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Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
- taeric 9y agoI actually really like the MAINTAINERS file. Keeps the metadata literally in the repository and doesn't rely on an external system.
- devrandomguy 9y agoYes, this is similar to how I would like to handle issues: just an issues directory full of yaml-markdown files. That way, issues are a part of the same history as the code. They can be specific to a branch, they can diverge as different solutions are attempted in parallel, and they can be deleted and retrieved after resolution.
- taeric 9y agoI've actually been fine with to-do lines in files. Have a metric for the number you have, and don't abuse it, but they are easy to find and literally next to the code they relate to.
- mi100hael 9y agoThere's also Linus's personal aversion to how GitHub implements many opinionated workflows. > I don't do github pull requests. > > github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a > valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is > also deficient and useless. > > Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github > instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. > As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's > fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit > editing, are just pure garbage. > > I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they > mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...
- Waterluvian 9y agoHe really talks in extremes. I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.
- whipoodle 9y agoSurely someone who talks like he does will never go anywhere in life!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 9y agoProgress relies strongly on unreasonable people like Linus. Keep in mind that Github mutilated his baby so that's a pretty good reason to be upset.
- jowiar 9y agoMaybe, but solving truly big problems relies on people working together. Linus (and the unfortunate proliferation of jackasses who emulate him) do more to hinder progress than help it.
- boomboomsubban 9y agoHe solved the problem with git, he's upset that the company trying to make money off it broke it again. Most of the times Linus is an asshole are completely justified. Being rude to groups like Nvidia isn't hindering progress.
- res0nat0r 9y agoI'm sure github has done more for git uptake than anyone else involved on the lkml or Linus himself. He should be thanking them for that.
- liaukovv 9y agoThis font gave me a headache Why not write with white on white? It would be so stylish
- joosters 9y agoLooks clear & readable on my computer (Mac/Firefox) Perhaps you are missing the font and the page has a bad fallback font?
- sp332 9y agoThe font stack is just "Helvetica, sans-serif" but the weight is set to 100 which is extremely light. So if you have a very light variant of Helvetica installed it might be unreadable. Edit: or if your default sans-serif font has a super light variant installed, it might look very different from what was intended.
- WorldMaker 9y ago100 is not a font weight that makes sense for a large body of text no matter what the font. We call 300/400 "normal" for a reason. 100 is a "sometimes food" for that giant header or over-sized pull quote. Designers that insist that entire documents/web-pages must be "light and airy and always 100 font-weight" have A) never struggled with contrast or accessibility issues, B) maybe don't understand typography. "light and airy" also means "easily blows off the page and is unreadable".
- woliveirajr 9y agoDark Reader extension on Chrome, black background with white font become much better.
- jacquesm 9y agoYour browser has a 'Page style/No Style' option to take care of stuff like that.
- Semaphor 9y agoNot that easy on mobile. Would be much better if people didn't feel the need to make their sites crappy
- jacquesm 9y agoI'm fine with that. Github is 'too large to fail' already, adding the Linux kernel to the pile and forcing the kernel team into Github's workflow are two big negatives. It would be great for Github but bad for everybody else.
- __jal 9y agoSeriously. Linux will likely outlive GH[1], and more importantly, it doesn't need GH. The current workflow works fine, and I hardly think any potential kernel hackers are choosing not to work on the kernel because it is email-driven. [1] Nothing against them that I don't have with any other commons that depends on corporate beneficence. But companies fail all the time; I can't think of a reason GH is immune.
- shp0ngle 9y agoIt's not like open source projects are immortal. Some die due to poor management, lost developer interest, lost funding, or some fork becoming more popular. Or all of the above.
- KekDemaga 9y agoFor me Linux is the core of the open source movement. If it dies the rest of it might die with it.
- cosinetau 9y agoWow. That's bleak. Linux will not last forever, irrespective of how it might change. Change is gonna come someday. Don't get left behind because of sentiment. This isn't a judgment on the Linux project, this is reality.
- gnaritas 9y agoLinux will likely outlive all of us. Network effects are massively strong for operating systems, we've been stuck with the same basic 3 for decades and that's likely to stay the same.
- tomschlick 9y agoThe kernel seems better suited to something like Phabricator instead of Github. Keep Github simple and clean for our "normal" projects.
- neandrake 9y agoWhat makes Phabricator not suitable for "normal" projects?
- mmagin 9y agoI imagine after the Bitkeeper fiasco, Linus and others are disinclined to become dependent on a proprietary service.
- Aissen 9y agoBitkeeper was proprietary software. git is not. This dependency exists with Github only if you use issues, wiki, etc. But even those are exportable with documented APIs.
- dublinben 9y agoIt should be a complete non-starter for one of the largest, and most important free software projects to be hosted on a centralized, proprietary service like Github. I can't even consider it as a serious suggestion.
- mi100hael 9y agoI always think this sums it up well: > Current state makes it very hard to mange/search/fork/open-issues etc > especially for newcomers, > please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions > forks/prs etc goodness. No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organization at that). Contributing to unicorn is *socially* as easy as contributing to git or the Linux kernel. There is no need to signup for anything, no need to ever touch a bloated web browser. The reason I contribute to Free Software is because I am against any sort of lock-in or proprietary features. It absolutely sickens me to encounter users who seem to be incapable of using git without a proprietary communications tool. https://bogomips.org/unicorn-public/20140801213202.GA2729@dcvr.yhbt.net/ https://bogomips.org/unicorn-public/20140801213202.GA2729@dc...
- dajt 9y agoLinus seems to have a different take on OSS than most OSS warriors. I don't think he sees proprietary software as 'evil' or OSS as morally superior. I get the impression he just thinks OSS will be better in quality. Depending on the contributors, which is why he doesn't want or need endless numbers of average devs contributing to his baby. I think his point about Tridgell's actions with BK reverse engineering were right, and El Reg was playing the OSS warrior card. It looks to me like Tridgell was trying to create a way to steal BK metadata - BK specifically required you to have a license to get that data. OSS warriors annoy me as much as SJWs do, and seem just as narrow minded.
- hyperion2010 9y agoHere is another overview of how the kernel uses git and why no emails is simply not possible (or sensible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyenmLqJQjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyenmLqJQjs
- web007 9y ago> Please support pull requests and issue tracking spanning different repos of a monotree. Issue tracking you can already file against one or more repos and link them together. It's not ideal, but it'll do the job. Is "pr against different repos of a monotree" not what submodules let you do? Update whatever things you want in whatever repos, and pull the submodule pointer update(s) as a single change in your monotree repo.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoI bet he knows git technical options. The issue tracking just won't fly for a community that large. Imagine the hours spent keeping everything aligned relevant and updated: all that is wasted time, plain and simple.
- shmerl 9y agoIs there some similar reason why Debian doesn't use more convenient bug tracking system that would allow a Web frontend? I don't mind periodically using reportbug, but using something like Bugzilla is way more convenient.
- vbernat 9y agoNot mentioned in the article, but work is also coordinated by maintainers with the use of patchwork. For example, for the network subsystem: http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/netdev/list/ http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/netdev/list/. This enables tracking the status of a patch and not loose them.
- snakeanus 9y agoI can't really see the obsession that everyone has with centralised and closed services like github. We need to start moving away from them, not move more projects to them. Mailing lists and NNTP make decentralisation quite easy while being open standards and without having the need to have any account in any centralised service, why drop all these features away?
- amorphid 9y agoI like free and easy to use, so even if I wanted to leave GitHub, doing so would be pretty low on my list of priorities.
- ythn 9y agoIt's really nice having some things standardized. I can tell from a glace how popular a project is by the number of stars. I can tell how many bugs it has by perusing the issues. I know I'm not going to get any spyware if I download something. The fragmented approach means you have to learn a bunch of different services, each with their own nuances. Then you have crap like sourceforce injecting adware into the download and now I have trust issues.
- jordigh 9y agoGit itself is already a monoculture, which makes me sad because it means I have very few people to speak hg to. Github makes it even worse. But having everyone speaking the same VCS language has obvious advantages, especially when part of that language is where to host it and how to get a web view of it and how to share it. People centralise because it means someone else takes care of the boring work and you can go back to writing code. There are disadvantages to centralisation, just like there are disadvantages to giving up your privacy, but it's so damn convenient to do so that nobody has enough activation energy to do the opposite.
- monorepoman 9y agoLost me at "And lots of people learned that monorepos are really painful, because past a certain size they just stop scaling." Plenty of counterexamples of monorepo projects much larger than Linux kernel.
- the_duke 9y agoTrue, but only in large organizations that can devote massive amounts of manpower and infrastructure and have extensive tooling to make it work.
- jcranmer 9y agoActually, my experience is that monorepos scale better than non-monorepos. Probably the largest project that isn't a monorepo is OpenJDK--and even then, that's only barely true, as the entire JDK (effectively, rt.jar) is itself a single repository. If you're arguing it's not a (implied-to-be-evil) monorepo because, well, it's really managed as independent fiefs who do all their work in separate integration stages... well, that's basically how every other major monorepo project does it. So if Linux isn't a monorepo, then there's no such thing as a monorepo in practice.
- Boothroid 9y agoUgh that font is unreadable on my phone.
- IceDane 9y agoThis website is completely fucking unreadable on mobile. But hey, at least it's stylish or something.
- feelin_googley 9y agoOff-topic: Why does this blog need to be whitelisted with Adblock Plus? See data-adblockkey in HTML source. Are there any ads in this page? (Maybe owner wants revenue from domain parking?) Why is this blog not working with simple user agents that do not process javascript (e.g., curl, etc.)?
- jwilk 9y agocurls works for me; so does Firefox+NoScript and elinks.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- feelin_googley 9y agoThank you for checking. Problem is misconfigured DNS: 1 blog.ffwll.ch: 77 bytes, 1+2+0+0 records, response, authoritative, noerror query: 1 blog.ffwll.ch answer: blog.ffwll.ch 3600 CNAME danvet.github.io answer: danvet.github.io 3600 A 192.64.147.142 I mistook 192.64.147.142 as the correct IP address. Try that one with curl, firefox or elinks. Correct address is 151.101.53.147.
- clarkevans 9y agoAs I understand, Daniel Vetter is proposing a "monotree" as a source code control pattern where a monorepo (and its branches) is not the primary place where development is done, but is rather where works are integrated from subordinate repositories. In particular, he's asking for GitHub to support coordination (issues and pull requests) spanning upstream repositories that are indicated by a particular change request. I was hoping to see discussion of the merits of this proposal here on HN... not a regurgitation of Torvalds' positions and personal demeanor. What other projects use a monotree? does it work well? How do those projects coordinate changes across subordinate repositories?
- johannes1234321 9y agoI believe Cononical's launchpad was built to achieve such workflows. It came out of the need to create an integration platform taking upstream versions of software and applying Ubuntu-specific fixes. In the old days, before git and GitHub won, I liked their bug tracker way over GutHubs as it really supported these flows, where bugs are fixed not in the main repo but by some contributor first. But we'll, wrong bet on bzr ...
- justinjlynn 9y agoI wonder if there has been any work on porting launchpad to work with git.
- rlpb 9y agoYes, there has. Launchpad works fine with git today.
- justinjlynn 9y agoOh, awesome. I was going to look at that later this afternoon. Cheers!
- seanp2k2 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dajt 9y agoI think you're right. And if so I agree with Linus. I don't get the entitlement of OSS people. They want to play in someone else's sandpit but enforce their own rules. If you don't like the way the project is run then fork it, go make your own or find another one.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- linkmotif 9y agoOh wow, the MAINTAINERS file is a work of art: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/MAINTAINERS https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
- wiremine 9y agoHehe, never read through it, enjoyed Linus' info at the end THE REST M: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> L: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Q: http://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/ http://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/ T: git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git S: Buried alive in reporters
- eridius 9y ago> If you don't do something because of a personal dislike, and expect others to cater to your culture and personal preferences, then the problem is you. Are you serious? If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off, and you don't like that, the problem is with you? How can you possibly defend that statement?
- jacquesm 9y ago> If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off Consider that he might be right and not a complete asshole. Also, consider that you are not the person he insults but someone else. You're making up this strawman very craftily but it is still a strawman: people are coarse in their conversation all the time, it's not a big deal until the recipient declares it to be a big deal. And then they - not you, unless you are the recipient - have all the right in the world to feel offended and to respond in kind if you feel like it or to do it a bit more precise and with more grace if that's your make-up. But for all the weight given to 'free speech' the fact is that all you're doing is trying to control someone else's language and I find that a far bigger problem than someone throwing out the occasional insult in the process of communicating with others, there are plenty of reasons why that could happen, personality, lack of patience, culture and so on and all of those would be less of an issue than someone deliberately trying to control how others communicate. Now if Linus had said something like 'you're dumb because you're a woman' or something to that effect I could understand the outrage. But calling someone an asshole - justified or not - when you're not the person being addressed is not enough grounds to embark on a moral crusade and is not enough grounds to lie the diversity problem in tech at that persons feet.
- eridius 9y agoSpeaking as someone who has been insulted personally and publicly by Linus, on a topic that Linus was completely wrong about, he's a real asshole. And it's extremely well documented that he's an asshole. I don't need to "consider that he might […] not be a complete asshole", because that's already a given. > You're making up this strawman very craftily I'm not making a straw man at all, and I resent your attempt to frame my argument in this way. Since this is how you choose to argue, I'm not going to engage with you any more.
- mpd 9y agoFrankly, I think the Linux kernel is too important to even consider subjecting itself to the Github T&C, community guidelines, etc.
- ericfrederich 9y agoSomeone desperately needs to come up with an open source replacement for GitHub that is completely decentralized. Sure GitLab exists and the repo is decentralized since it's Git, but issues, merge requests, comments, etc aren't Git based (though they could be)
- X86BSD 9y agoI wish more people used Fossil. I find it much better than Git and if it had more developers you may get a much better replacement.
- neandrake 9y agoCheck out Phabricator - https://phacility.com/phabricator/ https://phacility.com/phabricator/
- closeparen 9y agoPhabricator is awesome but GitLab is more similar to Github if you're looking for a direct replacement. These are still centralized, but each organization can host its own server. A true decentralized solution would federate issues/tasks, pull requests/diffs and their comments, etc. similar to how Git federates changes.
- hgdsraj 9y agoCan we get a trade on this font, gosh it's bad. Color and weight both need to be increased. Seriously #00000 on #FFFFF makes life easy with a font weight of at least 400
- mcs_ 9y ago> Like pull requests, issues can be relevant for multiple repos, and might need to be moved around Not sure about the Linux kernel (no enough experience) but same issue across multiple projects looks something necessary...
- TheChosen 9y agoI love using GitHub, but there is an established process and home for the kernel that works and I see no reason to change it.
- sytse 9y agoAt GitLab we're looking into addressing this use case https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/36239 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/36239
- pdimitar 9y agoLove the effort and the dedication, but "Make Monotree Merging Magnificent", really? :D Made me giggle.