In the olden days, a FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) project typically had:
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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.)
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to HankB last edited by
@HankB Before we had the web, we also had weird solutions like ftp to e-mail gateways, where you would get tarballs from an ftp server as chunked content delivered to your email inbox
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🔗 David Sommersethreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
s/things changed dramatically/it went downhill ever since/
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Miah Johnsonreplied to Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian: last edited by
@lunareclipse @jwildeboer IRC doesn't need history, it's not a documentation service its a place to hold discussions. You don't walk into a discussion with people and request that they give you a log of past discussions. It's ephemeral on purpose. If something important happens it can be logged and made into documentation or a issue etc.
IRC is also perfectly usable on mobile, the problem lies in frequent disconnects but let's admit that mobile users ignore irc 99% of the time anyway.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to 🔗 David Sommerseth last edited by
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It's not just young people. I'm 56 and I don't care for the "submit patches only by email" rule either.
I've done it, but I don't like it.
The one project I follow that had that rule got a Github mirror, that's the only thing I use now.
They like their plaintext email; they can have it. I will happily live in *this* century.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Larry Clapp last edited by
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Larry Clappreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
I apologize, I didn't think you meant that.
I don't know if @0leil thought you did, either; they just brought it up, talking about "young people", and I offered a data point from an old fart.
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
Seeing how quite some commenters (want to?) take the wrong conclusions from my thread: I am all for the GitHub/gitlab/forgejo/codeberg based approach of managing issues, PRs, releases in "modern" ways. It made drive-by contributions so much easier! I am however not sure if discord et al are better for asynchronous communication and feel that mailing lists with public archives were a superior approach that we gave up on prematurely. HTH! 6/6
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Miah Johnsonreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer IRC wins for discussions by not requiring anything. You want to chat? Click the JavaScript client link and chat. You can install a optional client if you plan to chat often. You don't need to register or provide any personal details.
Matrix/Discord etc all fail with onboarding and high hardware requirements for a client. I can sign into IRC using any computer with networking, even obsolete hardware. NetBSD on a Apple llc, IRC on a palm pilot. Take your pick.
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tessaraktreplied to Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer What about an issue tracker?
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Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:replied to tessarakt last edited by
@tessarakt Many (smaller) projects didn't have one. It was often handled on the mailing lists. Setting up a full-blown bugzilla was quite a task. Sorceforge was (like GitHub nowadays) another solution to that.