feedback.
- Bring in the right folks to consult with on your end.
- Write a public response with concrete information (should be first interaction).
- Finally, reach out to the authors of this post. Perhaps, getting them more clarity on your roadmap and your thought process will go a long way in resolving matters like this with high profile maintainers.
My main goal in responding was to acknowledge the issues. This is just the start of the process, and by no means the end.
The next step, as you mention, is to bring the right people in. This is why I want to ensure this is raised with our teams inside GitHub to explore ways to rectify some of these concerns.
I personally prefer someone to at least acknowledge someone now owns the issues than to wait in silence while they gather the right people and formulate a concrete response. That doesn't happen quickly in some cases and the silence can exacerbate the issue, which ironically is why this hit HN in the first place.
I appreciate the prompt response. Face-to-face at Home Depot you know the message was received. Online it's nice to get an immediate read receipt with the real reply coming later.
Promises about the future about Github’s roadmap is understandably difficult to make, besides by a very small number of people at the top. I don’t think this is the expectation. But visibility into past failure to address these concerns and the current status is long overdue. I assume when these maintainers reached out in private channels, they were equally detailed, and have waited years.
At present, I’m not sure how this response is different from the "empty response" that motivated the publication of this document in the first place, except that this response is also public. Comments like "happy to take a look into these issues", "considered in how future work is planned" and "ensure the right eyeballs are on this" uses a lot of words to say nothing. If the community department is not the right place, maybe it’s time to walk over to where the the product group sits and ask. They probably read Hacker New too.
I’ll also highlight a possible theory: the right people at Github have already looked at these requests and decided that is not what Github Issues is for. Perhaps Issues is prioritized for the masses, not the small minority of very popular projects (but not resourceful enough that they have staff). Each of these feature requests do add friction (if only in complexity) and the majority of projects that do not need and should not utilize them. Hopefully someone at Github will quash this theory but it is consistent with events so far.
GitHub has settings for individual repos. People can opt to turn the issue tracker off completely.
Why not have the option to enable issue voting? It could be as easy as stars for issues.
Custom issue instructions would be trivial to tuck away in the settings page or associate with a specially named markdown file. They turn a wiki on by default, but you can't instruct users about the info you expect in their issue on the page where they create the issue. Documentation is very effective when it is inline with the system it is describing.
Custom issue fields with validation is a little more complex. Punt.
One thing I would love to see for my own projects is a way to temporarily completely block off contributions on threads by people who only watched/starred the repository for less than 48 hours or something like this.
When people submit your issue tracker to hackernews/reddit/twitter all hell breaks lose and time gets wasted for nothing.
Interesting idea, but I wonder what the right metric is to determine legacy vs. new users. I certainly haven't starred/watched every package I've ever `npm install`ed.
Respectfully Jono, I think your reply is symptomatic of the issues at the heart of the matter. GitHub is, whether it expected to be or not, whether it wants to be or not, now at the heart of the OSS community. For the "Director of Community" at a company which plays such an important role in the OSS community, which itself plays an enormously important role in the broader software and civic communities and is populated by abnormally high numbers of passionate and talented contributors, to respond to a HN story with such a high profile by:
1) apologizing for being new
2) extending borderline patronizing praise (the OP likely wanted a response to the issues put forth, not your approval)
& 3) a promise, which you can't necessarily keep, to put eyes on the issue instead of speaking to the issues raised directly.
It's not what I would expect from someone in that role at that sort of company. It's, unfortunately, what I would expect from a company that had the sort of issues raised by the OP.
Your response, specifically #3, makes me wonder if you have ever worked in a medium to large business. Forgive me if I read it wrong. I think his response is solid and the best that one could expect from his role. I could not imagine some director from a different department by passing the product team and coming to my development team and saying, "stop what you are doing, and handle my request! I read something on HN! I need a plan of action that directly addresses issues that were raised!". I would, however, expect him to say that he knows or can find out (he is new still) who needs to see this and make sure the discussions happen to ensure that product team has the information required to make an informed discission allowing for a roadmap to be formed that could be shared with the community. He can totally guarantee the right people see it. He can't ensure they do anything about it, but he can champion the issue. I would hope/expect to hear back after all this has happened. What's wrong with saying he is still getting an understanding of how things work at github? And what approval are you dismayed with? His acknowledgment that feedback is important? That was just civility.
One suggestion is to improve the permissions system. For example, third-party github plugins that interact with the github system (e.g., setting labels, responding to comments) require "write permissions" which gives those systems "push" access to the underlying repo. Simply separating the git repository access control from the github UI / issues / pull requests access control system would be very helpful. I'm sure there are many other examples of where the permissions system needs some finer-grained access.
I've been personally paying for a couple of years, and the SAAS company I work for (~50 engineers) has committed to moving away from Github for some of these (and other) reasons.
Here are some of my fave :+1:-a-thons that help demonstrate when the issue system starts to be less useful, and the Github acknowledgement seems sparse:
Also, you might consider empowering your social media team. I see Github as a pretty cool company. And when I sent this tweet, I was expecting to have a bit of a shared chortle with this tweet as I know I would of had with @SlackHq:
I've witnessed Jono's outstanding work at Canonical/Ubuntu, and as you can see from his comment above he's a great guy. No matter what you think of Github, I think you should appreciate this.
There appears to be a need for some a different class of repository for larger open source software.
Similar to the way twitter provides verified accounts maybe
GitHub should consider a tagging these popular repositories to allow for more advanced control over the collaboration project.
When I first read the letter I was a little bit disappointed, one thing I've enjoyed (to an limited extent) is the low barrier of entry to pull requests. The spring boot team especially are extremely patient and understanding when it comes to pull requests.
Hopefully there's enough community will in this to encourage GitHub to make the change, if it does really come down it not being worth the money it would be a disappointing sign.
Are you THE Jono Bacon of Ubuntu fame? If so, I have the best of hopes for Github.
Best of luck in your new position and I hope we'll get to see many great new features on the platform.
That's why you shouldn't use Google Docs for such an article (even if it comes in the form of a letter). Nobody expects the concept of pages on the web (as in books, not as in web page).
@jono Will you be able to answer, if github has any plans in the roadmap to open source the code in 1-2 years and develop in open instead of closed rooms.
Given many open source project adopting it for their code repository its important question to be answered.
Otherwise sourceforge.net story will repeat again, this time with github. Many projects adapted it when it was closed source and then when they open source it slowly and later due to falling revenues just started crumbling.
Problem with them open sourcing their platform is that the platform base is used in enterprise and how the bulk of their revenue is made... Who wants to buy milk when the cow is being given away?
This, I feel, is the most important bug, even though it precedes the list:
> 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.
I'd like to call out that the GitHub user @isaacs maintains an unofficial repository[1] where the issues are "Issues for GitHub". It's not much more than a token of goodwill from a user to open a place like that to organize bugs (GitHub: you are lucky you have such a userbase!), but it's the best thing I know of for "has someone else thought of this?"[2]. Many of the issues that have been filed there are excellent ideas.
[2]: though I'd say if you also think about it, you should also go through the official channel, even if just to spam them so they know people want that feature.
The author mentions that if GitHub was open source, they would implement these features themselves.
Gitlab[1] is an open source repository manager that supports local installs as well as public hosting at gitlab.com. If author appreciates open source, perhaps they should put their efforts into improving an existing open source option rather than relying on a proprietary solution.
At GitLab we would welcome contributions. More than 1000 people already contributed and everyone is welcome. Also see my other answer in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905756
I cannot fathom why people are still actively supporting GitHub.
Even if you ignore the ethical reasons, which if you are an open source developer really should suffice, GitLab is better and more customizable in every way.
Supporting it benefits yourself and all of the FOSS community.
This was my first thought after reading it. I've used gitlab.com, also locally, and it is ok. Presumably people will want to stick with github due to popularity though.
GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008. Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372).
The word "Social" no longer appears on GitHub's landing page. They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.
I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.
I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".
Yeah, I'd honestly like for a website that actually focused on "Social Coding" rather than the Enterprise Money that GitHub is focusing on. Tbh, that is what GitLab, Bitbucket does also which is why they really are only effective as replacements rather than improvements upon.
I wonder if threads like this keep popping up if people will say "Fuck it" and build an OSS Github clone that focus on being the Reddit of Code/Git rather than another Version Control Enterprise product.
I'd do it but I'm an asshole, not a community builder.
EDIT:
Since I'm in the edit window and its complaining I submit too fast:
Tbh, the problem with Kallithea SCM and Trac is they aren't really built to generate network effects. They both suffer from the same problem as literally every other unsuccessful Github competitor has:
1) You need something built to generate a network effect first, other considerations second, to successfully compete.
2) You need to then leverage that network to chase Corporate money.
GitHub seems to be neglecting #1 in favor of #2 and that imbalance is an opportunity if someone can exploit it. However, that requires someone who is good at being a community builder rather than a software dev.
Recently even Python language planned to move its repositories to github.com for network effect, instead of helping projects like kallithea SCM and trac by partnering with software conservancy or gnu. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
I hope they change the decision to support one of the project like Kallithea or trac by migrating their system and build network effects.
Your `.git` directory would become huge pretty quickly and you would have plenty of problems with people commenting on issues without having a repo up-to-date. How would you handle conflicts in that case?
Mayhap it is related to their abandonment of being a meritocracy as doing such was being divisive? Success can be very devise as well so perhaps they are making a noble sacrifice to avoid dividing people.
We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent. Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue trackers, which is really a huge part of a project's documentation, to a for-profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good interoperability.
If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it's time to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever having the advantage of "locking in" its users with extremely high migration costs.
> If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations,
There is no longer an "if". It's absolutely true that GitHub is cruising at this time. For example: They are more interested in hiring community managers / community "heroes" instead of actual engineers in SF.
This. I'm a big fan of Github, but it bothers me that this single service is the centerpiece of most OSS projects. We see it every time Github goes down and virtually nobody can be productive anymore.
I hope to see a version control system on top of IPFS some day.
Ironically, git itself is decentralized. More effort should go into decentralized software architectures, especially in the current security climate where having a central point of failure is like having a virtual bull's eye for bad guys. There's no reason you couldn't have a decentralized issue tracker for example.
>We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now
Distributed is the key word. Blockchain/Bitcoin (not withstanding the hurtful politics ongoing at present) has shown the way, and ideally most shared/social things should work in a distributed, trust-less environment in future. Including Social networks and Search Engines.
So it is quite natural, that OSS developers can pave the way for shared/distributed source control (a protocol on top of GIT. Just like HTTP is over TCP).
Just to clarify, I don't hate github. But it sort of obscures the beauty/advancement that is GIT, over previous version control softwares. Wonder what does the creator Linus think of this?
I am not Michael Bayer (but I hope to be more like him someday)... that said, what I think he means or could mean is that issues would be distributed along with the repo. Maybe something like a git log for issues that are attached to and/or part of the repo itself.
Thinking about it, something like this would be sweet. I would immediately have a snap shot of things that might go boom when I run said software. eta: Instead, I have to go dig through github itself, which is slow compared to greping through a git log.
Why distributed version control? You need a central place to pull from and push to, to ensure that forks and patches are not duplicated everywhere... ;)
There’s not necessarily an antagonism between distributed and centralised in this case. You can still have a centralised frontend such as Github Issues, backed by a versioned and distributed backend using i.e. git.
I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational.
Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are maintainers of JS/HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare JS to <lang> projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For example, there is a strong correlation between +1'ers and JS repos vs. Python or vice versa. Perhaps, we could walk away with JS devs are more chatty than CPP developers when discussing issues... I don't know, just a thought.
I think it's just monkey see->monkey do. As soon as one person said +1, everyone that saw it thought that that's just how you voted for stuff. It's the same reason you see comments on HN or reddit that just say "This." or that if you leave your shoes by the door, everyone else will do the same. I doubt these people keep doing it if you ask them not to.
There's an old story about this man who stood quietly next to a closed door in Moscow, said nothing to no one, and did nothing else of interest. Eventually others joined him, and before long a queue has formed. No one knew what they were standing in line for.
I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits.
Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.
I maintain a C repo[1] and user idiocy is much lower than what I've seen in JS projects of similar popularity. Still, I agree with these criticisms of GitHub. I hate +1 spam enough to delete such comments. Sometimes I even ban those who do it. I'm frustrated by people who open idiotic issues[2][3][4][5]. I procrastinate on bad pull requests because my options are:
1. Close the PR with little or no comment. People then think I'm an asshole.
2. Spend hours explaining why the code is terrible and why it can't be improved. In addition to being a big time sink, PR submitters often don't understand the criticisms. Half the time, they still think I'm wrong.
People even defend stuff as obviously wrong as adding a thousand lines of GPL'd code to an Apache-licensed project.[6] Then they say I should remove .gitignore support from ag because it doesn't implement 100% of .gitignore syntax. As if users would be happier with tons of extraneous results instead of some extraneous results.
A lot of this is cultural, but GitHub could help steer things in a better direction with the features proposed in this letter. I hope they take this letter seriously.
I actually hesitate to really "watch" repos because the sheer volume of email generated is staggering. I take my hat off to those who run successful OSS projects. Thank you!
The same question about JS repos struck me. I suspect that if you write a shared letter then you just ask your network to sign it instead of <random other person from different ecosystem>, but I would be curious to know if these grievances are disproportionate in different communities.
I'd like to think that someone who writes this kind of letter would take such a thing into account. It's really possible that there is a strong correlation between a language and people being more involved with Github. I wouldn't be surprised that many developers from other language ecosystems just don't care.
From skimming, they found "+/-1, because REASON" to be valuable, not "+/-1". Indeed, in the open letter, they mention these are valuable, but the current implementation is a pain.
Yep. The problem is that some users are not aware of the conventions, and often you see on the Android Google Code repo "+1" or something along the lines of "Google plz fix this".
This becomes heavily apparent when someone posts an Android issue directly onto the Android subreddit. I suspect the same could happen with GitHub issues. When you see others posting "+1", then others follow the same practice.
I agree that the suggestions are great; I'm also generally happy to see a letter like this take a clear tone without being aggressive or overtly confrontational. Re: the prevalence JS/HTML projects, I think that may just be a matter of simple base popularity; the web is the most popular development platform, and JS is the most used language on github (githut.info has great stats on this). If the letter gains steam, I'm sure we could expect project maintainers from other ecosystems to get on board.
I noticed that most of the signers are maintaning JS/HTML projects too.
I wonder if those types of projects are more likely to have these problems (larger userbase? Less experienced userbase? just different userbase?)? It could also just be a coincidence that they knew each other because they work on similar things, and a group of people who knew each other are the ones who wrote the letter.
+1 isn't spam. It's valuable. However the implementation of how people can +1 an issue that's very important to them is the point. There should be a voting system.
Spam would indicate that +1 adds no value.. But it does! If I have an issue with no comments, no indication of its importance to the users, then I would deprioritize that issue over another one that has lots of activity.
This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub's simple approach:
>Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.
Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process and GitHub has historically taken a pretty solid stance against this.
There are tools like Jira and Bugzilla for people who prefer this style of issue management. I hope GitHub resists the temptation to add whatever people ask of them.
Yes! The maintainers deliberately want to add cognitive overhead so the quality bar for creating issues is higher.
By having simple zero-friction forms, you haven't removed cognitive overhead. You've simply shifted the cognitive load into the followup messages asking for clarification of "reproduction steps", "version tested". The issues' threads therefore begin with "meta" type questions which duplicate the checkboxes and dropdowns you were trying to avoid.
The default can remain zero-friction but it seems very reasonable to offer options for maintainers to gain some control over their inbox.
Zero structure just leads to lots of shitty issues that have no information on what version of the software it was against, no reproduction steps, and no stacktrace or debug output. I'm tired of closing issues with "I cant reproduce at all, maybe you're on an old version? Anyway feel free to open a new bug if you ever come up with a reproduction step..."
A simple optional field to include the version number that the issue was being reported against would do wonders for my interaction with users.
And you don't need to include that on your software project, but really if our users can't be bothered to tell us what version they're running, I have many, many other issues to fix which I know are broken in master.
Which I guess is the difference. If you're a small project with few users, then the handful of bug reports you get are useful and you want a zero barrier.
I have literally thousands of bug reports, hundreds of those will be left without ever being fixed (even though they may be perfectly legitimate). I have to triage. If a user is blocked by not being able to tell me what version they are running then that pre-triage of making them not even bother to cut a ticket with bad information is useful because then they don't waste any of my time...
This is very true. While clunky to use most support sites for enterprise software includes these types of fields as mandatory to complete a support ticket.
As someone who has opened issues myself on projects in gitHub its easy to be unaware or even forget all the information a maintainer would need to reproduce the issue. As someone who uses an open source stack every day anything to make the whole issue flow better for maintainers and users I'm for 110%
But the big thing that GitHub doesn't use GitHub for is interacting with the masses.
- GitHub doesn't use GitHub issues to take feature requests or bug reports.
- GitHub doesn't use Pull Requests to allow users to submit bug fixes
When all your issues and pull-request are being raised by a defined set of people who are (or ought to be) committed to the same collective goal (because they're employees of the same company) you can develop a culture and norms around how those things work.
If "Some Guy" at GitHub raises issues where the only description is "This feature doesn't work on Mac" or raises PRs where the only description is "this fixes a bug I found" the cultural pressure would teach him/her that's not how things are done, and if the lesson wasn't learned, then they wouldn't last at GitHub.
When the people you're interacting with are infrequent contributors, it's a different scenario. They need guidance. They need to be pushed to go down the helpful path on their first attempt, because there are too many new contributors and they often don't stick around for long enough to change behaviours by osmosis and cultural pressure.
> Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process
I do concur, but there should be at least some of them. One shouldn't have to hope that people will be kind enough to submit proper issues, the platform should force them somehow to do so. I think, if a study of github issues was made, we'd see that about first five messages on a given issue would be those of maintainers craving for more input. What is the output of dmesg, how is your configuration, what is the output of the process, can you run it with the verbose flag on... A bit of cognitive overload is good, so that who submit bugs are those who take the burden of doing so.
If I read it right, they're not asking for a more complicated default for all projects, just that they can customize it for their projects.
And I agree, simple is good... but simple is also bad for large projects, as while it makes it easier to create a ticket, it makes it harder to track for the maintainers. They are (rightfully) looking to ease their work, and I do believe it is a net win for both sides if filing a bug is made a little harder, but it becomes a lot easier to manage.
It can be as simple as a text file that is dropped into the content-free TEXTAREA that currently greets new issue reporters. Try running a big project like jQuery, Angular, or Babel and you'll understand how important a feature like this would be.
Disagreed. In a free-for-all environment like FOSS, collective lack of details means more time wasted to gather/request for relevant information. Maintainers have the rights to request for such things before sifting through a potential mess of mostly incomplete issues/PRs. Their time is better spent anywhere but gathering correct versions to chase down a bug. People should have the common sense to provide those beforehand but alas, many do not.
It may take cognitive overhead away from the submitter but it shoves it onto the maintainet at the same time. Instead of 100 people having to deal with 1u of cognitive overhead each, you have 1 person having to deal with 100u or more to extract information from the submitters.
This is why your application should always have a "dump version string"-button, conveniently embedded together with your "report bug" button which doesn't have to be more advanced than simply opening your email-client or forward you to a webpage. This form should be free text but pre-filled with the version string pasted at the top and contain headers that invite the user to fill in the rest, such as Reproducing: <write what you did to cause the bug>. 100 different drop-downs makes nobody happy.
The bullet points of complaints feel like a continuation of Linus Torvald's refusal of github pull requests in May 2012.[1]
Taken all together, it seems like github is on a path of alienating their most valuable members. Github was unresponsive to Linus' feature requests and it turns out that theme continues almost 3 years later.
If github plans to evolve into a full-featured ALM[2] like MS Team Foundation or JIRA instead of being relegated to being just a "dumb" disk backup node for repositories, they have to get these UI workflow issues fixed.
I don't see anything wrong with going after the massive amount of smaller project with simple needs, instead of the few large projects & popular projects with very specific needs.
If github evolves to the projects you're mentioning, you'll surely alienate the many more casual users. I personally hate working with the bloated applications you mention.
Distributed revision control users whining about centralized repository lacking features.
Ummm ... anybody getting the irony here?
And, from a GitHub business perspective, why do I hear Lily Tomlin: "We don't care. We don't have to."
Everybody anointed GitHub as "the chosen one" over strenuous objections from some of us that creating another monopoly for open source projects is a bad idea.
Pardon me for enjoying some Schadenfreude now that GitHub leveraged the open-source adoption into corporate contracts and now doesn't have to give two shits about open source folks.
I'm an open source project maintainer and share many of the pain points outlined in the document, but I also totally agree with you. Giving control of your project to a company means losing control and having to resort to desperate pleas like this. This is simply what happens when you can't fork it yourself like you could with an open source project.
It's likely that GitHub will alleviate these pain points in time, but the lesson is the same: let a company control your destiny and you can no longer have what you want or need when their interests diverge from yours, even if their system is the best there is and was radically better than everything else at the time you switched to it.
There's been no mention of phabricator yet so I thought I'd give it a shout out. It's used by LLVM, FreeBSD, Blender, Wikimedia and others and I love it. It's under very active development and even if it doesn't solve every issue in this letter, by using an open source tool for development you of course have the option to customize it to the needs of your community.
Phabricator is pretty great overall, love that it's under such active development.
Only gripe is that some parts of it are still highly coupled, so doing something like adding a custom button to the text editor view or writing your own internal application very quickly becomes a huge mess, an effect that is multiplied by the active development and no promise of stable public APIs.
Your experience will be great as long as you don't try and do anything custom, at least for the next year or two.
Phabricator is great! I host it for a couple of my projects. I love it, and it was easy to setup.
Seriously: if you have a web server (or php hosting) anywhere, try out phabricator; it's easy to setup, and you can even point it at a github (or any public git/svn/hg) repository to fiddle around with its features, as hosting the repository inside phabricator is not mandatory.
Another shoutout here to phabricator. I started hosting it internally at the company a year ago and have near 100% adoption from developers for code reviews, additionally using the task/issue tracking for some projects.
Is this a case of the squeakiest wheels getting the grease? What if these problems aren't representative of the overall user base? What if far more people prefer a more simple, minimalistic interface than an ultra-customizeable interface with myriad custom actions and events. I've always appreciated software that deliberately keeps things simple (Basecamp and Workflowly come to mind). It sounds like these people want a full blown Jira/Stash installation.
I don't like the general feel of these suggestions. It sounds like more bureaucratic features, the lack of which is a big part of why GitHub is so pleasant.
Making an issue or a pull request feels like having a casual chat with the project maintainers. Adding fields and other hoops to jump through puts distance between people.
I guess for maintainers of popular projects, everybody's "casual chat" (by people who did not read CONTRIBUTING.txt, do not supply the version of relevant software they are using etc.) is not as fun as it is for you.
Wow, what a bunch of whiners. If you hate github so much why don't you just fork it and fix-- Oh, right. It's not open source.
Well, there's your problem right there.
(I have sooooo much more in this vein but I'll spare you. ;-)
EDIT: No I won't. Fuck it. This is too ridiculous.
These guys (and they are all guys) chained themselves to github's metaphorical car and now they're complaining that the ride is too bumpy and the wind is a little much.
Don't whine about not getting to sit inside the car! Unchain yourself and go catch one of the cars where the doors are unlocked and open and the driver and other passengers are beckoning you to join them. (Apologies for the mangled metaphor.)
These folks come off to me like masochistic babies.
Shouldn't we (the OSS community) have an open source, roll-your-own version of something like GitHub? Like, the repo-management equivalent to a phpBB or a Wiki or a Wordpress.
We do have the separate components, though maybe the hard part is to glue them together. But still, it is something what would be worth the time and effort, wouldn't it?
I do like Github, and I understand how it makes the entire process of maintaining a code repo a lot easier, but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing? I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain, but I see it as the only real solution. Developing in the open can't be done on platforms where restrictions apply, and they do apply. I'm saying this with no intention of sounding like a jerk, but 18 project maintainers and/or developer need to write an open letter to get Github to give'em a "me too" button? I understand the issue, but i still find it rather silly.
The only aspect I could think of where Github has the pro is the community of developers it has, but does it really matter that much? Especially for established/big projects that probably don't care about the fork/stars numbers, or the random look around-ers that pass by.
> I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain
You outlined exactly why people don't build their own or use another system. Github is the best there is. That doesn't mean it doesn't have problems, but if your company/project/expertise isn't focused in collaborative development and/or version control, you're just distracting yourself by building your own.
The authors are not saying "we can build a better Github." They have complaints and would like them resolved, but don't see a good way of having that happen.
Doesn't matter really as it's still a locked platform. The argument they're making is that they're developing in the open and they'd like some sort of expedited treatment because of the size of the project or because they're doing OSS. I don't think those two can go hand in hand all the way.
The point about GitHub today is that being "the best there is" is as irrelevant to its continued success as "being the best microblogging service there is" is to Twitter's.
Open Source projects move to GitHub because their users are all already familiar with GitHub from all the other open source projects that use it. That means those people already have a user account, know how to check out your code, are able to file issues, and can probably make contributions even if they're not very familiar with git, for example using one of the GitHub integrated GUIs that will handhold you through making a PR. If you are an odd-duck project using some other infrastructure you don't have any of these advantages, and the barrier to entry for potential contributors is correspondingly larger.
For users having a near-monoculture of source code hosting has all the same advantages but reversed; it means they only need a single account, and that every process they learn — all of which are well documented across the web — is fully transferable between projects. It also gives them a recognised place to show off their own code, and increasingly people are asking for a link to a GitHub profile as part of a hiring process. This even happens at Mozilla, an organisation that doesn't actually use GitHub for its most prominent projects (but increasingly does for new things; the advantages I mention here are valuable even when you already have everything set up for using something else).
Another benefit enjoyed by projects that use GitHub is the plethora of tools designed to integrate with it; again little to do with the intrinsic merits of the tool and everything to do with network effects (although I will allow that the API is generally very good). So if you chose an alternative to GitHub you might miss out on IDE integration, Travis, landscape.io, reviewable.io, or any number of other third party tools that either exclusively work with GitHub or have smoother integration in the case of such a well-worn path.
Tools like reviewable.io are interesting because they are clearly making up for deficiencies in the GitHub platform itself. In that case it's the totally, utterly, useless code review functionality in stock GitHub. And there are many other things in the site that could stand to be improved. For example the notification system that either spams you with every comment from a repo or ensures that you miss anything you don't check via the web UI. The permissions system that makes it impossible to add commits to a PR against your own repository without losing all the metadata associated with the PR. The issue tracker that doesn't allow assigning issues to anyone other than a project admin. But, from a business point of view, none of these things matter because GitHub isn't popular for being the best. It's popular for having been good enough for long enough to become ubiquitous, and now not being so bad as to negate the enormous network effects.
So the core of the problem here is not whether or not the authors, or anyone else, can build a better GitHub. The problem is that even if they could it would have to be wildly, dramatically, better to even provide competition. And so people, without meaningful leverage, resort to writing open letters and hoping that they can drum up enough noise that someone at GitHub chooses to care.
>but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing?
Github is a great advertising and marketing platform for large OSS projects. Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge (sorry FOSShub, it was a bold try), with all that implies.
The thing I really don't get is why people use it for small projects. Like Facebook, Twitter and basically every other social media site out there, it's a drama factory. It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
That's the last thing small OSS projects need, and I'd have thought most 5-15 man projects would be vastly better off throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business. I acknowledge that this reduces discoverability by some amount and thus risks taking a hit to your developer acquisition, but I'd love to see some hard numbers on how much. I'd wager that much like the Apple app store, if you're not in the top 50 on github, you're no one.
But hey, I'm apparently an old fogey born young, and I prefer to self-host when I can, so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
@Sir_Substance - thank you for the kind mention. I agree with you but don't forget that any Empire will fall sooner or later. People work with enthusiasm at a new project, after a while this new excitement is replaced by greed because the financial thing becomes the most important aspect. At this stage I would say that GitHub is Google, SourceForge is Yahoo and FossHub aims to become DuckDuckGo. We need to improve so instead of throwing us at garbage we would appreciate a constructive criticism. Thank you!
The reason why I thought bigger projects would be more capable of handling this is because team size = more manpower obviously.
> Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge.
Not exactly sure what they're supposed to perform better/easier on a shared-hosting locked-in platform. If it's the issue of getting people excited about the project to want to use it or join in and help, it'd be interesting to see if there are any numbers to back this up.
I'm not sure about sourceforge but i never thought of it as a serious thing for big project hosting before github came around.
> It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
Totally. This is a good point I think. I never understood the fascination with obsessive forking (edit: lol, after the letter moved to github it got 2 forks! WHY! https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github) just to apply a patch or change a line of code (there's a lot of those). It's a nice feature and all, but not really that useful imo. I'd like to see some data on forks that haven't been touched as well, amounting to garbage, outdated code basically.
> ... throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business...
The thing that bugs me the most about Github and the likes is this. It's slowly taking away the will or need to do this. Same as how the use of Slack/Gitter has somewhat eclipsed IRC in OSS world. From my experience, I learn a lot when I'm doing things I don't really want to do or I find tedious because I either discover that there's a detail that I don't understand well or it motivated me to write an automator to sort things out.
> so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
Wait until the fixation on cloud crap washes off and everything will be back to normal lol.
It's a momentum thing I think. A big part of the Github platform mirrors a social media platform. When you meet a developer, you check out what they're up to on Github just like you might check on a friend's status on Facebook. Like Twitter, it's a way to get your name out there.
Also, I don't want to have to maintain an account on a Gitlab (or equivalent) server for every project. Anyone who has enough interest to troll through issues on a project or open an issue already has a Github account. It lowers the barrier to entry for your project.
The final thing is just name recognition. People trust code from Github. They shouldnt, but a Github URL legitimizes your project more than git.abrakadoodle.io.
> Also, I don't want to have to maintain an account on a Gitlab (or equivalent) server for every project. Anyone who has enough interest to troll through issues on a project or open an issue already has a Github account. It lowers the barrier to entry for your project.
There are multiple ways to go around this, OpenID, Mozilla Persona, or any third-party authenticator.
> The final thing is just name recognition. People trust code from Github. They shouldnt, but a Github URL legitimizes your project more than git.abrakadoodle.io.
I see this more of an additional reason for big projects to move away from Github. It gives unwarranted legitimacy to everything on the platform.
Along the same line of thought: there's a lot of momentum regarding tooling surrounding GitHub. Continuous integration works smoothly. Slack works smoothly. github/hub and ghi let you interact with the issues and repos from the command line. Vim, Emacs, Atom, and Sublime plugins exist to integrate with GitHub. While moving to another hosting platform might fix some things, there is a lot of solid tooling built around GitHub.
I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the moment. Why has Github been complacent?
I'm maintaining a GitLab instance for my team at work and it's been really great for us. I am pretty disappointed that the CE version doesn't include GitLab Pages, though, as that was the one feature I missed most from GitHub and GitLab Enterprise is outside of our budget at this time.
By their very nature, git repos are one of the easiest things to migrate. Simply point at a new remote and push, and that's really it. It means that, unlike many other services, I could see GitHub being completely abandoned almost over night. If something better came along.
The same reason YouTube is so popular. Neither GitHub or YouTube are big because of their technology, it's their community that keeps people there.
It's a huge tax on attention and contributions if a project decides not to use GitHub. There are many GitHub replacements but none of them have the community of GitHub.
Playing devil's advocate - in their respective heydays, SourceForge and Google Code both seeemed unassailable. They had large, active communities that hosted the most popular OSS projects.
For a very large percentage of young developers I work with, "Git" and "GitHub" are synonyms. GitHub has made themselves literally synonymous with version control to a large number of people. That's a lot of social momentum that a competitor has to overcome. In light of that, it's not that surprising at all that GitHub has become complacent.
Because Github succeeded in being the Git repo host. I think you're on track with saying their complacency is an opportunity and I wouldn't doubt to see a Github killer born this year.
> I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the moment. Why has Github been complacent?
Network effects strong enough to slow the growth of any competitor long enough for GitHub to adapt.
That will be extremely challenging. GitHub has a huge community with a lot of heavy weight projects behind it. Sure you can add a few features on top of whatever you build, but GitHub has the ability to copy whatever seems popular very quickly.
Bitbucket requires payment for larger numbers of collaborators. Github requires payment for private repositories. Open source requires unlimited collaborators, and no one wants to pay.
Most people on GitHub do not suffer these issues, simply put. It's only really the popular open source projects, which represents a small minority but are loud and vocal.
My company pays me to work on a fairly old-school free software project and we run our own git service. Our workflow is email based so we won't ever consider switching to GitHub.
That said, we do sometimes consider setting up an official mirror on GitHub. Ideology aside (some team members might think we shouldn't promote a propriety solution for free software project), the main thing that puts us off is that there is no way to disable pull requests. Closing all pull requests by hand is not appealing; leaving all pull requests open is not desirable. We can probably write a bot to close pull requests, but that is just yet another administrative burden.
Not sure if GitHub will ever consider allowing users to disable pull requests though. That seems to go against GitHub's core interest.
I myself don't really see any motive of doing that. It is administrative burden (maintaining the service that bridge API and existing system, managing GitHub accounts / tokens). Compare that to the number / quality of pull requests received [0] [1] and I find RoI of doing that very low.
I work on a very relevant project called Product Pains.
React Native, the open source project, is using Product Pains instead of GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. This is because there were thousands of open issues and, just as this document mentions, it's impossible to organize them. The comments are all "+1" and it's really hard to tell what's important and what's just noise.
1. It's a temporary alternative to GitHub issues. I'm guessing GitHub will get to adding votes eventually. If you want to use Product Pains for organizing issues for your open source project, go for it. I'll even give it away to you for free.
2. It's a community dedicated to improving products. This document is chock-full of great, constructive, actionable feedback. Product Pains is a community built for posting exactly this. You can post feedback publicly, about any product, people can vote on it, and posts with a lot of votes create a social responsibility for the company to respond.
3. It's a way for your voice to be heard. Posting on Hacker News lasts a day and will get your voice heard. If you post actionable, constructive feedback on Product Pains, and 150 people vote on it, it lingers waiting for GitHub to do something about it. Around 600 users on Product Pains are also React Native developers. They'd probably be ecstatic to vote on constructive feedback for GitHub.
I've used Bitbucket for years and I've never seen "multiple assignees for an issue" as something which is available. I've just looked at a couple of our (private) repositories and I still can't see how you would do it. Either that feature doesn't exist or it's used in an extremely obscure manner.
Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits.
It'd be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know what's next up in my queue of things to do; right now I've got 5 tags called NextUp:1 -> NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a simple drag/drop widget.
Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing what matters -- I cringe every time I leave a +1, so I've gotten into the habit of at least adding a comment after it --- but the premise and the pain are the same.
I also think that voting systems should only have /positive/ inputs. (I agree with the content of a given statement/post). Negatives belong as a concretely expressed /contrasting opinion/ which can, it's self, be 'agreed with' (voted for).
A shame that GitHub aren't more responsive to the community that enables their success when they make such a big deal of their openness. It is also our own fault that we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on a single provider of a relatively simple service.
That said, I'm extremely grateful to the platform for enabling collaboration on open source and to the company for its work on Git, Resque etc.
GitHub's strategy is to open source everything except the business critical stuff, but it seems to me that their business is in enterprise support rather than in actual software. Perhaps they should just open source the whole platform and count on their service business being enough to carry the company?
I like GitHub issues as they are. I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.
I find it strange that some project maintainers get annoyed when people use the issues section to post questions. What's wrong with that?
A question can reveal design failures about your software... Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.
I do think there should be a +1/like button though.
Have you ever tried to maintain a popular OS project on Github? Github issues feel great until you start using them at scale, and then they start to fall apart without some structure. This is especially pronounced in open source where many issues come from people who aren't familiar with what information you need in an issue to quickly resolve it.
I don't think the authors are requesting that this be made mandatory for all repos, but instead they just want the option to set up rules for repos they maintain. As someone giving up their free time to offer software for the rest of us, it seems only fair to let them set the rules about what they need before they can resolve an issue.
The biggest issue I see OSS maintainers running into is that they likely aren't the voice that Github listens to most anymore. If they can get some companies that pay for Github Enterprise to sign their letter as well that would likely help prioritize these features.
My project's main repo has 150 issues (only 7 still open) and it works out pretty well. Usually contributors will answer each other's questions and help close issues.
I suppose that could be a problem if you have 7000+ issues (as is the case for Docker) - But those projects represent an extremely small percentage of all OSS projects on GitHub.
Also, these projects usually have a lot of contributors, so maybe those contributors could help filter through and tag/close issues as necessary?
Not so. For my project, I noticed on several occasions that different people were asking the same questions and that prompted me to rethink the design of the project a bit and it greatly improved the community engagement as a result.
Why should maintainers not get annoyed if people ignore the proper support channels (which often have a great community of users to help) and further burden the developers instead?
>I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.
The thing is, if they implemented issue formatting in the way the posted document describes, the default would be exactly what it is now. Giving maintainers more control can't possibly be a bad thing.
I have mixed feelings about these requests. Yes it would be nice to have these extra features in GitHub. Its issue handling has always been a bit light on the workflow side—but IMHO has made up for it with a pleasant way to organize conversation around issues. The simple and smooth UX is part of what makes GitHub so great.
For the opposite side of the spectrum, there's the Bitbucket+Jira combo. It is customizable to a PM's heart's content, and in the process can become a mess of a tool.
I have mixed feelings about custom fields, I'd like Github UI to become as burden as Jira, but in the other hand 'reactions' as Slack or Facebook are implementing would make much easier to follow a discussion without so much scroll down.
After the whole incident where they deleted forks of a project without notice, due to their belief on what is and is not appropriate words to use in code without an apology I think we really need to re-assess GitHub in general.
Their 'control' of code and lack of respect to the people running projects is very disappointing and they seem to not want to move forward on the issues.
I'm surprised the open community is allowing this de-facto ownership of the worlds code and how it's written to take place, I'm not so sure they are a benevolent dictator.
Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
> why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript?
I also noticed that most of the repositories seem to be based on Javascript.
> JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
My guess:
Based on numerous sources [1][2], Javascript is the most popular language on GitHub. So there are more developers, more repositories, more activity involved. It just happens that one (or a few of them) talked this through and gather up other folks in their community.
The problem is that GitHub has a monopoly and is considered _the_ current standard for Open Source. But I think that once some of the major projects move to alternatives like GitLab (which has many of the features described in that letter) GitHub will have to obey its user base. Unfortunately no Open Source project with a large user base will dare to do the first step.
3. We're open to displaying CONTRIBUTING.md more prominently, please open an issue on our public issue tracker that contains all our planned features https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
I'll go sleep now but please ask any questions so I can respond tomorrow.
I went ahead and created an account on GitLab.com. So far I can tell the transition is seamless. You can import a repository from GitHub with only a few clicks. Issues will be inherited, but the single PR on the repo I tried to migrate got lost on the way.
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.
I completely agree with some of these suggestions, but it doesn't need all of them. If you really need a heavily-customizable issue tracking system, you can do anything you want in Bugzilla or Jira.
Every checkbox, dropdown and mandatory field they add makes GitHub Issues less attractive to those who don't need it. Simplicity is a feature, and it's one that you sacrifice as you make your software more flexible.
I guess it depends who is logging issues. If I'm experiencing some bug that I need fixed and motivated enough to log an issue at all, I'm probably motivated enough to fill out a few more fields.
Google Code had stars in order to encourage people to +1 something without creating noise and then instead of +1 comments you got +1 comments AND people yelling at them for using it wrong.
At Sourcegraph, we're trying to help solve these problems for developers everywhere (https://sourcegraph.com), both in open source and inside companies. GitHub’s commercial success and contributions to the world of development are impressive (and I'm speaking as a GitHub user for 8 years), but they can’t build everything developers need on their own.
We’re really pumped about improving dev team collaboration in the GitHub ecosystem by (soon) letting anyone use Sourcegraph.com’s code intelligence (semantic search/browsing), improved pull requests, flexible issue tracking with Emoji reactions instead of +1s (example: https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph/.tracker/151), etc.—all on their existing GitHub.com repositories.
All of Sourcegraph’s source code is public and hackable at https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph, so it can grow over time to solve the changing needs of these projects. (It’s licensed as Fair Source (https://fair.io), not closed source like GitHub or open source.)
Email me (sqs@sourcegraph.com) if you’re interested in beta-testing this on your GitHub.com repositories.
My biggest gripe with GitHub has been the notification system. Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
My workaround has been to use email notifications exclusively. I have a Gmail filter that applies a label to all notifications and skips the inbox. Then in my mail client I have a smart mailbox that only shows me unread notifications with that label (or that folder, from an IMAP perspective). The smart mailbox then shows me a counter of unread notifications. This way I don't oversee comments when multiple ones are made in a PR.
Problem 1: No context in these notifications. It would be nice if these emails could show the code in question for diff comments or the entire comments thread.
Problem 2: Now what is really bad with these notification emails is that the link "view it on GitHub" sometimes no longer links to the comment I'm being notified of. This happens when the comment was made on a PR on a line of the diff that no longer exists, as sometimes is the case when new commits are pushed. I then have to go to the main PR page, expand all collapsed "foo commented on an outdated diff" comments and manually search for the comment in order to get the context and be able to reply.
By fixing problem 1, problem 2 would be automatically fixed with it and make my workflow much more productive. Is there anyone else annoyed by this?
> Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
I think the bundling aspect is an awesome feature! I can read multiple new comments all at once, with context in mind and less total context switches.
About being able to miss new comments - doesn't the link in the notifications UI take you directly to the first unread comment?
I just created and maintain a little Android library (a very rewarding experience by the way) so most of the complaints about Github doesnt really apply to me because the size and reach of my project (I understand the point perfectly though).
But I read some complaints about the users and the issues they tend to open and I fully agree. They are a minority but I can't only imagine what people with bigger projects have to deal with. This is what I've found:
- People with little to zero experience in the language/framework that simply state that my project doesn't work without providing more information and sometimes they didn't reply to my "give me more info" inquiries.
- Guys who just want to get their homework done and They are basically trying to get it done using me as non-paid freelance.
- And my favourite one, junior dev in a company, he needs to get their work done with more pressure than the previous one so became anxious about their problems and I feel it even via email. Eventually He gets the thing done but He notices I changed the build system to Jitpack for better dependency handling and and start to complain about Man in the middle attacks to his company and black-hat hackers replacing my lib with a malicious one (I guess it could happen but come on).
But it is a very rewarding experience besides these anecdotical cases
It's the nature of any issue tracker to gather low-quality feedback. The people using the product who are happy with it or who can solve their own problems mostly aren't the ones booking issues, unless there are genuine bugs. Paradoxically, a high quality project will have fewer genuine issues to report, and therefore be sensitive to a lower average quality of feedback.
Hi. your junior colleague might be interested in the security answer here https://jitpack.io/docs/FAQ/. It's an important matter so will be happy to answer any more questions via email/gitter.
You can also run JitPack on-premises and have full control over build artifacts.
All this problems seem to me like good problems to have.
They all seem to stem from the fact that github is too successful. And too many people are on github and too many people are using it, often in wrong ways.
Of course github should solve them all. But still, it's still better to have problems with too many people and too much interest, than have the opposite problem - dying platform that people are leaving (see: sourceforge and Google Code).
Being too successful is of course a good problem for github to have, but for the individual maintainers, it's still a source of frustration that can lead to maintainer burnout. If too many people get frustrated and leave, then it can quickly turn from a problem of too many people to having too few.
Look at kallithea SCM at http://kallithea-scm.org/, we have used it and in most cases it works well. Also it supports both git and mercurial. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
A lot of these points are fair and interesting, but I fail to grab some of the points, especially that one:
Ability to block users from an organization.
What does blocking users mean? Blocking from commenting/making PR/cloning?
Why blocking a whole organization from an open source project?
What would prevent such users to use a personal account instead to do what they organization counterpart is blocked from anyways?
A more plausible interpretation would be that a particular GitHub organization might wish to block the inputs of a particular user across all its projects. That is, the phrase "from an organization" is adverbial and clarifies "block" rather than "users".
You're probably right! I don't use organization accounts so I'm not sure what was the issue, it would be to prevent haters to troll on every project of a particular company?
I work at a large company with a central GitHub Enterprise instance, and we use GitHub as a code-reviewing and code-hosting platform. Everything else (including build-automation) is integrated through web-hooks to Atlassian tools for many of the reasons noted in this letter. It works for us, but I am hopeful that GitHub will listen and maybe someday we can have everything on there.
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
While I don't maintain Ansible anymore, +9 billion on this. GitHub is hard at scale.
GitHub is fantastic because everyone is on it, but the issue system has not improved since inception - and I felt the UI changes have actually stepped back.
We had to implement our own bot to comment on tickets that did not appear to follow a template, and I would have given a kingdom for a template that let people filter their own tickets into whether they were bugs or feature requests or doc items.
We also had a repo of common replies we copy and pasted manually (this because there was so much traffic and me replying quickly would likely tick someone off - but this too could have been eliminated mostly with a good template system). Having this built-in (maybe I could have picked a web extension) would have also been helpful.
So many hours lost that could have been features or bugfixes - and by many, I mean totally weeks, if not cumulative months.
GitHub does the world a great service, and I love it, but this would help tons.
I always got a response when I filed a ticket - ALWAYS - but a lot of them were in the "we'll take that under consideration" type vein.
I feel opening GitHub RFEs up to votes is probably not the answer to serve the maintainer side of the equation, since users outnumber maintainers, but these needs to be done and would greatly improve OSS just based on expediting velocity.
If you don't use the GitHub tracker you lose out on a lot of useful tickets. However, if you use it, you are pretty much using the most unsophisticated tracker out there.
It's good because there's a low barrier to entry, but just having a template system - a very very very basic one, would do wonders.
A final idea is that GitHub really should have a mailing list or discussion system. Google Groups sucks for moderation, and I THINK you could probably make something awesome. Think about how Trac and the Wiki were integrated, for instance, and how you could automatically hyperlink between threads and tickets. The reason I say this is often GitHub creates a "throw code at project" methodology, which is bound to upset both contributor and maintainer - when often a "how should I do this" discussion first saves work. Yet joining a Google Group is a lot of commitment for people, and they probably don't want the email. Something to think about, perhaps.
Also think about StackOverflow. It's kind of a wasteland of questions, but if there was a users-helping-users type area, it would reduce tickets that were not really bugs, but really requests for help. These take time to triage, and "please instead ask over here and join this list" causes people pain.
I love all the work to keep up site reliability, maybe I'd appreciate more/better analytics, but I totally say this wearing a GitHub octocat shirt at the moment.
I wish Github would add a "Discussions" tab for repos, so projects don't need to create a separate Google Group (which require a Google account!) for questions-that-are-not-quite-issues.
There are three groups within GitHub, and this article is about the issues faced by the first - big open source projects (a small number).
The main bread and butter of GitHub is from private or organizational projects and do not have these issues
The majority of accounts on GitHub are folks like the majority of HN readers - developers, coders, hackers and do not have these issues.
So all these complaints are in a sense not applicable to the vast majority of both GitHubs revenue generating customers and the vast majority of GitHub users.
While I like to bitch and moan about stuff myself, I don't really agree with the first point.
What I like about GitHub's issue tracking is that (compared with alternatives, such as Redmine or Jira) it is free form. It doesn't force users to fill information such as steps to reproduce and I don't think it should. And that's because the needs of every project is slightly different. Consider how different the "steps to reproduce" are for a web user interface, versus the usage of some library. Yes, it can be painful for an issue to not provide all the information required, but on the other hand GitHub does a better job than alternatives at fostering conversations and keeping people in the loop. I've even seen projects use the GitHub issues as some sort of mailing list.
On the second point, I do agree that GitHub needs a voting system for issues. Given that GitHub has long turned into some sort of social network, adding a voting system for issues is a no-brainer. But then a voting system doesn't address the problem of people getting frustrated about issues taking too long to get fixed. +1's are annoying, but sometimes that's a feature and I've been on both sides of the barricade.
Do the undersigned send any money to github? It might be better to phrase your demand in the form of a question, "how much can we pay you to do this work for us?"
GitHub's success is based on its community. Simple fairness says the community should be respected and listened to, simple business says if the community doesn't get something back, it will get pissed and go somewhere else.
GitHub got to where it is today thanks to the network effect that the undersigned helped create. If open source were to do a mass migration to another provider, many of the contributors whom are paying for private repositories and other features would most likely follow.
This tracker app [0] is designed to be pretty modular, and there's a service implementation that uses the GitHub API client [1]. In theory, you could modify it and expand it to cover your custom needs for issue tracking.
We would love your thoughts on ZenHub.io [1] - fully integrated issue tracking, +1, estimates, burndown charts, kanban boards, even a personal todo list - a lot of the features asked for here, right within the GitHub interface and presented a lot more cleanly than competing products.
Looks nice. How do I add additional organizations after the first one? Can I send an invite to other organization managers to make themselves available for ZenHub?
waffle.io does this, but having to run on top of GitHub means it can't really fix problems like voting. But it can offer better search and things like that
+1 to the notification spam. Being @sam on github sucks sometimes. And as far as I can figure out there's no way to set watching/following/notifications to opt-in only.
So every time someone who knows a "Sam" uses @sam incorrectly in an issue I get notified, have to unsubscribe, ignore, and leave a polite message to let them know they're doing it wrong.
Most of this stuff seems pretty common sense and reasonable. I really only have a couple of objections:
* Issue templating.
It's one thing to prefill the entry box, it's quite another to add fields that everyone must fill out. I quite like that filling out something on Github is totally the opposite of filling out something on Jira.
* Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines
This is a people problem that has plagued open source from day one. You cannot engineer your way around it in a manner that doesn't annoy your contributors.
There was a blurb in here about getting rid of the big green "new pull request" button, but that was when this link went to a google doc. Good - if someone doesn't want to take PR's, then they have almost no reason to be on Github in the first place. Put another way, it's the mark of someone that wants a repo as a signpost of sorts without actually interacting with its community.
I think if these people have that many issues with GitHub, they should find a replacement. That's what happened in the Node community and it led to a better Node. That's a big list of complaints and GitHub doesn't have much incentive to fix 'em except to silence a bunch of cry babies that are bitching about a free tool.
I've felt the same way. The worst bit is notifications, so I get a notification that someone replied to an issue I opened. How do I get there? It's not in my notification page, I have to go to the email and click the link from there. Things get missed.
GitHub needs to step it up. They got to the top first, but can they stay there?
What I don't get ... why do people building free software even consider forcing their users and in particular their contributors to use proprietary development tools such as github? (Or, for that matter, exclude people from contributing to their projects who only use free software.)
Next, we'll see public complaints to Microsoft because MS Word doesn't properly support the way they want to maintain their project's documentation?
I mean, sure, feel free to complain all you like, but how is this not exactly what was to be expected from the beginning, and why do you expect them to care in the future, given that you just seem to have realized that they didn't care in the past, for obvious reasons, and given that their incentives haven't changed, and there is no reason for them to change in the future?
Many times, I've asked GitHub to add icons for :test:, :doc:, :admin: and a couple others. I use them in commit messages as it helps categorize the type of commit. This has to be the easiest kind of improvement imaginable, but they have never bothered.
I know they've only recently released new permissions for organisations, but they're still extremely lacking. As far as I can see, there's no way of setting permissions at a group level.
As an example of how this would be used, we have a Github team within our organisation which is used for non-technical people to post bugs. These people have no reason to be able to see or push code to the repository, they only need to be able to create issues. This applies to every repository in the organisation. As far as I can see, and without manually adding every single repository to the team, there's no way of setting global permissions permissions for a team. This seems like a major oversight to me.
I would just love if they could add target _blank on all the links in comments and issues. I'm constantly navigating away from the issue to view links in question and then realizing the tab with the issue is gone.
My experience with Github support is terrible, if not one of the worst, I once had an issue and contacted their support and it took them 1 month to respond to me (literally) I was really surprised by that.
I had the opposite experience. I am on the free student plan for private repos. It has to be renewed annually. It wasn't clear to my how to do so. I asked, and Scott from Github support contacted me in under a minute and sorted it out. I was very impressed.
It's also annoying that Github sometimes is missing some basic features like attachments to bug reports and comments for instsance. All mature bug trackers have such feature.
Why do you want GitHub to solve the (very) specific problems of issue and defect tracking?
They make a facility available as a nicety, but if your project has legitimate Global impact, you should be looking at (or bootstrapping) a counterpart.
Don't have the revenue for JIRA? Apply for the Free license.
Don't have the stomach for Bugzilla? Turn out a Node/Go alternative.
Don't have the business alignment with Clearquest or Rally? Lower your expectations to suit your Free (as in beer) SCM tool.
There's a lot of great feature requests for issues at the bottom of the document. Not sure why the document highlights only 3 things above the signatures.
Yet, I 100% agree with them. I do not understand why Github issues are so basic. The only feature I feel was added in all of 2015 was making the logging of every metadata change extremely verbose (read: maybe too noisy now?!).
I recurrently refer to this[0] PR, and the subsequent discussion, as the reason why, if any project of mine gets any bigger - it will not be accepting Github pull requests.
I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people (cough guys) that maintain these repos, but there's something telling about it that it's all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:
> Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!
LOL. I can't tell if this is "go-fuck-yourself"-level passive aggression, or mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github (or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after reading this would be "mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y'can g'fuck yr'self", while the second thought would be "yea, you're not wrong". Generally, passive aggression gets you nowhere when you're asking for something from someone/something who owes you nothing (I know, I know, they "owe" their customers everything).
The Node/React/JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish. The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it's mind-boggling, because they're not wrong about anything they're asking for. But it's how they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.
I agree that the "we’re very good at that!" was not needed. But the rest of the letter is ok to me, not particularly entitled. It is after all an open letter, open letters are designed to pressure people into something. In this case, these people have been asking for changes for years nicely and privately and have been ignored. They are just pressuring them as any customers would do. One may ignore the history of git, but its very existence came to be because a million dollar company called BitKeeper started ignoring its open source customers because they didn't owe them anything. Look what happened to them. Who even remembers BitKeeper? Maybe github should take these millennials hippy contributors more seriously if it doesn't want to end the same way.
People often ask why WordPress doesn't use Github for its primary development (they do have official read-only mirrors there), and it's not just because they already had an SVN-based system in place when Github came to be. It's because the tooling they already had was more sophisticated, especially regarding issues.
We’d like issues to gain a first-class voting system,
and for content-less comments like “+1” or “:+1:” or
“me too” to trigger a warning and instructions on how
to use the voting mechanism.
Why bother users with a warning? Turn it into a vote, and then highlight the vote icon so you can see what happened.
I got frustrated waiting for improved PR code review, so I built https://reviewable.io. It's best suited for private repos (since there's a learning curve that make throw off potential open source contributors) but it addresses a lot of the issues with PRs. Take a look!
I've actually looked at Reviewable multiple times for use within our team, but never decided to use it. From my usage of the demo, it feels complicated. There are a lot of controls on the screen, and I struggle to tell what exactly I'm looking at at any given time.
I also tried the demo, and was shocked to see that Reviewable had edited our PR descriptions to include a big "Review on Reviewable" badge. We currently make heavy use of PR descriptions in quite specific formats, and it felt like Reviewable was forcing itself upon us.
To be clear, I'm really glad someone is looking at this problem, and Reviewable looks like a step in the right direction. I'm just quite opinionated on code review and developer tools, and I feel like it could be much better.
One annoying issue I found with github is that it doesn't provide a discussion board. a lot of times, I have a question to ask, it doesn't mean I found a bug or anything needs progress tracking, but I have to go through the "github issues".
To what degree a company has to not give a f$#% when maintainers of largest projects on a platform can't get any feedback (compounded by a fact that some of those maintainers are very prominent employees of largest github paying customers)
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience.
It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented awfully with issues.
I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system to make our decisions with.
What really gets to me is how adamantly GitHub has ignored all the people who've gone on about this forever. Last time they seemed to care marginally was when jacobian finally managed to twist their arm and get them to implement the Close Issue feature, because one repo issue was a radioactive pit of abuse and invective.
I wonder if the whole "managerless culture" is to blame and is unfixable? (In other words, why hasn't SOMEONE had this thought about issues in N years? One is they deem it not a problem, another could be that they think to optimize for the filer, and the maintainer doesn't matter, or... there's no organization at all?)
There could be (theoretically) no one to make anyone do anything, and perhaps the issue tracker is either a quagmire of a codebase or something no one wants to touch because something else is more exciting?
That's one theory.
My other theory is they spend a lot of time on scaling problems and/or GitHub enterprise (which I haven't seen) -- and don't really do features anymore.
But it does feel there is no vision for changes to GitHub (maybe they think it's "solved") and it's ceasing to evolve in noticeable ways in any direction.
Can't really be sure. But I find it interesting. Again, the core is good. It's just curious to watch it so closely and not see the needle moving in any perceptible way.
I like the theory of the flat-office culture or philosophy affecting this.
Then again, it could be the kind of anarchic Libertarian or laissez-faire bent that we see with reddit that makes it exceedingly different to grant special permissions and privileges, especially across subreddits/issues/users/orgs. Or maybe user experience just doesn't matter for today's start-ups; maybe we've passed the Overton window for start-ups deciding it's not worth caring about their users.
A lot of the time, I feel like more of a user+ than a(n) (super)admin on my own repos. I might as well have the permissions and tools to ruin my own project - in the name of pure unadulterated freedom if for no other reason.
The dashboard and notification system have always been POS, too, so it might just be that everything that basically isn't tethered to a GUI is on the bottom of the totem pole.
GitHub does certain things very well, other - not so much. I really think the best way to get them to focus is to start contributing massively to GitLab.
Anyway, implementing just voting won't be a such a good idea in the time of Emoji Reactions!
The issues were deleted in fairly short order, but their notifications were still sent out to all repository watchers and persisted beyond the issue deletion. Also, most issues were generated mere seconds apart from accounts less than a day old.
So the issue isn't that GitHub didn't let them clean up the issues after the fact, but that there were no a) rate limiting options, b) user reputation options, or c) issue submission filtering options.
Any one of those three would have reduced the impact significantly.
Thanks, I've been trying all day to open the original link on mobile and it just brings my phone to its knees and never opens. Not even sure what is behind that link other than perhaps a very large Google doc?
gog.com has a great mechanic for this which might work here called a community wishlist [1] where people can submit games whey wish to see and people can vote on it and eventually they get things done when possible.
we maybe need a feature of hotness of a bug, "affects me too", that'll prioritize issues out of a bucket load of issues, plus on github you first raise an issue then it is sorted into feature request or bug, can be made better
The post with ~110 points was killed in favor of the ~50 point post at the time. In that case using time as the tie breaker might not be the best since people will have to upvote again.
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience.
It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented awfully with issues.
I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system to make our decisions with.
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.
Chris Wanstrocity is an inept leader, social activists roam the halls in self glory about their contributions to the world while Kakul spends money on retreats and hires senior product people who have zero open source or dev ops experience. This company needs intensive care with new leadership asap or they will be doomed, Gitlab is salivating right now.
While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects.
What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?
There is plenty being done in JS/node communities (plural! because there is more than one) at all levels. It just turns out that change doesn't happen over night.
Conferences already reverse discriminate by aiming for a gender balance in speakers (despite the submissions they chose from being very imbalanced). User groups have adopted CoCs to protect female and minority members. There are even female-only special interest groups. There's also this: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity
Besides, the list you're referring to is not an exhaustive list of important JS projects. It's a list of maintainers who have signed this open letter. What does their gender add to the conversation?
Inclusivity in programming comunities and JS/node in particular has drastically improved throughout the past decade. But structural changes take a long time to show results. The distribution you're seeing today represents what was being done in the past, not what is happening today.
Addendum: if all the non-males majoring in literary/communications/gender studies who complain about the lack of diversity in STEM would major in STEM, maybe they would no longer have anything to complain about. Whining isn't a science.
This is like blaming the schools for poverty. Yes it would be wonderful if Node module maintainers were a perfectly representative blend of all the races, genders, religions, and orientations on Earth. The gap between that vision of Node and the one we have pales in comparison to the gap between that vision of Earth and the one we inhabit.
Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre,
My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in.
Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pain points are. Constructive criticism is an important of doing great work. I appreciate how specific and detailed you were in your feedback. Getting a good sense of specific problems provides a more fruitful beginning to a conversation than "it suxx0rs", so I appreciate that.
I am still figuring out how GitHub fits together as an organization but I am happy to take a look into these issues and ensure they are considered in how future work is planned. We have a growing product team at GitHub that I know is passionate about solving the major pain points that rub up against our users. Obviously I can't make any firm commitments as I am not on the product team, but I can ensure the right eyeballs are on this. I also want to explore with my colleagues how we can be a little clearer about future feature and development plans to see if we can reduce some ambiguity.
As I say, I am pretty new, so I am still getting the lay of the land, but feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any further questions or concerns about this or any other issue. I am at jono@github.com.
An open question is how the community should provide feedback. Trello provides a decent example of how to do it well [1], but GitHub feels like a black box. I've been on GitHub since 2008 and I have been paying every month for years, but other than emailing support I have no idea how to vote for a feature request.
My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'. There are a lot of other people with the same frustration [2], but we have no idea how to get that on GitHub's roadmap.
[1] http://help.trello.com/article/724-submitting-feature-reques... [2] https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/144
An open question is how the community should provide feedback.
Perhaps if Github used their own issues system to gather feedback on Github itself, they'd more rapidly improve it. I'm sure they'd feel a lot of these pain points in a far sharper, more visceral way if they were subjected to them daily.
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> My personal pet peeve is not being able to mark a public repo as 'deprecated'.
What I came up to work around this is:
- Create an org named <YOUR-USERNAME>-deprecated - Move the projects to the organization - Set the avatar of the organization to your avatar, with desaturated colors (purely cosmetic, optional)
https://github.com/coreh-deprecated
I normally put a big "[DEPRECATED]" notice at the beginning of the README. This normally doesn't go unnoticed.
Another good example is harthur's "[UNMAINTAINED]" [1]
[1] https://github.com/harthur/brain
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I've had pretty good success with feature requests in Github – but I agree that it at least _feels_ like it depends on who is replying to you (or even what state of mind they're in; copy paste responses has been had).
Anyway, a good example of a successful feature request – shared since it might help others in their quest for success – included me attempting to reduce the problem, scoping it and suggesting a solution. If you can find examples of this problem over multiple open source repositories (in my case nodejs) it seems to contribute to it getting fixed.
As a software engineer, I am reminded of when I go to Home Depot and ask someone for help and they say, "Oh, I do not know. I am new here...". I think it is best to come prepared with the right answers. As you can see from the doc, there are a lot of maintainers who have signed this. Perhaps:
- Note the feedback.
- Bring in the right folks to consult with on your end.
- Write a public response with concrete information (should be first interaction).
- Finally, reach out to the authors of this post. Perhaps, getting them more clarity on your roadmap and your thought process will go a long way in resolving matters like this with high profile maintainers.
My main goal in responding was to acknowledge the issues. This is just the start of the process, and by no means the end.
The next step, as you mention, is to bring the right people in. This is why I want to ensure this is raised with our teams inside GitHub to explore ways to rectify some of these concerns.
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I personally prefer someone to at least acknowledge someone now owns the issues than to wait in silence while they gather the right people and formulate a concrete response. That doesn't happen quickly in some cases and the silence can exacerbate the issue, which ironically is why this hit HN in the first place.
I appreciate the prompt response. Face-to-face at Home Depot you know the message was received. Online it's nice to get an immediate read receipt with the real reply coming later.
Promises about the future about Github’s roadmap is understandably difficult to make, besides by a very small number of people at the top. I don’t think this is the expectation. But visibility into past failure to address these concerns and the current status is long overdue. I assume when these maintainers reached out in private channels, they were equally detailed, and have waited years.
At present, I’m not sure how this response is different from the "empty response" that motivated the publication of this document in the first place, except that this response is also public. Comments like "happy to take a look into these issues", "considered in how future work is planned" and "ensure the right eyeballs are on this" uses a lot of words to say nothing. If the community department is not the right place, maybe it’s time to walk over to where the the product group sits and ask. They probably read Hacker New too.
I’ll also highlight a possible theory: the right people at Github have already looked at these requests and decided that is not what Github Issues is for. Perhaps Issues is prioritized for the masses, not the small minority of very popular projects (but not resourceful enough that they have staff). Each of these feature requests do add friction (if only in complexity) and the majority of projects that do not need and should not utilize them. Hopefully someone at Github will quash this theory but it is consistent with events so far.
GitHub has settings for individual repos. People can opt to turn the issue tracker off completely.
Why not have the option to enable issue voting? It could be as easy as stars for issues.
Custom issue instructions would be trivial to tuck away in the settings page or associate with a specially named markdown file. They turn a wiki on by default, but you can't instruct users about the info you expect in their issue on the page where they create the issue. Documentation is very effective when it is inline with the system it is describing.
Custom issue fields with validation is a little more complex. Punt.
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One thing I would love to see for my own projects is a way to temporarily completely block off contributions on threads by people who only watched/starred the repository for less than 48 hours or something like this.
When people submit your issue tracker to hackernews/reddit/twitter all hell breaks lose and time gets wasted for nothing.
Interesting idea, but I wonder what the right metric is to determine legacy vs. new users. I certainly haven't starred/watched every package I've ever `npm install`ed.
Respectfully Jono, I think your reply is symptomatic of the issues at the heart of the matter. GitHub is, whether it expected to be or not, whether it wants to be or not, now at the heart of the OSS community. For the "Director of Community" at a company which plays such an important role in the OSS community, which itself plays an enormously important role in the broader software and civic communities and is populated by abnormally high numbers of passionate and talented contributors, to respond to a HN story with such a high profile by:
1) apologizing for being new
2) extending borderline patronizing praise (the OP likely wanted a response to the issues put forth, not your approval)
& 3) a promise, which you can't necessarily keep, to put eyes on the issue instead of speaking to the issues raised directly.
It's not what I would expect from someone in that role at that sort of company. It's, unfortunately, what I would expect from a company that had the sort of issues raised by the OP.
Your response, specifically #3, makes me wonder if you have ever worked in a medium to large business. Forgive me if I read it wrong. I think his response is solid and the best that one could expect from his role. I could not imagine some director from a different department by passing the product team and coming to my development team and saying, "stop what you are doing, and handle my request! I read something on HN! I need a plan of action that directly addresses issues that were raised!". I would, however, expect him to say that he knows or can find out (he is new still) who needs to see this and make sure the discussions happen to ensure that product team has the information required to make an informed discission allowing for a roadmap to be formed that could be shared with the community. He can totally guarantee the right people see it. He can't ensure they do anything about it, but he can champion the issue. I would hope/expect to hear back after all this has happened. What's wrong with saying he is still getting an understanding of how things work at github? And what approval are you dismayed with? His acknowledgment that feedback is important? That was just civility.
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At least he responded, and promptly. Let's not jump to conclusions just yet.
One suggestion is to improve the permissions system. For example, third-party github plugins that interact with the github system (e.g., setting labels, responding to comments) require "write permissions" which gives those systems "push" access to the underlying repo. Simply separating the git repository access control from the github UI / issues / pull requests access control system would be very helpful. I'm sure there are many other examples of where the permissions system needs some finer-grained access.
Edit: Essentially the same as reported here: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/268
Perhaps Github Issues itself should be available as a mechanism for people to provide feedback about Github itself.
Hypothetical link: github.com/github/github/issues
I've been personally paying for a couple of years, and the SAAS company I work for (~50 engineers) has committed to moving away from Github for some of these (and other) reasons.
Here are some of my fave :+1:-a-thons that help demonstrate when the issue system starts to be less useful, and the Github acknowledgement seems sparse:
* https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/18
* https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/215
Also, you might consider empowering your social media team. I see Github as a pretty cool company. And when I sent this tweet, I was expecting to have a bit of a shared chortle with this tweet as I know I would of had with @SlackHq:
https://twitter.com/Ash_Coolman/status/670595632659206146
But instead I got nothing, except a vague sense of having offended someone (sorry BTW, it was only a joke! :'()
I've witnessed Jono's outstanding work at Canonical/Ubuntu, and as you can see from his comment above he's a great guy. No matter what you think of Github, I think you should appreciate this.
There appears to be a need for some a different class of repository for larger open source software.
Similar to the way twitter provides verified accounts maybe GitHub should consider a tagging these popular repositories to allow for more advanced control over the collaboration project.
When I first read the letter I was a little bit disappointed, one thing I've enjoyed (to an limited extent) is the low barrier of entry to pull requests. The spring boot team especially are extremely patient and understanding when it comes to pull requests.
Hopefully there's enough community will in this to encourage GitHub to make the change, if it does really come down it not being worth the money it would be a disappointing sign.
Are you THE Jono Bacon of Ubuntu fame? If so, I have the best of hopes for Github. Best of luck in your new position and I hope we'll get to see many great new features on the platform.
There are more authors on the second page.
That's why you shouldn't use Google Docs for such an article (even if it comes in the form of a letter). Nobody expects the concept of pages on the web (as in books, not as in web page).
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Oops: I posted too quickly. Updated.
Not sure you'll read this but I'd love a tagging feature for starring. Sorting on code isn't good enough.
+1
Nice to meet you Jono. I maintain a similar list, albeit a bit more focused on GHE. https://github.com/kevinSuttle/github/issues
@jono Will you be able to answer, if github has any plans in the roadmap to open source the code in 1-2 years and develop in open instead of closed rooms.
Given many open source project adopting it for their code repository its important question to be answered.
Otherwise sourceforge.net story will repeat again, this time with github. Many projects adapted it when it was closed source and then when they open source it slowly and later due to falling revenues just started crumbling.
Problem with them open sourcing their platform is that the platform base is used in enterprise and how the bulk of their revenue is made... Who wants to buy milk when the cow is being given away?
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This, I feel, is the most important bug, even though it precedes the list:
> 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.
I'd like to call out that the GitHub user @isaacs maintains an unofficial repository[1] where the issues are "Issues for GitHub". It's not much more than a token of goodwill from a user to open a place like that to organize bugs (GitHub: you are lucky you have such a userbase!), but it's the best thing I know of for "has someone else thought of this?"[2]. Many of the issues that have been filed there are excellent ideas.
[1]: https://github.com/isaacs/github
[2]: though I'd say if you also think about it, you should also go through the official channel, even if just to spam them so they know people want that feature.
The author mentions that if GitHub was open source, they would implement these features themselves.
Gitlab[1] is an open source repository manager that supports local installs as well as public hosting at gitlab.com. If author appreciates open source, perhaps they should put their efforts into improving an existing open source option rather than relying on a proprietary solution.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master
This. When you are tired of github, start using gitlab, and realize your mistake going forward and stop making it, over[1], and over[2], and over[3].
[1] http://sourceforge.net/
[2] https://code.google.com/
[3] https://bitbucket.org/
Sourceforge runs Apache Allura, which is open source.
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At GitLab we would welcome contributions. More than 1000 people already contributed and everyone is welcome. Also see my other answer in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905756
Absolutely agree!
I cannot fathom why people are still actively supporting GitHub.
Even if you ignore the ethical reasons, which if you are an open source developer really should suffice, GitLab is better and more customizable in every way.
Supporting it benefits yourself and all of the FOSS community.
gitlab.com is dog slow and my code is too important to risk self hosting.
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This was my first thought after reading it. I've used gitlab.com, also locally, and it is ok. Presumably people will want to stick with github due to popularity though.
It's 2016, and GitHub is stagnant.
GitHub used to bill itself as "Social Coding", but the "Network" graph has not seen ANY updates since its original introduction in April of 2008. Issues has seen very few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses internally have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. https://github.com/resque/resque/issues/1372).
The word "Social" no longer appears on GitHub's landing page. They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
I've been puzzled for a while with what github is doing hiring so many social impact employees.
https://twitter.com/agelender
https://twitter.com/_danilo
https://twitter.com/rachelmyers
https://twitter.com/nmsanchez
https://twitter.com/BiancaCreating
https://twitter.com/ammeep
https://twitter.com/davystevenson
Maybe something more noble than a social coding site?
I doubt it. Github has a reputation problem. I wouldn't put anything sensitive on there, given the attitude github leadership showed about privacy ethics in the Julie Horvath incident.
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I happen to be an acquaintance of Rachel Myers, and while she does do not-for-profit stuff outside of work, do you have some evidence that she's a "social impact employee" there? It's not obvious on her Twitter/Github profiles.
I don't want to assume any motive to your comment, but I think it would be a cause for concern if the world at large assumes that women/minorities are hired strictly for their "social impact".
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Yeah, I'd honestly like for a website that actually focused on "Social Coding" rather than the Enterprise Money that GitHub is focusing on. Tbh, that is what GitLab, Bitbucket does also which is why they really are only effective as replacements rather than improvements upon.
I wonder if threads like this keep popping up if people will say "Fuck it" and build an OSS Github clone that focus on being the Reddit of Code/Git rather than another Version Control Enterprise product.
I'd do it but I'm an asshole, not a community builder.
EDIT:
Since I'm in the edit window and its complaining I submit too fast:
Tbh, the problem with Kallithea SCM and Trac is they aren't really built to generate network effects. They both suffer from the same problem as literally every other unsuccessful Github competitor has:
1) You need something built to generate a network effect first, other considerations second, to successfully compete.
2) You need to then leverage that network to chase Corporate money.
GitHub seems to be neglecting #1 in favor of #2 and that imbalance is an opportunity if someone can exploit it. However, that requires someone who is good at being a community builder rather than a software dev.
Recently even Python language planned to move its repositories to github.com for network effect, instead of helping projects like kallithea SCM and trac by partnering with software conservancy or gnu. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
I hope they change the decision to support one of the project like Kallithea or trac by migrating their system and build network effects.
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OMG can we get a moratorium on "tbh"? Just say "Indeed" or some other filler. "To be honest" is bad writing even when it's spelled out.
How reasonable is it to make issue tracking and social interaction part of the SCM itself [with optional web interface] ?
git issues "This needs attention"
>> Issue #1 created
git issues
>> List of issues
git issues -u #11
>> Issue #11 up voted
>> #11 Important stuff, needs attention
git issues -d #6
>> Issue #6 down voted
git issues -f #4
>> Issue #4 flagged
Your `.git` directory would become huge pretty quickly and you would have plenty of problems with people commenting on issues without having a repo up-to-date. How would you handle conflicts in that case?
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> They're chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
Maybe putting most of their efforts into Atom and Electron?
Mayhap it is related to their abandonment of being a meritocracy as doing such was being divisive? Success can be very devise as well so perhaps they are making a noble sacrifice to avoid dividing people.
We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent. Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue trackers, which is really a huge part of a project's documentation, to a for-profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good interoperability.
If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it's time to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever having the advantage of "locking in" its users with extremely high migration costs.
> If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations,
There is no longer an "if". It's absolutely true that GitHub is cruising at this time. For example: They are more interested in hiring community managers / community "heroes" instead of actual engineers in SF.
Seems like this open letter is exactly the kind of thing a community manager should have gotten on tho.
This. I'm a big fan of Github, but it bothers me that this single service is the centerpiece of most OSS projects. We see it every time Github goes down and virtually nobody can be productive anymore. I hope to see a version control system on top of IPFS some day.
Ironically, git itself is decentralized. More effort should go into decentralized software architectures, especially in the current security climate where having a central point of failure is like having a virtual bull's eye for bad guys. There's no reason you couldn't have a decentralized issue tracker for example.
> If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself
There you go: https://github.com/google/git-appraise
Suckless have discussed this several times and have fallen back to an email mailing list.
http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1201/index.html#msg10574
Last one proposed by someone: http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1504/26210.html
The problem with mailing lists is that patches and bug reports get forgotten.
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>We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now
Distributed is the key word. Blockchain/Bitcoin (not withstanding the hurtful politics ongoing at present) has shown the way, and ideally most shared/social things should work in a distributed, trust-less environment in future. Including Social networks and Search Engines.
So it is quite natural, that OSS developers can pave the way for shared/distributed source control (a protocol on top of GIT. Just like HTTP is over TCP).
Just to clarify, I don't hate github. But it sort of obscures the beauty/advancement that is GIT, over previous version control softwares. Wonder what does the creator Linus think of this?
Well, for one he doesn't like GitHub pull requests. ;)
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
> We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now.
Why distributed? You need a central place to report bugs and track them to ensure they’re not duplicated everywhere.
I am not Michael Bayer (but I hope to be more like him someday)... that said, what I think he means or could mean is that issues would be distributed along with the repo. Maybe something like a git log for issues that are attached to and/or part of the repo itself.
Thinking about it, something like this would be sweet. I would immediately have a snap shot of things that might go boom when I run said software. eta: Instead, I have to go dig through github itself, which is slow compared to greping through a git log.
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Why distributed version control? You need a central place to pull from and push to, to ensure that forks and patches are not duplicated everywhere... ;)
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I wrote a little bit about this two years ago: https://sny.no/2014/04/dbts
There’s not necessarily an antagonism between distributed and centralised in this case. You can still have a centralised frontend such as Github Issues, backed by a versioned and distributed backend using i.e. git.
You mean like GitLab?
GitLab is still centralised (whomever is hosting…), not distributed.
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I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational.
Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are maintainers of JS/HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare JS to <lang> projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For example, there is a strong correlation between +1'ers and JS repos vs. Python or vice versa. Perhaps, we could walk away with JS devs are more chatty than CPP developers when discussing issues... I don't know, just a thought.
I think it's just monkey see->monkey do. As soon as one person said +1, everyone that saw it thought that that's just how you voted for stuff. It's the same reason you see comments on HN or reddit that just say "This." or that if you leave your shoes by the door, everyone else will do the same. I doubt these people keep doing it if you ask them not to.
There's an old story about this man who stood quietly next to a closed door in Moscow, said nothing to no one, and did nothing else of interest. Eventually others joined him, and before long a queue has formed. No one knew what they were standing in line for.
Monkey see - monkey do.
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I agree that that's probably how it started, but it seems that once the cultural expectation has been set, it's hard for a single project maintainer to set a different custom just for their own project. People are going to use the conventions and communication methods that they learn elsewhere, even if you say not to in the contributing guidelines document. You might be able to get individuals to stop doing it in your project by asking them directly, but then each person has done it at least once, and you've had to ask each person to change their normal habits. Besides, as they note in the letter, there is a valid and valuable purpose to these communications, it would just be better if they were in a different place than clogging up the comment thread.
StackOverflow tackled this by intercepting plus one posts and telling people to just vote. GitHub should do the same (with starring or following).
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"This." or "+1" is a more expressive way of showing support beyond anonymous voting mechanisms.
I maintain a C repo[1] and user idiocy is much lower than what I've seen in JS projects of similar popularity. Still, I agree with these criticisms of GitHub. I hate +1 spam enough to delete such comments. Sometimes I even ban those who do it. I'm frustrated by people who open idiotic issues[2][3][4][5]. I procrastinate on bad pull requests because my options are:
1. Close the PR with little or no comment. People then think I'm an asshole.
2. Spend hours explaining why the code is terrible and why it can't be improved. In addition to being a big time sink, PR submitters often don't understand the criticisms. Half the time, they still think I'm wrong.
People even defend stuff as obviously wrong as adding a thousand lines of GPL'd code to an Apache-licensed project.[6] Then they say I should remove .gitignore support from ag because it doesn't implement 100% of .gitignore syntax. As if users would be happier with tons of extraneous results instead of some extraneous results.
A lot of this is cultural, but GitHub could help steer things in a better direction with the features proposed in this letter. I hope they take this letter seriously.
1. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
2. User accuses ag of hard-locking his computer: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/791
3. User wants ag to always print filenames, unlike every other tool out there: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/749
4. User wants ag to replace PCRE with a totally different, incompatible regex library: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/698
5. User aliases 'ag' to 'grep', then complains ag doesn't work: https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/issues/578
6. https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher/pull/614
I actually hesitate to really "watch" repos because the sheer volume of email generated is staggering. I take my hat off to those who run successful OSS projects. Thank you!
About number 5. I don't see anyone complaining about anything.
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SourceForge fixed the +1 issue recently.
The same question about JS repos struck me. I suspect that if you write a shared letter then you just ask your network to sign it instead of <random other person from different ecosystem>, but I would be curious to know if these grievances are disproportionate in different communities.
I'd like to think that someone who writes this kind of letter would take such a thing into account. It's really possible that there is a strong correlation between a language and people being more involved with Github. I wouldn't be surprised that many developers from other language ecosystems just don't care.
Stack Overflow tried preventing +1/-1 comments[1], and the community came to the consensus[2][3] that those comments can be useful.
[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/277314
[2]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/277319
[3]http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/283935
From skimming, they found "+/-1, because REASON" to be valuable, not "+/-1". Indeed, in the open letter, they mention these are valuable, but the current implementation is a pain.
Google Code has primarily been used for Chromium's issue tracker, but they have a star system for exactly this reason.
You can sort something by stars, but it's bad etiquette there for a user to comment +1 rather than just star.
Yep. The problem is that some users are not aware of the conventions, and often you see on the Android Google Code repo "+1" or something along the lines of "Google plz fix this".
This becomes heavily apparent when someone posts an Android issue directly onto the Android subreddit. I suspect the same could happen with GitHub issues. When you see others posting "+1", then others follow the same practice.
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I agree that the suggestions are great; I'm also generally happy to see a letter like this take a clear tone without being aggressive or overtly confrontational. Re: the prevalence JS/HTML projects, I think that may just be a matter of simple base popularity; the web is the most popular development platform, and JS is the most used language on github (githut.info has great stats on this). If the letter gains steam, I'm sure we could expect project maintainers from other ecosystems to get on board.
I noticed that most of the signers are maintaning JS/HTML projects too.
I wonder if those types of projects are more likely to have these problems (larger userbase? Less experienced userbase? just different userbase?)? It could also just be a coincidence that they knew each other because they work on similar things, and a group of people who knew each other are the ones who wrote the letter.
+1 isn't spam. It's valuable. However the implementation of how people can +1 an issue that's very important to them is the point. There should be a voting system.
Spam would indicate that +1 adds no value.. But it does! If I have an issue with no comments, no indication of its importance to the users, then I would deprioritize that issue over another one that has lots of activity.
+1 is valuable, it's just the form that Github forces it into (comments) winds up looking spammy. Make it a counter - simple enough.
This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub's simple approach:
>Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.
Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process and GitHub has historically taken a pretty solid stance against this.
From "How GitHub uses GitHub to Build GitHub"[1]: http://i.imgur.com/1yJx8CG.png
There are tools like Jira and Bugzilla for people who prefer this style of issue management. I hope GitHub resists the temptation to add whatever people ask of them.
[1] http://zachholman.com/talk/how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...
> adds cognitive overhead to the process
Yes! The maintainers deliberately want to add cognitive overhead so the quality bar for creating issues is higher.
By having simple zero-friction forms, you haven't removed cognitive overhead. You've simply shifted the cognitive load into the followup messages asking for clarification of "reproduction steps", "version tested". The issues' threads therefore begin with "meta" type questions which duplicate the checkboxes and dropdowns you were trying to avoid.
The default can remain zero-friction but it seems very reasonable to offer options for maintainers to gain some control over their inbox.
So use a real issue tracker. Most of the big ones integrate with github. Why should they reinvent this wheel?
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Zero structure just leads to lots of shitty issues that have no information on what version of the software it was against, no reproduction steps, and no stacktrace or debug output. I'm tired of closing issues with "I cant reproduce at all, maybe you're on an old version? Anyway feel free to open a new bug if you ever come up with a reproduction step..."
A simple optional field to include the version number that the issue was being reported against would do wonders for my interaction with users.
And you don't need to include that on your software project, but really if our users can't be bothered to tell us what version they're running, I have many, many other issues to fix which I know are broken in master.
Which I guess is the difference. If you're a small project with few users, then the handful of bug reports you get are useful and you want a zero barrier.
I have literally thousands of bug reports, hundreds of those will be left without ever being fixed (even though they may be perfectly legitimate). I have to triage. If a user is blocked by not being able to tell me what version they are running then that pre-triage of making them not even bother to cut a ticket with bad information is useful because then they don't waste any of my time...
This is very true. While clunky to use most support sites for enterprise software includes these types of fields as mandatory to complete a support ticket.
As someone who has opened issues myself on projects in gitHub its easy to be unaware or even forget all the information a maintainer would need to reproduce the issue. As someone who uses an open source stack every day anything to make the whole issue flow better for maintainers and users I'm for 110%
But the big thing that GitHub doesn't use GitHub for is interacting with the masses.
- GitHub doesn't use GitHub issues to take feature requests or bug reports.
- GitHub doesn't use Pull Requests to allow users to submit bug fixes
When all your issues and pull-request are being raised by a defined set of people who are (or ought to be) committed to the same collective goal (because they're employees of the same company) you can develop a culture and norms around how those things work.
If "Some Guy" at GitHub raises issues where the only description is "This feature doesn't work on Mac" or raises PRs where the only description is "this fixes a bug I found" the cultural pressure would teach him/her that's not how things are done, and if the lesson wasn't learned, then they wouldn't last at GitHub.
When the people you're interacting with are infrequent contributors, it's a different scenario. They need guidance. They need to be pushed to go down the helpful path on their first attempt, because there are too many new contributors and they often don't stick around for long enough to change behaviours by osmosis and cultural pressure.
> Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process
I do concur, but there should be at least some of them. One shouldn't have to hope that people will be kind enough to submit proper issues, the platform should force them somehow to do so. I think, if a study of github issues was made, we'd see that about first five messages on a given issue would be those of maintainers craving for more input. What is the output of dmesg, how is your configuration, what is the output of the process, can you run it with the verbose flag on... A bit of cognitive overload is good, so that who submit bugs are those who take the burden of doing so.
If I read it right, they're not asking for a more complicated default for all projects, just that they can customize it for their projects.
And I agree, simple is good... but simple is also bad for large projects, as while it makes it easier to create a ticket, it makes it harder to track for the maintainers. They are (rightfully) looking to ease their work, and I do believe it is a net win for both sides if filing a bug is made a little harder, but it becomes a lot easier to manage.
It can be as simple as a text file that is dropped into the content-free TEXTAREA that currently greets new issue reporters. Try running a big project like jQuery, Angular, or Babel and you'll understand how important a feature like this would be.
Disagreed. In a free-for-all environment like FOSS, collective lack of details means more time wasted to gather/request for relevant information. Maintainers have the rights to request for such things before sifting through a potential mess of mostly incomplete issues/PRs. Their time is better spent anywhere but gathering correct versions to chase down a bug. People should have the common sense to provide those beforehand but alas, many do not.
It may take cognitive overhead away from the submitter but it shoves it onto the maintainet at the same time. Instead of 100 people having to deal with 1u of cognitive overhead each, you have 1 person having to deal with 100u or more to extract information from the submitters.
This is why your application should always have a "dump version string"-button, conveniently embedded together with your "report bug" button which doesn't have to be more advanced than simply opening your email-client or forward you to a webpage. This form should be free text but pre-filled with the version string pasted at the top and contain headers that invite the user to fill in the rest, such as Reproducing: <write what you did to cause the bug>. 100 different drop-downs makes nobody happy.
The bullet points of complaints feel like a continuation of Linus Torvald's refusal of github pull requests in May 2012.[1]
Taken all together, it seems like github is on a path of alienating their most valuable members. Github was unresponsive to Linus' feature requests and it turns out that theme continues almost 3 years later.
If github plans to evolve into a full-featured ALM[2] like MS Team Foundation or JIRA instead of being relegated to being just a "dumb" disk backup node for repositories, they have to get these UI workflow issues fixed.
[1]https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_lifecycle_manageme...
I don't see anything wrong with going after the massive amount of smaller project with simple needs, instead of the few large projects & popular projects with very specific needs.
If github evolves to the projects you're mentioning, you'll surely alienate the many more casual users. I personally hate working with the bloated applications you mention.
Distributed revision control users whining about centralized repository lacking features.
Ummm ... anybody getting the irony here?
And, from a GitHub business perspective, why do I hear Lily Tomlin: "We don't care. We don't have to."
Everybody anointed GitHub as "the chosen one" over strenuous objections from some of us that creating another monopoly for open source projects is a bad idea.
Pardon me for enjoying some Schadenfreude now that GitHub leveraged the open-source adoption into corporate contracts and now doesn't have to give two shits about open source folks.
Lily Tomlin's Phone Company Sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw
I'm an open source project maintainer and share many of the pain points outlined in the document, but I also totally agree with you. Giving control of your project to a company means losing control and having to resort to desperate pleas like this. This is simply what happens when you can't fork it yourself like you could with an open source project.
It's likely that GitHub will alleviate these pain points in time, but the lesson is the same: let a company control your destiny and you can no longer have what you want or need when their interests diverge from yours, even if their system is the best there is and was radically better than everything else at the time you switched to it.
There's been no mention of phabricator yet so I thought I'd give it a shout out. It's used by LLVM, FreeBSD, Blender, Wikimedia and others and I love it. It's under very active development and even if it doesn't solve every issue in this letter, by using an open source tool for development you of course have the option to customize it to the needs of your community.
I'm looking very closely at Phabricator, it looks quite nice.
Phabricator is pretty great overall, love that it's under such active development.
Only gripe is that some parts of it are still highly coupled, so doing something like adding a custom button to the text editor view or writing your own internal application very quickly becomes a huge mess, an effect that is multiplied by the active development and no promise of stable public APIs.
Your experience will be great as long as you don't try and do anything custom, at least for the next year or two.
Phabricator is great! I host it for a couple of my projects. I love it, and it was easy to setup.
Seriously: if you have a web server (or php hosting) anywhere, try out phabricator; it's easy to setup, and you can even point it at a github (or any public git/svn/hg) repository to fiddle around with its features, as hosting the repository inside phabricator is not mandatory.
Another shoutout here to phabricator. I started hosting it internally at the company a year ago and have near 100% adoption from developers for code reviews, additionally using the task/issue tracking for some projects.
Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't knew about it. After a quick read, it seems to be a very interesting alternative.
Is this a case of the squeakiest wheels getting the grease? What if these problems aren't representative of the overall user base? What if far more people prefer a more simple, minimalistic interface than an ultra-customizeable interface with myriad custom actions and events. I've always appreciated software that deliberately keeps things simple (Basecamp and Workflowly come to mind). It sounds like these people want a full blown Jira/Stash installation.
I don't like the general feel of these suggestions. It sounds like more bureaucratic features, the lack of which is a big part of why GitHub is so pleasant.
Making an issue or a pull request feels like having a casual chat with the project maintainers. Adding fields and other hoops to jump through puts distance between people.
I guess for maintainers of popular projects, everybody's "casual chat" (by people who did not read CONTRIBUTING.txt, do not supply the version of relevant software they are using etc.) is not as fun as it is for you.
Wow, what a bunch of whiners. If you hate github so much why don't you just fork it and fix-- Oh, right. It's not open source.
Well, there's your problem right there.
(I have sooooo much more in this vein but I'll spare you. ;-)
EDIT: No I won't. Fuck it. This is too ridiculous.
These guys (and they are all guys) chained themselves to github's metaphorical car and now they're complaining that the ride is too bumpy and the wind is a little much.
Don't whine about not getting to sit inside the car! Unchain yourself and go catch one of the cars where the doors are unlocked and open and the driver and other passengers are beckoning you to join them. (Apologies for the mangled metaphor.)
These folks come off to me like masochistic babies.
+1
Shouldn't we (the OSS community) have an open source, roll-your-own version of something like GitHub? Like, the repo-management equivalent to a phpBB or a Wiki or a Wordpress.
We do have the separate components, though maybe the hard part is to glue them together. But still, it is something what would be worth the time and effort, wouldn't it?
I do like Github, and I understand how it makes the entire process of maintaining a code repo a lot easier, but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing? I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain, but I see it as the only real solution. Developing in the open can't be done on platforms where restrictions apply, and they do apply. I'm saying this with no intention of sounding like a jerk, but 18 project maintainers and/or developer need to write an open letter to get Github to give'em a "me too" button? I understand the issue, but i still find it rather silly.
The only aspect I could think of where Github has the pro is the community of developers it has, but does it really matter that much? Especially for established/big projects that probably don't care about the fork/stars numbers, or the random look around-ers that pass by.
> I understand that there isn't a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management/issues/etc.. app is a pain
You outlined exactly why people don't build their own or use another system. Github is the best there is. That doesn't mean it doesn't have problems, but if your company/project/expertise isn't focused in collaborative development and/or version control, you're just distracting yourself by building your own.
The authors are not saying "we can build a better Github." They have complaints and would like them resolved, but don't see a good way of having that happen.
> Github is the best there is.
Doesn't matter really as it's still a locked platform. The argument they're making is that they're developing in the open and they'd like some sort of expedited treatment because of the size of the project or because they're doing OSS. I don't think those two can go hand in hand all the way.
The most important thing is not even that GitHub is the best but that everybody is used to GitHub.
The point about GitHub today is that being "the best there is" is as irrelevant to its continued success as "being the best microblogging service there is" is to Twitter's.
Open Source projects move to GitHub because their users are all already familiar with GitHub from all the other open source projects that use it. That means those people already have a user account, know how to check out your code, are able to file issues, and can probably make contributions even if they're not very familiar with git, for example using one of the GitHub integrated GUIs that will handhold you through making a PR. If you are an odd-duck project using some other infrastructure you don't have any of these advantages, and the barrier to entry for potential contributors is correspondingly larger.
For users having a near-monoculture of source code hosting has all the same advantages but reversed; it means they only need a single account, and that every process they learn — all of which are well documented across the web — is fully transferable between projects. It also gives them a recognised place to show off their own code, and increasingly people are asking for a link to a GitHub profile as part of a hiring process. This even happens at Mozilla, an organisation that doesn't actually use GitHub for its most prominent projects (but increasingly does for new things; the advantages I mention here are valuable even when you already have everything set up for using something else).
Another benefit enjoyed by projects that use GitHub is the plethora of tools designed to integrate with it; again little to do with the intrinsic merits of the tool and everything to do with network effects (although I will allow that the API is generally very good). So if you chose an alternative to GitHub you might miss out on IDE integration, Travis, landscape.io, reviewable.io, or any number of other third party tools that either exclusively work with GitHub or have smoother integration in the case of such a well-worn path.
Tools like reviewable.io are interesting because they are clearly making up for deficiencies in the GitHub platform itself. In that case it's the totally, utterly, useless code review functionality in stock GitHub. And there are many other things in the site that could stand to be improved. For example the notification system that either spams you with every comment from a repo or ensures that you miss anything you don't check via the web UI. The permissions system that makes it impossible to add commits to a PR against your own repository without losing all the metadata associated with the PR. The issue tracker that doesn't allow assigning issues to anyone other than a project admin. But, from a business point of view, none of these things matter because GitHub isn't popular for being the best. It's popular for having been good enough for long enough to become ubiquitous, and now not being so bad as to negate the enormous network effects.
So the core of the problem here is not whether or not the authors, or anyone else, can build a better GitHub. The problem is that even if they could it would have to be wildly, dramatically, better to even provide competition. And so people, without meaningful leverage, resort to writing open letters and hoping that they can drum up enough noise that someone at GitHub chooses to care.
>but what I'd genuinely like to know is why don't big projects just move to their own thing?
Github is a great advertising and marketing platform for large OSS projects. Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge (sorry FOSShub, it was a bold try), with all that implies.
The thing I really don't get is why people use it for small projects. Like Facebook, Twitter and basically every other social media site out there, it's a drama factory. It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
That's the last thing small OSS projects need, and I'd have thought most 5-15 man projects would be vastly better off throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business. I acknowledge that this reduces discoverability by some amount and thus risks taking a hit to your developer acquisition, but I'd love to see some hard numbers on how much. I'd wager that much like the Apple app store, if you're not in the top 50 on github, you're no one.
But hey, I'm apparently an old fogey born young, and I prefer to self-host when I can, so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
@Sir_Substance - thank you for the kind mention. I agree with you but don't forget that any Empire will fall sooner or later. People work with enthusiasm at a new project, after a while this new excitement is replaced by greed because the financial thing becomes the most important aspect. At this stage I would say that GitHub is Google, SourceForge is Yahoo and FossHub aims to become DuckDuckGo. We need to improve so instead of throwing us at garbage we would appreciate a constructive criticism. Thank you!
The reason why I thought bigger projects would be more capable of handling this is because team size = more manpower obviously.
> Quite the opposite, large projects should be moving towards github, because it's a great stage for them to perform on. On top of that, it's rather become the defacto replacement for sourceforge.
Not exactly sure what they're supposed to perform better/easier on a shared-hosting locked-in platform. If it's the issue of getting people excited about the project to want to use it or join in and help, it'd be interesting to see if there are any numbers to back this up.
I'm not sure about sourceforge but i never thought of it as a serious thing for big project hosting before github came around.
> It incentivises people towards public grandstanding on creative and technical issues, and encourages resolving disputes by forking the repo, burning bridges and splitting the dev team rather than discussing all aspects of the problem, chewing it over and making a group decision.
Totally. This is a good point I think. I never understood the fascination with obsessive forking (edit: lol, after the letter moved to github it got 2 forks! WHY! https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github) just to apply a patch or change a line of code (there's a lot of those). It's a nice feature and all, but not really that useful imo. I'd like to see some data on forks that haven't been touched as well, amounting to garbage, outdated code basically.
> ... throwing up a kallithea repo (if they don't just use DCVS the real way) and a dokuwiki and then knuckling down to business...
The thing that bugs me the most about Github and the likes is this. It's slowly taking away the will or need to do this. Same as how the use of Slack/Gitter has somewhat eclipsed IRC in OSS world. From my experience, I learn a lot when I'm doing things I don't really want to do or I find tedious because I either discover that there's a detail that I don't understand well or it motivated me to write an automator to sort things out.
> so maybe I'm just pointlessly resisting the tide of the inevitable or something.
Wait until the fixation on cloud crap washes off and everything will be back to normal lol.
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It's a momentum thing I think. A big part of the Github platform mirrors a social media platform. When you meet a developer, you check out what they're up to on Github just like you might check on a friend's status on Facebook. Like Twitter, it's a way to get your name out there.
Also, I don't want to have to maintain an account on a Gitlab (or equivalent) server for every project. Anyone who has enough interest to troll through issues on a project or open an issue already has a Github account. It lowers the barrier to entry for your project.
The final thing is just name recognition. People trust code from Github. They shouldnt, but a Github URL legitimizes your project more than git.abrakadoodle.io.
> Also, I don't want to have to maintain an account on a Gitlab (or equivalent) server for every project. Anyone who has enough interest to troll through issues on a project or open an issue already has a Github account. It lowers the barrier to entry for your project.
There are multiple ways to go around this, OpenID, Mozilla Persona, or any third-party authenticator.
> The final thing is just name recognition. People trust code from Github. They shouldnt, but a Github URL legitimizes your project more than git.abrakadoodle.io.
I see this more of an additional reason for big projects to move away from Github. It gives unwarranted legitimacy to everything on the platform.
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Along the same line of thought: there's a lot of momentum regarding tooling surrounding GitHub. Continuous integration works smoothly. Slack works smoothly. github/hub and ghi let you interact with the issues and repos from the command line. Vim, Emacs, Atom, and Sublime plugins exist to integrate with GitHub. While moving to another hosting platform might fix some things, there is a lot of solid tooling built around GitHub.
I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the moment. Why has Github been complacent?
> I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement.
There is GitLab, which is good and is FOSS in addition.
I'm maintaining a GitLab instance for my team at work and it's been really great for us. I am pretty disappointed that the CE version doesn't include GitLab Pages, though, as that was the one feature I missed most from GitHub and GitLab Enterprise is outside of our budget at this time.
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By their very nature, git repos are one of the easiest things to migrate. Simply point at a new remote and push, and that's really it. It means that, unlike many other services, I could see GitHub being completely abandoned almost over night. If something better came along.
Agreed. This is the point of git. There is no centralized repository.
You would lose the issues.
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The same reason YouTube is so popular. Neither GitHub or YouTube are big because of their technology, it's their community that keeps people there.
It's a huge tax on attention and contributions if a project decides not to use GitHub. There are many GitHub replacements but none of them have the community of GitHub.
Playing devil's advocate - in their respective heydays, SourceForge and Google Code both seeemed unassailable. They had large, active communities that hosted the most popular OSS projects.
Could the same thing happen to GitHub?
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For a very large percentage of young developers I work with, "Git" and "GitHub" are synonyms. GitHub has made themselves literally synonymous with version control to a large number of people. That's a lot of social momentum that a competitor has to overcome. In light of that, it's not that surprising at all that GitHub has become complacent.
Because those features are not ones from the people paying money to Github?
Most of these features are ones that only affect public projects. You're not customers of Github, you're the product. Or rather, the advertising.
Because Github succeeded in being the Git repo host. I think you're on track with saying their complacency is an opportunity and I wouldn't doubt to see a Github killer born this year.
> I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the moment. Why has Github been complacent?
Network effects strong enough to slow the growth of any competitor long enough for GitHub to adapt.
That will be extremely challenging. GitHub has a huge community with a lot of heavy weight projects behind it. Sure you can add a few features on top of whatever you build, but GitHub has the ability to copy whatever seems popular very quickly.
They've pretty much been profitable since the start unlike other start-ups who may be more eager to please users/customers.
Why not bitbucket?
Bitbucket's UX and integrations are worse than Github.
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Bitbucket requires payment for larger numbers of collaborators. Github requires payment for private repositories. Open source requires unlimited collaborators, and no one wants to pay.
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Most people on GitHub do not suffer these issues, simply put. It's only really the popular open source projects, which represents a small minority but are loud and vocal.
> Why has Github been complacent?
Management, money, growth.
My company pays me to work on a fairly old-school free software project and we run our own git service. Our workflow is email based so we won't ever consider switching to GitHub.
That said, we do sometimes consider setting up an official mirror on GitHub. Ideology aside (some team members might think we shouldn't promote a propriety solution for free software project), the main thing that puts us off is that there is no way to disable pull requests. Closing all pull requests by hand is not appealing; leaving all pull requests open is not desirable. We can probably write a bot to close pull requests, but that is just yet another administrative burden.
Not sure if GitHub will ever consider allowing users to disable pull requests though. That seems to go against GitHub's core interest.
FreeBSD has worked out a means of accepting pull requests on their github mirror, guessing using the API.
I myself don't really see any motive of doing that. It is administrative burden (maintaining the service that bridge API and existing system, managing GitHub accounts / tokens). Compare that to the number / quality of pull requests received [0] [1] and I find RoI of doing that very low.
[0] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/pulls [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pulls
I work on a very relevant project called Product Pains.
React Native, the open source project, is using Product Pains instead of GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. This is because there were thousands of open issues and, just as this document mentions, it's impossible to organize them. The comments are all "+1" and it's really hard to tell what's important and what's just noise.
If you take a look at https://productpains.com/product/react-native?tab=top you'll see the power of being able to vote on these issues.
So why's Product Pains relevant?
1. It's a temporary alternative to GitHub issues. I'm guessing GitHub will get to adding votes eventually. If you want to use Product Pains for organizing issues for your open source project, go for it. I'll even give it away to you for free.
2. It's a community dedicated to improving products. This document is chock-full of great, constructive, actionable feedback. Product Pains is a community built for posting exactly this. You can post feedback publicly, about any product, people can vote on it, and posts with a lot of votes create a social responsibility for the company to respond.
3. It's a way for your voice to be heard. Posting on Hacker News lasts a day and will get your voice heard. If you post actionable, constructive feedback on Product Pains, and 150 people vote on it, it lingers waiting for GitHub to do something about it. Around 600 users on Product Pains are also React Native developers. They'd probably be ecstatic to vote on constructive feedback for GitHub.
For example, go make an account and vote here: https://productpains.com/post/github/implement-voting-for-is...
Bitbucket kills GitHub issues with these two features:
- Multiple assignees for an issue - An "Approve" button so that maintainers can stamp a PR with the seal of approval
Surprised I didn't see my personal favourite mentioned - the unlimited free private repos!
To be fair, GitHub has to make money.
None of the complaints are about the GitHub business model, which is IMO pretty fair.
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I just wish that bitbucket's UI was half as smooth as Github. Sure, it's not terrible, but it has a lot of rough edges.
I'm completely comfortable calling BitBucket's UI/UX terrible.
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Github kills Bitbucket with this one feature: uptime
...and speed in my experience. Both the web UI and push/pull.
I've used Bitbucket for years and I've never seen "multiple assignees for an issue" as something which is available. I've just looked at a couple of our (private) repositories and I still can't see how you would do it. Either that feature doesn't exist or it's used in an extremely obscure manner.
Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits.
It'd be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know what's next up in my queue of things to do; right now I've got 5 tags called NextUp:1 -> NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a simple drag/drop widget.
Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing what matters -- I cringe every time I leave a +1, so I've gotten into the habit of at least adding a comment after it --- but the premise and the pain are the same.
We created ZenHub - https://www.zenhub.io/ - specifically to solve these problems.
The addition of a task board in the GitHub interface allows you to communicate both the priority and progress of GitHub issues.
While adding a +1 button to comments allows feedback without clutter.
Best of all, it is free for Open Source :)
You can read more on why we created ZenHub here - https://medium.com/axiom-zen/introducing-zenhub-2-0-c352a12c... and get in touch with us via our public support repo here - https://github.com/zenhubio/support
I hope we can help improve your GitHub experience!
I agree with voting.
I also think that voting systems should only have /positive/ inputs. (I agree with the content of a given statement/post). Negatives belong as a concretely expressed /contrasting opinion/ which can, it's self, be 'agreed with' (voted for).
A shame that GitHub aren't more responsive to the community that enables their success when they make such a big deal of their openness. It is also our own fault that we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on a single provider of a relatively simple service.
That said, I'm extremely grateful to the platform for enabling collaboration on open source and to the company for its work on Git, Resque etc.
GitHub's strategy is to open source everything except the business critical stuff, but it seems to me that their business is in enterprise support rather than in actual software. Perhaps they should just open source the whole platform and count on their service business being enough to carry the company?
I like GitHub issues as they are. I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.
I find it strange that some project maintainers get annoyed when people use the issues section to post questions. What's wrong with that? A question can reveal design failures about your software... Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.
I do think there should be a +1/like button though.
Have you ever tried to maintain a popular OS project on Github? Github issues feel great until you start using them at scale, and then they start to fall apart without some structure. This is especially pronounced in open source where many issues come from people who aren't familiar with what information you need in an issue to quickly resolve it.
I don't think the authors are requesting that this be made mandatory for all repos, but instead they just want the option to set up rules for repos they maintain. As someone giving up their free time to offer software for the rest of us, it seems only fair to let them set the rules about what they need before they can resolve an issue.
The biggest issue I see OSS maintainers running into is that they likely aren't the voice that Github listens to most anymore. If they can get some companies that pay for Github Enterprise to sign their letter as well that would likely help prioritize these features.
My project's main repo has 150 issues (only 7 still open) and it works out pretty well. Usually contributors will answer each other's questions and help close issues.
I suppose that could be a problem if you have 7000+ issues (as is the case for Docker) - But those projects represent an extremely small percentage of all OSS projects on GitHub. Also, these projects usually have a lot of contributors, so maybe those contributors could help filter through and tag/close issues as necessary?
The request was to allow maintainers to define a template or have the ability to add fields. So the formats would be on a project by project basis.
> Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn't be asking the question to begin with.
This is just silly.
Not so. For my project, I noticed on several occasions that different people were asking the same questions and that prompted me to rethink the design of the project a bit and it greatly improved the community engagement as a result.
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Why should maintainers not get annoyed if people ignore the proper support channels (which often have a great community of users to help) and further burden the developers instead?
>I wouldn't like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.
The thing is, if they implemented issue formatting in the way the posted document describes, the default would be exactly what it is now. Giving maintainers more control can't possibly be a bad thing.
I have mixed feelings about these requests. Yes it would be nice to have these extra features in GitHub. Its issue handling has always been a bit light on the workflow side—but IMHO has made up for it with a pleasant way to organize conversation around issues. The simple and smooth UX is part of what makes GitHub so great.
For the opposite side of the spectrum, there's the Bitbucket+Jira combo. It is customizable to a PM's heart's content, and in the process can become a mess of a tool.
I have mixed feelings about custom fields, I'd like Github UI to become as burden as Jira, but in the other hand 'reactions' as Slack or Facebook are implementing would make much easier to follow a discussion without so much scroll down.
After the whole incident where they deleted forks of a project without notice, due to their belief on what is and is not appropriate words to use in code without an apology I think we really need to re-assess GitHub in general.
Their 'control' of code and lack of respect to the people running projects is very disappointing and they seem to not want to move forward on the issues.
I'm surprised the open community is allowing this de-facto ownership of the worlds code and how it's written to take place, I'm not so sure they are a benevolent dictator.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150802/20330431831/githu...
Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
It's simple: This was made by a JS developer who shared it on Twitter and whose followers/community friends are more likely to be JS developers.
> why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript?
I also noticed that most of the repositories seem to be based on Javascript.
> JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
My guess:
Based on numerous sources [1][2], Javascript is the most popular language on GitHub. So there are more developers, more repositories, more activity involved. It just happens that one (or a few of them) talked this through and gather up other folks in their community.
[1] http://githut.info [2] https://github.com/blog/2047-language-trends-on-github
The problem is that GitHub has a monopoly and is considered _the_ current standard for Open Source. But I think that once some of the major projects move to alternatives like GitLab (which has many of the features described in that letter) GitHub will have to obey its user base. Unfortunately no Open Source project with a large user base will dare to do the first step.
There are some open source projects with a large user base taking the step to us, for example https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman
Regarding the three demands in the doc:
1. GitLab has issue templates in EE and on GitLab.com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests/28
2. GitLab has the award emoji function that doesn't spam and acts as a voting system https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/
3. We're open to displaying CONTRIBUTING.md more prominently, please open an issue on our public issue tracker that contains all our planned features https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
I'll go sleep now but please ask any questions so I can respond tomorrow.
Yes, I already saw some of these.
Unfortunately, there's no Travis CI integration yet, which I've been using on GitHub a lot.
I'm evaluating GitLab CI right now. Am I right, that I have to host a runner myself if I don't want to use a shared runner for my project?
> You can setup as many runners as you need. Runners can be placed on separate users, servers, and even on your local machine.
Does "local machine" really mean a non-public machine like my notebook?
Appreciating help from GitLab's CEO :)
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We're working on a response to all the issues in the letter in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938
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I went ahead and created an account on GitLab.com. So far I can tell the transition is seamless. You can import a repository from GitHub with only a few clicks. Issues will be inherited, but the single PR on the repo I tried to migrate got lost on the way.
Importing Pull Requests will be possible with the next version of gitlab that's going to be released on the 22nd january. See this MR for more information: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/2168
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.
"It's the world's tiniest open source violin"
https://xkcd.com/743/
Each and every suggestion is a sane and much needed improvement.
I completely agree with some of these suggestions, but it doesn't need all of them. If you really need a heavily-customizable issue tracking system, you can do anything you want in Bugzilla or Jira.
Every checkbox, dropdown and mandatory field they add makes GitHub Issues less attractive to those who don't need it. Simplicity is a feature, and it's one that you sacrifice as you make your software more flexible.
I guess it depends who is logging issues. If I'm experiencing some bug that I need fixed and motivated enough to log an issue at all, I'm probably motivated enough to fill out a few more fields.
Especially the +1
Best github support thread ever : https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/9 (scroll down)
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I don't think a +1 button would help.
Google Code had stars in order to encourage people to +1 something without creating noise and then instead of +1 comments you got +1 comments AND people yelling at them for using it wrong.
+1. Fix this.
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At Sourcegraph, we're trying to help solve these problems for developers everywhere (https://sourcegraph.com), both in open source and inside companies. GitHub’s commercial success and contributions to the world of development are impressive (and I'm speaking as a GitHub user for 8 years), but they can’t build everything developers need on their own.
We’re really pumped about improving dev team collaboration in the GitHub ecosystem by (soon) letting anyone use Sourcegraph.com’s code intelligence (semantic search/browsing), improved pull requests, flexible issue tracking with Emoji reactions instead of +1s (example: https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph/.tracker/151), etc.—all on their existing GitHub.com repositories.
All of Sourcegraph’s source code is public and hackable at https://src.sourcegraph.com/sourcegraph, so it can grow over time to solve the changing needs of these projects. (It’s licensed as Fair Source (https://fair.io), not closed source like GitHub or open source.)
Email me (sqs@sourcegraph.com) if you’re interested in beta-testing this on your GitHub.com repositories.
I think reactions as implemented in Facebook, Slack or Sourcegraph is a really neat UX solution for the +1 spam problem.
My biggest gripe with GitHub has been the notification system. Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
My workaround has been to use email notifications exclusively. I have a Gmail filter that applies a label to all notifications and skips the inbox. Then in my mail client I have a smart mailbox that only shows me unread notifications with that label (or that folder, from an IMAP perspective). The smart mailbox then shows me a counter of unread notifications. This way I don't oversee comments when multiple ones are made in a PR.
Problem 1: No context in these notifications. It would be nice if these emails could show the code in question for diff comments or the entire comments thread.
Problem 2: Now what is really bad with these notification emails is that the link "view it on GitHub" sometimes no longer links to the comment I'm being notified of. This happens when the comment was made on a PR on a line of the diff that no longer exists, as sometimes is the case when new commits are pushed. I then have to go to the main PR page, expand all collapsed "foo commented on an outdated diff" comments and manually search for the comment in order to get the context and be able to reply.
By fixing problem 1, problem 2 would be automatically fixed with it and make my workflow much more productive. Is there anyone else annoyed by this?
> Personally I can't use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue/PR for new comments.
I think the bundling aspect is an awesome feature! I can read multiple new comments all at once, with context in mind and less total context switches.
About being able to miss new comments - doesn't the link in the notifications UI take you directly to the first unread comment?
I just created and maintain a little Android library (a very rewarding experience by the way) so most of the complaints about Github doesnt really apply to me because the size and reach of my project (I understand the point perfectly though).
But I read some complaints about the users and the issues they tend to open and I fully agree. They are a minority but I can't only imagine what people with bigger projects have to deal with. This is what I've found:
- People with little to zero experience in the language/framework that simply state that my project doesn't work without providing more information and sometimes they didn't reply to my "give me more info" inquiries.
- Guys who just want to get their homework done and They are basically trying to get it done using me as non-paid freelance.
- And my favourite one, junior dev in a company, he needs to get their work done with more pressure than the previous one so became anxious about their problems and I feel it even via email. Eventually He gets the thing done but He notices I changed the build system to Jitpack for better dependency handling and and start to complain about Man in the middle attacks to his company and black-hat hackers replacing my lib with a malicious one (I guess it could happen but come on).
But it is a very rewarding experience besides these anecdotical cases
It's the nature of any issue tracker to gather low-quality feedback. The people using the product who are happy with it or who can solve their own problems mostly aren't the ones booking issues, unless there are genuine bugs. Paradoxically, a high quality project will have fewer genuine issues to report, and therefore be sensitive to a lower average quality of feedback.
Hi. your junior colleague might be interested in the security answer here https://jitpack.io/docs/FAQ/. It's an important matter so will be happy to answer any more questions via email/gitter.
You can also run JitPack on-premises and have full control over build artifacts.
Fortunately not my junior colleague! just a junior dev using my lib in his company's project. Thank you for the FAQ. I will forward it to him
All this problems seem to me like good problems to have.
They all seem to stem from the fact that github is too successful. And too many people are on github and too many people are using it, often in wrong ways.
Of course github should solve them all. But still, it's still better to have problems with too many people and too much interest, than have the opposite problem - dying platform that people are leaving (see: sourceforge and Google Code).
It's not a good problem for the Open Source community after all.
Being too successful is of course a good problem for github to have, but for the individual maintainers, it's still a source of frustration that can lead to maintainer burnout. If too many people get frustrated and leave, then it can quickly turn from a problem of too many people to having too few.
Look at kallithea SCM at http://kallithea-scm.org/, we have used it and in most cases it works well. Also it supports both git and mercurial. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
A lot of these points are fair and interesting, but I fail to grab some of the points, especially that one:
What does blocking users mean? Blocking from commenting/making PR/cloning?
Why blocking a whole organization from an open source project? What would prevent such users to use a personal account instead to do what they organization counterpart is blocked from anyways?
A more plausible interpretation would be that a particular GitHub organization might wish to block the inputs of a particular user across all its projects. That is, the phrase "from an organization" is adverbial and clarifies "block" rather than "users".
You're probably right! I don't use organization accounts so I'm not sure what was the issue, it would be to prevent haters to troll on every project of a particular company?
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I work at a large company with a central GitHub Enterprise instance, and we use GitHub as a code-reviewing and code-hosting platform. Everything else (including build-automation) is integrated through web-hooks to Atlassian tools for many of the reasons noted in this letter. It works for us, but I am hopeful that GitHub will listen and maybe someday we can have everything on there.
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
While I don't maintain Ansible anymore, +9 billion on this. GitHub is hard at scale.
GitHub is fantastic because everyone is on it, but the issue system has not improved since inception - and I felt the UI changes have actually stepped back.
We had to implement our own bot to comment on tickets that did not appear to follow a template, and I would have given a kingdom for a template that let people filter their own tickets into whether they were bugs or feature requests or doc items.
We also had a repo of common replies we copy and pasted manually (this because there was so much traffic and me replying quickly would likely tick someone off - but this too could have been eliminated mostly with a good template system). Having this built-in (maybe I could have picked a web extension) would have also been helpful.
So many hours lost that could have been features or bugfixes - and by many, I mean totally weeks, if not cumulative months.
GitHub does the world a great service, and I love it, but this would help tons.
I always got a response when I filed a ticket - ALWAYS - but a lot of them were in the "we'll take that under consideration" type vein.
I feel opening GitHub RFEs up to votes is probably not the answer to serve the maintainer side of the equation, since users outnumber maintainers, but these needs to be done and would greatly improve OSS just based on expediting velocity.
If you don't use the GitHub tracker you lose out on a lot of useful tickets. However, if you use it, you are pretty much using the most unsophisticated tracker out there.
It's good because there's a low barrier to entry, but just having a template system - a very very very basic one, would do wonders.
A final idea is that GitHub really should have a mailing list or discussion system. Google Groups sucks for moderation, and I THINK you could probably make something awesome. Think about how Trac and the Wiki were integrated, for instance, and how you could automatically hyperlink between threads and tickets. The reason I say this is often GitHub creates a "throw code at project" methodology, which is bound to upset both contributor and maintainer - when often a "how should I do this" discussion first saves work. Yet joining a Google Group is a lot of commitment for people, and they probably don't want the email. Something to think about, perhaps.
Also think about StackOverflow. It's kind of a wasteland of questions, but if there was a users-helping-users type area, it would reduce tickets that were not really bugs, but really requests for help. These take time to triage, and "please instead ask over here and join this list" causes people pain.
I love all the work to keep up site reliability, maybe I'd appreciate more/better analytics, but I totally say this wearing a GitHub octocat shirt at the moment.
I could rant for hours about all the things GitHub doesn't do (or does wrong) for "real" software development.
+1 from the Kubernetes project
I wish Github would add a "Discussions" tab for repos, so projects don't need to create a separate Google Group (which require a Google account!) for questions-that-are-not-quite-issues.
There are three groups within GitHub, and this article is about the issues faced by the first - big open source projects (a small number).
The main bread and butter of GitHub is from private or organizational projects and do not have these issues
The majority of accounts on GitHub are folks like the majority of HN readers - developers, coders, hackers and do not have these issues.
So all these complaints are in a sense not applicable to the vast majority of both GitHubs revenue generating customers and the vast majority of GitHub users.
While I like to bitch and moan about stuff myself, I don't really agree with the first point.
What I like about GitHub's issue tracking is that (compared with alternatives, such as Redmine or Jira) it is free form. It doesn't force users to fill information such as steps to reproduce and I don't think it should. And that's because the needs of every project is slightly different. Consider how different the "steps to reproduce" are for a web user interface, versus the usage of some library. Yes, it can be painful for an issue to not provide all the information required, but on the other hand GitHub does a better job than alternatives at fostering conversations and keeping people in the loop. I've even seen projects use the GitHub issues as some sort of mailing list.
On the second point, I do agree that GitHub needs a voting system for issues. Given that GitHub has long turned into some sort of social network, adding a voting system for issues is a no-brainer. But then a voting system doesn't address the problem of people getting frustrated about issues taking too long to get fixed. +1's are annoying, but sometimes that's a feature and I've been on both sides of the barricade.
Do the undersigned send any money to github? It might be better to phrase your demand in the form of a question, "how much can we pay you to do this work for us?"
GitHub's success is based on its community. Simple fairness says the community should be respected and listened to, simple business says if the community doesn't get something back, it will get pissed and go somewhere else.
Again... No thought of how all this gets paid for?
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GitHub is a service, not a contracted vendor for work. There's a big difference.
GitHub got to where it is today thanks to the network effect that the undersigned helped create. If open source were to do a mass migration to another provider, many of the contributors whom are paying for private repositories and other features would most likely follow.
Yes, I do. If it was OSS I would PR the feature personally.
So most of the above replies seem to be a threat. Give us free stuffs. You have a nice website there, be a shame if anything happened to it.....
Seems like the Tony Soprano way of doing things.
Is there an issue tracking system out there that works on top of the Github issue system?
This tracker app [0] is designed to be pretty modular, and there's a service implementation that uses the GitHub API client [1]. In theory, you could modify it and expand it to cover your custom needs for issue tracking.
[0] https://src.sourcegraph.com/apps/tracker
[1] https://godoc.org/src.sourcegraph.com/apps/tracker/issues/gi...
We would love your thoughts on ZenHub.io [1] - fully integrated issue tracking, +1, estimates, burndown charts, kanban boards, even a personal todo list - a lot of the features asked for here, right within the GitHub interface and presented a lot more cleanly than competing products.
Disclosure: I work on ZenHub :)
[1] https://www.zenhub.io
Looks nice. How do I add additional organizations after the first one? Can I send an invite to other organization managers to make themselves available for ZenHub?
Thanks!
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waffle.io does this, but having to run on top of GitHub means it can't really fix problems like voting. But it can offer better search and things like that
+1 to the notification spam. Being @sam on github sucks sometimes. And as far as I can figure out there's no way to set watching/following/notifications to opt-in only.
So every time someone who knows a "Sam" uses @sam incorrectly in an issue I get notified, have to unsubscribe, ignore, and leave a polite message to let them know they're doing it wrong.
It's really lame that they've never fixed this.
Most of this stuff seems pretty common sense and reasonable. I really only have a couple of objections:
* Issue templating.
It's one thing to prefill the entry box, it's quite another to add fields that everyone must fill out. I quite like that filling out something on Github is totally the opposite of filling out something on Jira.
* Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines
This is a people problem that has plagued open source from day one. You cannot engineer your way around it in a manner that doesn't annoy your contributors.
There was a blurb in here about getting rid of the big green "new pull request" button, but that was when this link went to a google doc. Good - if someone doesn't want to take PR's, then they have almost no reason to be on Github in the first place. Put another way, it's the mark of someone that wants a repo as a signpost of sorts without actually interacting with its community.
I think if these people have that many issues with GitHub, they should find a replacement. That's what happened in the Node community and it led to a better Node. That's a big list of complaints and GitHub doesn't have much incentive to fix 'em except to silence a bunch of cry babies that are bitching about a free tool.
I've felt the same way. The worst bit is notifications, so I get a notification that someone replied to an issue I opened. How do I get there? It's not in my notification page, I have to go to the email and click the link from there. Things get missed.
GitHub needs to step it up. They got to the top first, but can they stay there?
What I don't get ... why do people building free software even consider forcing their users and in particular their contributors to use proprietary development tools such as github? (Or, for that matter, exclude people from contributing to their projects who only use free software.)
Next, we'll see public complaints to Microsoft because MS Word doesn't properly support the way they want to maintain their project's documentation?
I mean, sure, feel free to complain all you like, but how is this not exactly what was to be expected from the beginning, and why do you expect them to care in the future, given that you just seem to have realized that they didn't care in the past, for obvious reasons, and given that their incentives haven't changed, and there is no reason for them to change in the future?
Many times, I've asked GitHub to add icons for :test:, :doc:, :admin: and a couple others. I use them in commit messages as it helps categorize the type of commit. This has to be the easiest kind of improvement imaginable, but they have never bothered.
I know they've only recently released new permissions for organisations, but they're still extremely lacking. As far as I can see, there's no way of setting permissions at a group level.
As an example of how this would be used, we have a Github team within our organisation which is used for non-technical people to post bugs. These people have no reason to be able to see or push code to the repository, they only need to be able to create issues. This applies to every repository in the organisation. As far as I can see, and without manually adding every single repository to the team, there's no way of setting global permissions permissions for a team. This seems like a major oversight to me.
I just create a single repo for all issues, cross repo, and manage it with waffle.io. Works well for me, but ymmv
I suspect they are focusing on developing their enterprise offering.
Anyway, I found that http://feathub.com/ addressed my frustration about the absence of a voting system.
I would just love if they could add target _blank on all the links in comments and issues. I'm constantly navigating away from the issue to view links in question and then realizing the tab with the issue is gone.
My experience with Github support is terrible, if not one of the worst, I once had an issue and contacted their support and it took them 1 month to respond to me (literally) I was really surprised by that.
I had the opposite experience. I am on the free student plan for private repos. It has to be renewed annually. It wasn't clear to my how to do so. I asked, and Scott from Github support contacted me in under a minute and sorted it out. I was very impressed.
I contacted them dozens of times in 4 years and never had to wait more than a day. I guess you’ve been unlucky that time.
It's also annoying that Github sometimes is missing some basic features like attachments to bug reports and comments for instsance. All mature bug trackers have such feature.
Why do you want GitHub to solve the (very) specific problems of issue and defect tracking?
They make a facility available as a nicety, but if your project has legitimate Global impact, you should be looking at (or bootstrapping) a counterpart.
Don't have the revenue for JIRA? Apply for the Free license.
Don't have the stomach for Bugzilla? Turn out a Node/Go alternative.
Don't have the business alignment with Clearquest or Rally? Lower your expectations to suit your Free (as in beer) SCM tool.
There's a lot of great feature requests for issues at the bottom of the document. Not sure why the document highlights only 3 things above the signatures.
Yet, I 100% agree with them. I do not understand why Github issues are so basic. The only feature I feel was added in all of 2015 was making the logging of every metadata change extremely verbose (read: maybe too noisy now?!).
"Person assigned to the issue"
"Person added label"
"Person removed label"
I personally experiencing this issue. i wrote about this in 2014, you can check here http://paritosh.passion8.co.in/post/96619506751/dear-github-... although i am addressing the problem in different way but the issue is same.
I recurrently refer to this[0] PR, and the subsequent discussion, as the reason why, if any project of mine gets any bigger - it will not be accepting Github pull requests.
[0] https://github.com/technion/maia_mailguard/pull/42
Haha what a crazy final exchange.
> uh oh, someone is still sulking [...] We really don't care about the drama
Oh, okay buddy.
GitHub also does not allow deletion of bullshit issues.
I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people (cough guys) that maintain these repos, but there's something telling about it that it's all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:
> Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!
LOL. I can't tell if this is "go-fuck-yourself"-level passive aggression, or mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github (or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after reading this would be "mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y'can g'fuck yr'self", while the second thought would be "yea, you're not wrong". Generally, passive aggression gets you nowhere when you're asking for something from someone/something who owes you nothing (I know, I know, they "owe" their customers everything).
The Node/React/JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish. The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it's mind-boggling, because they're not wrong about anything they're asking for. But it's how they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.
I agree that the "we’re very good at that!" was not needed. But the rest of the letter is ok to me, not particularly entitled. It is after all an open letter, open letters are designed to pressure people into something. In this case, these people have been asking for changes for years nicely and privately and have been ignored. They are just pressuring them as any customers would do. One may ignore the history of git, but its very existence came to be because a million dollar company called BitKeeper started ignoring its open source customers because they didn't owe them anything. Look what happened to them. Who even remembers BitKeeper? Maybe github should take these millennials hippy contributors more seriously if it doesn't want to end the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#History
Interestingly most of these people are older than the millennial category
Fooled me ;)
People often ask why WordPress doesn't use Github for its primary development (they do have official read-only mirrors there), and it's not just because they already had an SVN-based system in place when Github came to be. It's because the tooling they already had was more sophisticated, especially regarding issues.
Why bother users with a warning? Turn it into a vote, and then highlight the vote icon so you can see what happened.
A proposal for a better way to deal with github issues: a discussion tab. https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/44
I'd settle for just a fix to the (minor) data-loss bug that I reported nearly a year ago, and which still crops up once a month or so.
That, and something for code review. Pull Requests are terrible for code review, and it wouldn't take that much to make them so much better.
I got frustrated waiting for improved PR code review, so I built https://reviewable.io. It's best suited for private repos (since there's a learning curve that make throw off potential open source contributors) but it addresses a lot of the issues with PRs. Take a look!
I've actually looked at Reviewable multiple times for use within our team, but never decided to use it. From my usage of the demo, it feels complicated. There are a lot of controls on the screen, and I struggle to tell what exactly I'm looking at at any given time.
I also tried the demo, and was shocked to see that Reviewable had edited our PR descriptions to include a big "Review on Reviewable" badge. We currently make heavy use of PR descriptions in quite specific formats, and it felt like Reviewable was forcing itself upon us.
To be clear, I'm really glad someone is looking at this problem, and Reviewable looks like a step in the right direction. I'm just quite opinionated on code review and developer tools, and I feel like it could be much better.
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One annoying issue I found with github is that it doesn't provide a discussion board. a lot of times, I have a question to ask, it doesn't mean I found a bug or anything needs progress tracking, but I have to go through the "github issues".
To what degree a company has to not give a f$#% when maintainers of largest projects on a platform can't get any feedback (compounded by a fact that some of those maintainers are very prominent employees of largest github paying customers)
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience.
It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented awfully with issues.
I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system to make our decisions with.
What really gets to me is how adamantly GitHub has ignored all the people who've gone on about this forever. Last time they seemed to care marginally was when jacobian finally managed to twist their arm and get them to implement the Close Issue feature, because one repo issue was a radioactive pit of abuse and invective.
I wonder if the whole "managerless culture" is to blame and is unfixable? (In other words, why hasn't SOMEONE had this thought about issues in N years? One is they deem it not a problem, another could be that they think to optimize for the filer, and the maintainer doesn't matter, or... there's no organization at all?)
There could be (theoretically) no one to make anyone do anything, and perhaps the issue tracker is either a quagmire of a codebase or something no one wants to touch because something else is more exciting?
That's one theory.
My other theory is they spend a lot of time on scaling problems and/or GitHub enterprise (which I haven't seen) -- and don't really do features anymore.
But it does feel there is no vision for changes to GitHub (maybe they think it's "solved") and it's ceasing to evolve in noticeable ways in any direction.
Can't really be sure. But I find it interesting. Again, the core is good. It's just curious to watch it so closely and not see the needle moving in any perceptible way.
I like the theory of the flat-office culture or philosophy affecting this.
Then again, it could be the kind of anarchic Libertarian or laissez-faire bent that we see with reddit that makes it exceedingly different to grant special permissions and privileges, especially across subreddits/issues/users/orgs. Or maybe user experience just doesn't matter for today's start-ups; maybe we've passed the Overton window for start-ups deciding it's not worth caring about their users.
A lot of the time, I feel like more of a user+ than a(n) (super)admin on my own repos. I might as well have the permissions and tools to ruin my own project - in the name of pure unadulterated freedom if for no other reason.
The dashboard and notification system have always been POS, too, so it might just be that everything that basically isn't tethered to a GUI is on the bottom of the totem pole.
GitHub does certain things very well, other - not so much. I really think the best way to get them to focus is to start contributing massively to GitLab.
Anyway, implementing just voting won't be a such a good idea in the time of Emoji Reactions!
Actually, GitLab counts some emojis as votes - so you can have your :cake: and eat it too ;-)
- https://about.gitlab.com/2015/11/22/gitlab-8-2-released/
- https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5724
Issue spam (in the literal sense) definitely needs addressed as well: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CYI31g1UQAUXQbs.png
It's my project, why can't I just delete issues like any other bug tracker?
The issues were deleted in fairly short order, but their notifications were still sent out to all repository watchers and persisted beyond the issue deletion. Also, most issues were generated mere seconds apart from accounts less than a day old.
So the issue isn't that GitHub didn't let them clean up the issues after the fact, but that there were no a) rate limiting options, b) user reputation options, or c) issue submission filtering options.
Any one of those three would have reduced the impact significantly.
This resonated so much with me
PS, it was moved to https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github
Please update the link to https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github
Thanks, I've been trying all day to open the original link on mobile and it just brings my phone to its knees and never opens. Not even sure what is behind that link other than perhaps a very large Google doc?
Funny. It's like "Hi, you are rich. We like you. You should onate your money".
There are tradeoffs, so pick services you like.
I guess I don't know how to use githib. You can send bug reports on a project. But how do you send questions or ask for advice?
Totally agree with what has been said. However, I find it interesting that most of the signatories displayed were for JS projects.
gog.com has a great mechanic for this which might work here called a community wishlist [1] where people can submit games whey wish to see and people can vote on it and eventually they get things done when possible.
[1]http://www.gog.com/wishlist
I am interested in understanding how much recurring revenue Github is receiving for hosting these projects.
I've never seen any issues spammed with +1s like the TravisCI request for Bitbucket support
Can anyone post a précis/examples - apparently I do not have rights to see any spreadsheets at all.
we maybe need a feature of hotness of a bug, "affects me too", that'll prioritize issues out of a bucket load of issues, plus on github you first raise an issue then it is sorted into feature request or bug, can be made better
Classic JavaScripters reaction: throw more tooling at it
Url changed from https://docs.google.com/document/d/14X72QaDT9g6bnWr0lopDYida..., which points to this.
NB: Duplicate post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10904693
Since they're both near the top we might as well treat the later post (which is the other one) as the duplicate.
The post with ~110 points was killed in favor of the ~50 point post at the time. In that case using time as the tie breaker might not be the best since people will have to upvote again.
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World’s top ten coldest places that will chill you to bones! http://goo.gl/5BvVCZ
This is how these World War 1 battlefields look like after 100 years! http://goo.gl/6wJWCe
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience.
It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn't received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented awfully with issues.
I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system to make our decisions with.
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable "license" attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT/Apache/GPL/etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.
:+1:
ahahaha
Chris Wanstrocity is an inept leader, social activists roam the halls in self glory about their contributions to the world while Kakul spends money on retreats and hires senior product people who have zero open source or dev ops experience. This company needs intensive care with new leadership asap or they will be doomed, Gitlab is salivating right now.
While I applaud the initiative, it's also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript / node.js community that there is not even a single non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects.
What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is "Nobody", why is that true?
There is plenty being done in JS/node communities (plural! because there is more than one) at all levels. It just turns out that change doesn't happen over night.
Conferences already reverse discriminate by aiming for a gender balance in speakers (despite the submissions they chose from being very imbalanced). User groups have adopted CoCs to protect female and minority members. There are even female-only special interest groups. There's also this: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity
Besides, the list you're referring to is not an exhaustive list of important JS projects. It's a list of maintainers who have signed this open letter. What does their gender add to the conversation?
Inclusivity in programming comunities and JS/node in particular has drastically improved throughout the past decade. But structural changes take a long time to show results. The distribution you're seeing today represents what was being done in the past, not what is happening today.
Addendum: if all the non-males majoring in literary/communications/gender studies who complain about the lack of diversity in STEM would major in STEM, maybe they would no longer have anything to complain about. Whining isn't a science.
...pretty strong indictment...
This is like blaming the schools for poverty. Yes it would be wonderful if Node module maintainers were a perfectly representative blend of all the races, genders, religions, and orientations on Earth. The gap between that vision of Node and the one we have pales in comparison to the gap between that vision of Earth and the one we inhabit.
You could open a pull request on the list itself.
Tell us, why does the gender matter in this debate? Sounds rather sexist to me.
Why did this get downvoted? Ugh.
Hmm what does this have to do a) with topic b) with node.js?