In the olden days, a FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) project typically had:
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ijreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer in the old-olden days there was even a newsgroup for that piece of software if the software was somewhat relevant for others.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian: last edited by
@lunareclipse Mailing lists *with archives* is what I said — for reasons! Having a publicly available archive is really important, IMHO, so that I can check a project even *before* I subscribe to a mailing list. Most of the time I am happy to just bookmark the archive page and read stuff there.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to ij last edited by
@ij And we had bridges between nntp and mailman Then came phpBB and things changed dramatically ...
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@nobletrout @jwildeboer Hard agree. For me this is about project governance, and infrastructure governance along with sustainable fund raising models (includes corporate sponsors). We must raise funding to support FOSS solution providers that respect privacy and user freedoms. Unpopular opinion: It does a disservice to our communities if we all stand up forgejo instances without considering that if we all put that money towards something like CodeBerg, that we might get a solution we all need.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by [email protected]
I am throwing this out here not to come over as a grumpy old man, yelling at the clouds. But because I guess many enthusiastic, young people simply never experienced the olden ways. Maybe they want to explore them a bit and see for themselves if there could be something viable in it for them. Especially wrt async communication. Is all! 5/6
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Carlos O'Donell last edited by
@codonell (FTR: I am a paying member of Codeberg, moved most of my projects there and am also running my own forgejo instance @nobletrout
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Carlos O'Donellreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer @nobletrout I figured you were, and I wrote "without considering" purposely. It is absolutely OK to do this for yourself, I don't object to that, but as @nobletrout says, and I agree with, we need a mindset change where we consider our options and their consequences. Consider if the top 3 downstream distribution put all of their sources on CodeBerg, and put all that funding in the same place? Imagine being able to do PRs against the same debian, gentoo, and fedora sources?
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Carlos O'Donell last edited by
@codonell I am not a big fan of centralisation. Forgejo is working hard to integrate ActivityPub so that ultimately you can file issues, pull requests etc to any instance with your preferred AP account. It's going to take a while to get there, but that's the future I am hoping for. Decentralised, distributed, open. @nobletrout
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Qreplied to Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian: last edited by
re: IRC with no history. Most of the IRC chans I'm in actually have public archives that are almost instant. I have my weechat loading the 1000 last messages from the chan (when I was connected, so that's obviously not perfect).
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Q last edited by [email protected]
@0leil I always saw IRC as synchronous, ephemeral communication. When I am there, I am there and when I'm not, I'm not. Meaning: I don't need or want to have an archive on chats.
The mailing list is the asynchronous communication channel for me. That's where I want the archive. That distinction was always really helpful to me. @lunareclipse
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Qreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer I've been contributing/following a few big projects that only use mailing list based contributions (Yocto, U-Boot bootloader, Linux kernel, libcamera, Buildroot). The last few years we've seen a lot of people voicing their discontent at that workflow and requesting we do everything with GitHub/GitLab "or else you will never get a contribution from me".
So I am not sure those young people are that interested in that old workflow.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Q last edited by
@0leil And I support them with that. The very old workflow of creating patch/diff and sending that around is dark magic With issue and PR management a la Github/Gitlab/Gitea/Codeberg a lot has become a lot better.
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I'm still in my early thirties but I think I was probably one of the last generations where GitHub was not in basic monopoly for anything-git. At university it was still a decision which to use and some were still using Dropbox
So I think it was less of an issue back then, because not EVERYTHING was on GitHub. Now it gets more difficult to get people to do a bit more effort to contribute, is my feeling. -
Qreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer I have contributed with Gerrit, GitLab/GitHub and mailing lists. Nothing works 100%. Every workflow is broken in some way and it's just always in the way.
It's just that when one person is used to one workflow, they learned to live with those and it hurts to see how you work now not work in another workflow.
I for myself have given up on something that's nice to use and I'm just internally complaining at everything ol' grumpy man yelling at the clouds like you said
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Q last edited by [email protected]
@0leil I come from the time when version control was an esoteric topic at first, tarballs and patches ruled. Then I started using CVS and along came Sourceforge, which many projects used. That was what git and GitHub are now, more or less. So yes, better tools, but still the same (centralised) setup. Forgejo/Codeberg are working on integrating ActivityPub by using #ForgeFed [1] and I have high hopes that that will introduce truly better ways and real progress.
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Juanlureplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer How is requesting a GitHub account "very high price"? Or put another way: is your solution to go back to *exclusively* IRC and mailing lists, or to have *both* systems to give people choice (and place the burden on maintainers)?
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Qreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer well... it is **a** workflow... which has nothing in comparison to mailing list based contribution.
GitHub/GitLab's PR workflow is an absolute disaster/nightmare for per-commit/patch review. Gerrit does that a bit better with patchsets but it gets difficult to read pretty quickly, even with topics.
GitLab/GitHub is just NOT necessarily compatible with some project's workflow.
I actually wrote a multiple pages long email on why no GH/GL for Yocto a while back, maybe I should put it in an article so it's easier to explain everything instead of being limited to a few 100s of characters at once
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Juanlu last edited by
@astrojuanlu When GitHub started using my code to feed it to their Copilot LLM with now way for me to opt-out, I decided the price was too high. But that's just me. I still have a GitHub account, but moved my code to Codeberg and my own Forgejo instance.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Q last edited by
@0leil Please do! I will also start a blogpost on how Discord etc mess up communication in a project (IMHO) by mixing synchronous and asynchronous communication together in a way that isn't helpful but, again IMHO, damaging to the flow.
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HankBreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
There was also source code and patches published to Usenet. I don't recall how much took place there but it was generally open and accessible. (Some newsgroups were moderated.)