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I feel that open source projects should at least have a mirror or issue repo on Github, I have a lot of issues with Firefox that I'd have reported in a jiffy on

I feel that open source projects should at least have a mirror or issue repo on Github, I have a lot of issues with Firefox that I'd have reported in a jiffy on Github, but when I open firefox's issue manager, I get lost, plus I have to go, sign up and then report etc It is a hassle that we can avoid if we all use github/gitlab

bad_user 10y ago
I love GitHub and I use it for my own projects, however the increased reliance of the open-source community on GitHub worries me, because if this relationship goes sour it will be worse than what happened with SourceForge, because GitHub is much bigger with a much greater lock-in effect, because it also turned out to be a sort of social network for developers. Many high profile projects don't even point at their own domain anymore, GitHub being their homepage, which is reckless for popular projects, given that a domain is only about $10 per year and given that hosting of static pages is essentially free. Personally I hope that an alternative like GitLab takes off, because in the worst case scenario you can host it yourself.
- jsli 10y ago
  We still have BitBucket. Cheers.
  - nolok 10y ago
    Different name, same issues. Your comment doesn't provide anything of value regarding the issues he raised. If you think he said "there is only GitHub", then I suggest you re-read his comment.
  - nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
    I used to root for BitBucket earlier because I too didn't like GitHub being treated as if it was 'The Way to Have Git On The Internet'. However, after I started working at a place which uses Atlassian's wiki software and JIRA, I don't hold them in high regard anymore. Now, I root for GitLab.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      I got so tired with todo tools/ stuff like that, I wrote my own in Go. I don't have to worry about the changes they make to their products and it works offline! http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks I am currently working to make it run via ajax, it'll be fun :-)
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Yes, it is dangerous to lock into Github as the home page for a popular project, but I feel that github is great as far as the community is concerned, gitlab still isn't as great looking as github. Sourceforge story was different and I hope that it was an exception rather than the norm. Almost all of my repositories are on github and my machine, no where else. It is a big lock in
  - Already__Taken 10y ago
    It's only a lock in you've created though to be fair. And still so far as github don't pull things the same hour your machine goes down you'll have all the code. What's githubs issue and wiki export like? Half of a project is it's backlog of that information.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      Yes, I am not aware of the wiki exports and yes, it is a lock in which we got ourselves into personally.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - 0mp 10y ago
        Wiki on GitHub is a git repo. You can clone it and play with it as you'd do with any other git repo.
fabrice_d 10y ago
Github issue system is lacking many features that Mozilla needs to track bugs (eg. proper dependencies). It's true that bugzilla is not as welcoming as github, but things are improving. For instance you can now login using your github account - that removes some friction. And wven if you file your bug in the "general" category of the Firefox product, it should be triaged in a few days at most.
Ntrails 10y ago
> I get lost, plus I have to go, sign up and then report etc That's the exact experience I had trying to report an issue for duckduckgo. Using Github (which I've never really used). It's not that github is flawless - you're just used to it.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Yes, I know. This is a painful process and it isn't just painful because of the UI, there is a reason why Github became so popular, the founders started working to create a webapp to democratize FOSS. Because they said that earlier when you contributed to FOSS you'd have to send the diff and the merge person would not be able to merge everything so only those who knew them would get their PRs merged, when we add in a nice "merge pull request" button in a nice UI, it becomes simple. Yes, I am used to Github, but that's not the total point, I never log out of github, it is the only webapp which I am 24x7 logged into (in my browser of course). Every other webapp I logout. That's why it is no hassle to report issues on Github. Also I have very very limited amount of personal time if you remove office and commute, in one year, I have learned how to write webapps in Go and written a tutorial on it, I did this while handling my <1yr nephew and having only 2hrs daily and 6-7hrs on weekends (https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...). There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience, not that I like github's issue tracker, I wrote a todo manager for myself and I rarely use Github's tools for tracking things which I build.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    > There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience It's a convenience for you - for me it's as inconvenient if nor more so than Firefox's homerolled issue tracker. Now, I suspect that the people filing bugreports fit your profile more than mine and so maybe you're right? But it's worth acknowledging that they may not be optimising for you.
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
aseipp 10y ago
Those projects have a lot of history and often very specific needs and workflows. Github's bug tracker is really simplistic TBH, and lacks a lot of crucial yet basic functionality, such as custom fields, issue dependencies, etc that are really, really useful if you're working on a large project, and they're very useful to the maintainers in particular. You can sort of get around a small part of it with issue templates but it doesn't really fix the root problems (e.g. it can't offer this metadata as part of the API if you script against it), especially if you ever need to extend or integrate your issue tracker elsewhere. Also, maybe I'm reading part of your suggestion incorrectly, but you really only want one canonical issue tracker. I've seen some people use GH repositories as issues-only repos for off-site code, which is OK for public accessibility, if it's the only one. But multiple places where bugs can be reported and multiple trackers, etc generally take a substantial amount of time and effort to maintain for the developers. It's already hard enough for most teams to keep on top of whatever issue tracker they have already, having to wedge two tools together just makes it worse... And also... Personally, Github is nice and all, but saying "Everyone should always go out of their way to use it so my life of reporting bugs can be that much easier, think about it" seems a bit self centered and short sighted, to be honest. Having a code mirror on GH is always pretty good practice though, IMO, and quite easy to configure at least.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  It depends how you look at it, from a neutral point (but there is no such thing as neutral point IMO, everything/everyone is biased), it is self centered, but then why won't I be self centered, as much as I love FOSS, I have only 4hrs daily for myself, if you remove commute + office, out of the 4hrs I get, I'll be busy in things which I want to do, improving my skills/writing books etc, I don't have the luxury to sign up for 100 different bug trackers and then follow up with all of them. I want tools to be integrated so I don't have to check 100 of them, I find gitlab to be great at taking feedback, I wrote to the cofounder's comment here on HN, he asked me the feedback, I gave him four or five points and asked for a email ID where I can write, I got an emailID and I sent the email, the person I emailed then replied and issues are created on Gitlab. With the Chromium project, when you use Chromium/chrome on Win/Linux, when you do a full screen mode, you can't see the address bar, when I raised an issue there, I was auto logged in via google since I had logged into gmail. Maybe this is very evil of me to not raise an issue related to feature requests/performance of Firefox, but then again, it is an issue of integration + ease of use. Just having a code mirror is not of much use unless someone wants to read the code.

bad_user 10y ago

I love GitHub and I use it for my own projects, however the increased reliance of the open-source community on GitHub worries me, because if this relationship goes sour it will be worse than what happened with SourceForge, because GitHub is much bigger with a much greater lock-in effect, because it also turned out to be a sort of social network for developers. Many high profile projects don't even point at their own domain anymore, GitHub being their homepage, which is reckless for popular projects, given that a domain is only about $10 per year and given that hosting of static pages is essentially free. Personally I hope that an alternative like GitLab takes off, because in the worst case scenario you can host it yourself.

jsli 10y ago
We still have BitBucket. Cheers.
- nolok 10y ago
  Different name, same issues. Your comment doesn't provide anything of value regarding the issues he raised. If you think he said "there is only GitHub", then I suggest you re-read his comment.
- nf05papsjfVbc 10y ago
  I used to root for BitBucket earlier because I too didn't like GitHub being treated as if it was 'The Way to Have Git On The Internet'. However, after I started working at a place which uses Atlassian's wiki software and JIRA, I don't hold them in high regard anymore. Now, I root for GitLab.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    I got so tired with todo tools/ stuff like that, I wrote my own in Go. I don't have to worry about the changes they make to their products and it works offline! http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks http://github.com/thewhitetulip/Tasks I am currently working to make it run via ajax, it'll be fun :-)
thewhitetulip 10y ago
Yes, it is dangerous to lock into Github as the home page for a popular project, but I feel that github is great as far as the community is concerned, gitlab still isn't as great looking as github. Sourceforge story was different and I hope that it was an exception rather than the norm. Almost all of my repositories are on github and my machine, no where else. It is a big lock in
- Already__Taken 10y ago
  It's only a lock in you've created though to be fair. And still so far as github don't pull things the same hour your machine goes down you'll have all the code. What's githubs issue and wiki export like? Half of a project is it's backlog of that information.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    Yes, I am not aware of the wiki exports and yes, it is a lock in which we got ourselves into personally.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - 0mp 10y ago
      Wiki on GitHub is a git repo. You can clone it and play with it as you'd do with any other git repo.

fabrice_d 10y ago

Github issue system is lacking many features that Mozilla needs to track bugs (eg. proper dependencies). It's true that bugzilla is not as welcoming as github, but things are improving. For instance you can now login using your github account - that removes some friction. And wven if you file your bug in the "general" category of the Firefox product, it should be triaged in a few days at most.

Ntrails 10y ago

> I get lost, plus I have to go, sign up and then report etc That's the exact experience I had trying to report an issue for duckduckgo. Using Github (which I've never really used). It's not that github is flawless - you're just used to it.

thewhitetulip 10y ago
Yes, I know. This is a painful process and it isn't just painful because of the UI, there is a reason why Github became so popular, the founders started working to create a webapp to democratize FOSS. Because they said that earlier when you contributed to FOSS you'd have to send the diff and the merge person would not be able to merge everything so only those who knew them would get their PRs merged, when we add in a nice "merge pull request" button in a nice UI, it becomes simple. Yes, I am used to Github, but that's not the total point, I never log out of github, it is the only webapp which I am 24x7 logged into (in my browser of course). Every other webapp I logout. That's why it is no hassle to report issues on Github. Also I have very very limited amount of personal time if you remove office and commute, in one year, I have learned how to write webapps in Go and written a tutorial on it, I did this while handling my <1yr nephew and having only 2hrs daily and 6-7hrs on weekends (https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...). There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience, not that I like github's issue tracker, I wrote a todo manager for myself and I rarely use Github's tools for tracking things which I build.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  > There are many constraints & I have very limited time, thus github is a convenience It's a convenience for you - for me it's as inconvenient if nor more so than Firefox's homerolled issue tracker. Now, I suspect that the people filing bugreports fit your profile more than mine and so maybe you're right? But it's worth acknowledging that they may not be optimising for you.
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago

aseipp 10y ago

Those projects have a lot of history and often very specific needs and workflows. Github's bug tracker is really simplistic TBH, and lacks a lot of crucial yet basic functionality, such as custom fields, issue dependencies, etc that are really, really useful if you're working on a large project, and they're very useful to the maintainers in particular. You can sort of get around a small part of it with issue templates but it doesn't really fix the root problems (e.g. it can't offer this metadata as part of the API if you script against it), especially if you ever need to extend or integrate your issue tracker elsewhere. Also, maybe I'm reading part of your suggestion incorrectly, but you really only want one canonical issue tracker. I've seen some people use GH repositories as issues-only repos for off-site code, which is OK for public accessibility, if it's the only one. But multiple places where bugs can be reported and multiple trackers, etc generally take a substantial amount of time and effort to maintain for the developers. It's already hard enough for most teams to keep on top of whatever issue tracker they have already, having to wedge two tools together just makes it worse... And also... Personally, Github is nice and all, but saying "Everyone should always go out of their way to use it so my life of reporting bugs can be that much easier, think about it" seems a bit self centered and short sighted, to be honest. Having a code mirror on GH is always pretty good practice though, IMO, and quite easy to configure at least.

thewhitetulip 10y ago
It depends how you look at it, from a neutral point (but there is no such thing as neutral point IMO, everything/everyone is biased), it is self centered, but then why won't I be self centered, as much as I love FOSS, I have only 4hrs daily for myself, if you remove commute + office, out of the 4hrs I get, I'll be busy in things which I want to do, improving my skills/writing books etc, I don't have the luxury to sign up for 100 different bug trackers and then follow up with all of them. I want tools to be integrated so I don't have to check 100 of them, I find gitlab to be great at taking feedback, I wrote to the cofounder's comment here on HN, he asked me the feedback, I gave him four or five points and asked for a email ID where I can write, I got an emailID and I sent the email, the person I emailed then replied and issues are created on Gitlab. With the Chromium project, when you use Chromium/chrome on Win/Linux, when you do a full screen mode, you can't see the address bar, when I raised an issue there, I was auto logged in via google since I had logged into gmail. Maybe this is very evil of me to not raise an issue related to feature requests/performance of Firefox, but then again, it is an issue of integration + ease of use. Just having a code mirror is not of much use unless someone wants to read the code.