Comment by fweespeech
10 years ago
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.
> instead of helping projects
This isn't how it works. You don't help projects by pretending the football-stadium-sized issues with them don't exist and using them despite their flaws.
Trac is an awful, awful piece of software. It's awful to set up, to use, to maintain, to gather feedback from, it's awful for just about everything. If in some very weird parallel universe it gathered even 1% of the following that Github has today, you'd find a 20 page google document at the top of HN about its issues.
This is me being nice. Kallithea is a lot better, but it's just a far poorer Github-like clone. You might as well use Gitlab.
The other advantage of Github is the network effect. You don't have to create yet-another account, which removes a barrier to contributions.
When you're an open source project, you can think of the "Submit issue" button as your payment form. Same UX rules apply: The user must be able to file the issue as easily as possible. You should not throw obstacles in their way. You should not ask 50 questions when they can't answer half of them, especially if they just want to tell you "You have a typo in decode.c" or even just say hi.
Time to enrollment. How easy is it to become a contributor? When I file an issue on your project, I am doing you a favour - you should help me help you. I have myself given up on several large scale projects because they use shit software for bug tracking. It's not fun.
A lot of people don't understand this today. Github has fixed these issues and this is a huge reason why they are popular. And before you say anything, this document here is about is not time to enrollment, but quality of life when you are already a developer (especially on large projects). I'd certainly love for GH to fix those.
Ubuntu has actively moved away from directing users to Launchpad to report a bug from a crash, and instead moved towards reporting to a crash database where they're triaged by actual developers.
Debian, in a similar vein, doesn't even have a web form to report bugs. As a result, almost every bug I've gotten on a Debian package has been clueful. At the very least, I know what version of the software they're running.
I've managed repositories that have gotten hundreds of low-quality issues. The poor filtering and curation functionality of GitHub ensures that a good deal of my spare time I have to work on those projects is spent managing the inbound issue flow, which is at least 90% noise.
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Gitlab is FOSS and does everything Github does (arguably) better.
The only reason one would use Github is for network effect.
Personaly i believe the ethical trade off to be too great, and I believe FOSS supporters should agree with me.
Look at diagoproject.com's ticket triage. They moved repository to github.com but cannot move issues there. It's built on trac and works. I am sure github.com will take ages to do such thing. Indeed even Python needs to rely on roundup for issues tracking. Now the developers will be more miserable since issues won't directly link to commits or changes which is loss of integrity.
Also from a ethical point of view it's wrong to trust for profit commercial closed source for community driven open source work. I am sure history will repeat and github.com will become future sourceforge.net.
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> and trac
Because, honestly, trac just sucks. It ain't as bad as the stuff Atlassian sells but still... it tries to be a fusion of MediaWiki and Bugzilla, and eh nope.
I still get a few emails a year from Trac instances where there is no support for unsubscribing emails
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.