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>I've had to answer the "why not just use github?" question a lot of times. We have a FAQ entry for that: https://build2.org/faq.xhtml#github https://build2.o

• bch 9y ago
  This is excellent. Addressing cargo cult development with its own self. GitHub == git, git == awesome because Linux and Linus, Linux development communications == email (turntable scratch noise)
• hota_mazi 9y ago
  > Mostly because we want complete control of our infrastructure. That's certainly a good reason to stay away from github but a terrible reason to roll your own infrastructure. How about using a hosted gitlab instance? It's been progressing extremely quickly and even has features that github doesn't have yet. You get the best of both worlds: git and being your own master. > I am much more efficient using my mail client (mutt) and text editor (emacs) than a web browser form. That's a surprisingly myopic view point. Of course, you are entitled to your preferences but if you take your project seriously, you need to realize that the choice of an arcane bug tracking system means that most users will simply never file bugs for your project, let alone fix them and then update your bug tracking system. You are most likely facing a huge opportunity cost here and you might never have realized it, even if you might be tempted to answer that you have received bugs against your project. Think again: how many users were about to and then just gave up when they saw you use non standard tools? This is really a simple choice: whose life are you trying to make easier, yours or your users'?
  • comex 9y ago
    At the moment the post I’m replying to is in the grey, perhaps because it comes off as aggressive. But the underlying claim is true. Filing a bug report takes effort, including: reproducing the bug, doing my best to isolate the circumstances in which it occurs, checking for existing reports of the same issue, and (if none are found) writing up as clear a report as possible. It creates a social obligation to follow up on responses from the maintainers, especially if I want to encourage them to pay attention and fix the bug. In particular, that may involve delving into the design of the code and figuring out the true nature of the problem, or what a proper fix would look like - which is almost invariably more complicated than it initially appears. And for all that, it generally comes with no guarantee that the bug will be fixed or even the report looked at. Even if the bug is fixed, it usually won’t be fixed quickly enough to obviate the need for me to work around it or deal with it somehow. In other words, filing the report probably won’t help me much; I do it more for the benefit of anyone else who runs into the same problem in the future. I get a sense of satisfaction from filing good bug reports, but it’s enough effort,for little gain, that it takes very little to make me lose interest and go spend time on something else instead. In the case of build2, I’m not even unfamiliar with mailing lists - I run a mailman instance myself - but I don’t regularly contribute to any projects that handle bug reports over email, so it would be an unfamiliar process, which is more than enough of an ‘obstacle’. I’d also get mildly stressed out thinking about the proper etiquette for mailing lists (should there be a greeting?), although that’s more of a personal quirk. And then there are the “posting guidelines”… Other people may be less socially inhibited than me, but then, a lot of people have much less experience with mailing lists than me (e.g., for many, exactly zero). Thus, regardless of what ought to be true or what’s reasonable or fair to maintainers, in practice, I strongly suspect that any given bug in build2 has a lower chance of being reported than it would have with a more GitHub-like process. (That may or may not actually equate to actual missed bug reports, because the community seems to be small enough to make for a low sample size.)