10 ms·

I've sworn off Github for my own toy projects. The code I write off the clock is a form of escapism, I don't want to run the risk of having my repos nuked from

by tjpnz 6y ago

I've sworn off Github for my own toy projects. The code I write off the clock is a form of escapism, I don't want to run the risk of having my repos nuked from orbit for any inadvertent profanity, nor do I want to triage issues from people taking issue with how I've named things, or forcing me to adopt an ultimately meaningless boilerplate CoC. I don't want to have to write a novel on why I'm not a racist or a fascist like Antirez recently had to. I'm not implying that I would face all of these issues on Github currently. But I don't want to run the risk of being in that position and getting into a shouting match with someone - and then having to deal with all of the consequences.

theSage 6y ago
What do you use then? Gitlab? Personal servers?
- tjpnz 6y ago
  A mixture of both actually. I'm a big user of Gitlab private repos which I'll sometimes make public.
- aerique 6y ago
  There's also sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/ https://git.sr.ht/
  - lugged 6y ago
    I've really been digging sourcehut recently, I really like that its just a dumb git+ssh receptacle with some modern build pipelines attached. Feels like early gitlab but even more craigslisty.
  - maelkum 6y ago
    I can't recommend Sourcehut enough! The git.sr.ht service is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It also provides you with CI, issue tracking, mailing lists... And it works perfectly in Lynx so you don't even have to leave command line to use the browser interface.
- lqet 6y ago
  If you have your own server and need a Github-like webinterface, gogs [0] and Gitea [1] (a fork of gogs) are stable and very easy to set up. I have been running gogs for a few years now. For me it contains the perfect subset of Github features. Previously I just pushed to a bare repo on my server via SSH. [0] https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/
  - uep 6y ago
    I currently use bare repos on my server. It might be fun to give them a web interface, thanks for the links.
withjive 6y ago
What's wrong with personal projects on a Free private Github repo? (they offer those now). Previously I would just put my pet projects on Bitbucket because they offered free private repos.
- tjpnz 6y ago
  Mostly habit - free private repos on Github are a relatively recent development.
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  gitlab for me, for the same reasons.
xwdv 6y ago
The master and slave debate was dumb, and reflects a creeping of political correctness into coding and software over the years that I do not look forward to. React’s keywords have been similarly attacked for promoting a “bro” culture with use of words like props or mount. And man-in-the-middle attacks are increasingly being described as person-in-the-middle, at the expense of alliteration. So many other examples out there.
- sascha_sl 6y ago
  It speaks of privilege to think having a debate on this is dumb. It's literally how human beings reconcile issues. You want to outright refuse the possibility that this is an issue to begin with. If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language, go ahead and ignore the critics (surely you can't believe github is going to ban you over it) but do not complain about this criticism existing because it makes you uncomfortable that someone does not like the language you use. That's not very liberal.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    > If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language It's not colonialism inspired language though. Edit: I also love the irony of invoking liberalism as a justification for silencing dissent.
    - sascha_sl 6y ago
      You want your thing to be above criticism, who is silencing dissent here?
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    No, making this a problem of racism speaks of privilege. A lot of privilege actually and a solid amount of detachment.
  - bendergarcia 6y ago
    100% agree with this. I would say someone will respond (were all not liberal). And that this is beyond liberal and conservatism. This about signaling and human decency. Words make people uncomfortable and words have history.
CydeWeys 6y ago
Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.
- kkoncevicius 6y ago
  You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 "Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.
  - Zenbit_UX 6y ago
    Oh wow, that was hard to read and I only made it through the top 10 comments. Getting brigaded because some people are over sensitive must be a horrible feeling.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.
      - vxNsr 6y ago
        That's false in the first 10 comments > emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop". "works on my machine" Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense. When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.
sascha_sl 6y ago
Or, you know, you could just not name your things master/slave and outright mention you do not take contributions if you do not care about doing that right either?
- xxs 6y ago
  next would be the red-black trees or some utter nonsense.
  - bendergarcia 6y ago
    Can you speak to the historical racism or slavery associated with the name red black trees? I’m genuinely curious as I don’t know the history.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      Lynching black people and hanging them from trees where their red blood ran. "Red black tree" reduces that history to a mere three words and should really be changed. That may sound preposterous, but it's making the same claim as the rest of the moral panic over names in tech.
      - bendergarcia 6y ago
        According to Wikipedia it’s because of the printing capabilities in the 70s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#Histo...
  - gilbetron 6y ago
    Literally read a post about some terminology that used red/green in them, and how that was biased against the colorblind. Not that some interface used the colors red/green, but merely the terminology used the words. As a red/green colorblind person ... words fail me at the stupidity of that.
    - 6y ago
ravenstine 6y ago
> I don't want to run the risk of having my repos nuked from orbit for any inadvertent profanity If they did, it doesn't sound like it would affect you if you already keep your repos locally anyway. Your point is totally valid, but I don't think that means that GitHub is a bad storage medium. It does mean that it's smart to always keep local copies of your code, as is true for anything one might keep in the "cloud".
- siculars 6y ago
  Keeping a copy in the cloud could be zipping the dir and sending to s3. Interacting with GitHub and all its community features is something else and having that get nuked for some reason is a different thing.
  - ravenstine 6y ago
    In which case wouldn't you want to run an instance of GitLab? That seems to be different from just keeping personal code somewhere without the need for community/organization features.
cy_hauser 6y ago
Kudos. You've found a perfect solution that works for you and doesn't try to move society in a particular direction. Even better, you're not trying to stop others from moving society in their favored direction. Win-win, right?
amiga-workbench 6y ago
I've just setup gitea on my home server, it lets me sidestep any issues like this and allows me to not contribute to the continued centralisation of a decentralised version control system. I think I'd like to see more people and projects go this way.
phendrenad2 6y ago
How does moving off of Github solve any of these but the first one? If you make the mistake of your software project becoming popular, and you give a shred of an indication that you're open to suggections/criticism/commits, you're going to get tons of emails telling you what to do and how.
spikej 6y ago
How would this happen if you kept the repo private? Private repos are free now and most of my toy stuff is private (maybe shared with a friend I happen to be working on it with)

by tjpnz 6y ago

theSage 6y ago

What do you use then? Gitlab? Personal servers?

tjpnz 6y ago
A mixture of both actually. I'm a big user of Gitlab private repos which I'll sometimes make public.
aerique 6y ago
There's also sourcehut: https://git.sr.ht/ https://git.sr.ht/
- lugged 6y ago
  I've really been digging sourcehut recently, I really like that its just a dumb git+ssh receptacle with some modern build pipelines attached. Feels like early gitlab but even more craigslisty.
- maelkum 6y ago
  I can't recommend Sourcehut enough! The git.sr.ht service is just the tip of the iceberg, though. It also provides you with CI, issue tracking, mailing lists... And it works perfectly in Lynx so you don't even have to leave command line to use the browser interface.
lqet 6y ago
If you have your own server and need a Github-like webinterface, gogs [0] and Gitea [1] (a fork of gogs) are stable and very easy to set up. I have been running gogs for a few years now. For me it contains the perfect subset of Github features. Previously I just pushed to a bare repo on my server via SSH. [0] https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/
- uep 6y ago
  I currently use bare repos on my server. It might be fun to give them a web interface, thanks for the links.

withjive 6y ago

What's wrong with personal projects on a Free private Github repo? (they offer those now). Previously I would just put my pet projects on Bitbucket because they offered free private repos.

tjpnz 6y ago
Mostly habit - free private repos on Github are a relatively recent development.
michaelcampbell 6y ago
gitlab for me, for the same reasons.

xwdv 6y ago

The master and slave debate was dumb, and reflects a creeping of political correctness into coding and software over the years that I do not look forward to. React’s keywords have been similarly attacked for promoting a “bro” culture with use of words like props or mount. And man-in-the-middle attacks are increasingly being described as person-in-the-middle, at the expense of alliteration. So many other examples out there.

sascha_sl 6y ago
It speaks of privilege to think having a debate on this is dumb. It's literally how human beings reconcile issues. You want to outright refuse the possibility that this is an issue to begin with. If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language, go ahead and ignore the critics (surely you can't believe github is going to ban you over it) but do not complain about this criticism existing because it makes you uncomfortable that someone does not like the language you use. That's not very liberal.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  > If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language It's not colonialism inspired language though. Edit: I also love the irony of invoking liberalism as a justification for silencing dissent.
  - sascha_sl 6y ago
    You want your thing to be above criticism, who is silencing dissent here?
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  No, making this a problem of racism speaks of privilege. A lot of privilege actually and a solid amount of detachment.
- bendergarcia 6y ago
  100% agree with this. I would say someone will respond (were all not liberal). And that this is beyond liberal and conservatism. This about signaling and human decency. Words make people uncomfortable and words have history.

CydeWeys 6y ago

Are these problems you've actually had? I have various stuff on GitHub and none of this has remotely happened to me. What you're describing does not jibe with my lived experience of what GitHub is actually like.

kkoncevicius 6y ago
You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091 "Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  Oh wow, that was hard to read and I only made it through the top 10 comments. Getting brigaded because some people are over sensitive must be a horrible feeling.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    I've read that thread a few times and I see the people requesting the change doing so in a calm, reasonable manner. The only non-productive posts I see are from people who are vehemently and acerbically against it.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      That's false in the first 10 comments > emilyst commented 11 days ago I live in a country with a real dictator (although not on paper), unchecked police that's just an instrument in the hands of the government, and while no one here has any fondness of the Bulgarian police as an institution or our cops, I don't have any issues with the words "police" and "cop". "works on my machine" Additionally I haven't seen a single comment that is "acerbically against it" just calm people making reasonable arguments to not virtue signal. Especially in a way that doesn't even make sense. When people complain about the OSS community and github this is what they mean. A bunch of rando's who had nothing to do with a project chiming in with breaking changes bec of their feelings. It really is a great example of what the GP is talking about.

sascha_sl 6y ago

Or, you know, you could just not name your things master/slave and outright mention you do not take contributions if you do not care about doing that right either?

xxs 6y ago
next would be the red-black trees or some utter nonsense.
- bendergarcia 6y ago
  Can you speak to the historical racism or slavery associated with the name red black trees? I’m genuinely curious as I don’t know the history.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Lynching black people and hanging them from trees where their red blood ran. "Red black tree" reduces that history to a mere three words and should really be changed. That may sound preposterous, but it's making the same claim as the rest of the moral panic over names in tech.
    - bendergarcia 6y ago
      According to Wikipedia it’s because of the printing capabilities in the 70s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93black_tree#Histo...
- gilbetron 6y ago
  Literally read a post about some terminology that used red/green in them, and how that was biased against the colorblind. Not that some interface used the colors red/green, but merely the terminology used the words. As a red/green colorblind person ... words fail me at the stupidity of that.
  - 6y ago

ravenstine 6y ago

> I don't want to run the risk of having my repos nuked from orbit for any inadvertent profanity If they did, it doesn't sound like it would affect you if you already keep your repos locally anyway. Your point is totally valid, but I don't think that means that GitHub is a bad storage medium. It does mean that it's smart to always keep local copies of your code, as is true for anything one might keep in the "cloud".

siculars 6y ago
Keeping a copy in the cloud could be zipping the dir and sending to s3. Interacting with GitHub and all its community features is something else and having that get nuked for some reason is a different thing.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  In which case wouldn't you want to run an instance of GitLab? That seems to be different from just keeping personal code somewhere without the need for community/organization features.

cy_hauser 6y ago

Kudos. You've found a perfect solution that works for you and doesn't try to move society in a particular direction. Even better, you're not trying to stop others from moving society in their favored direction. Win-win, right?

amiga-workbench 6y ago

I've just setup gitea on my home server, it lets me sidestep any issues like this and allows me to not contribute to the continued centralisation of a decentralised version control system. I think I'd like to see more people and projects go this way.

phendrenad2 6y ago

How does moving off of Github solve any of these but the first one? If you make the mistake of your software project becoming popular, and you give a shred of an indication that you're open to suggections/criticism/commits, you're going to get tons of emails telling you what to do and how.

spikej 6y ago

How would this happen if you kept the repo private? Private repos are free now and most of my toy stuff is private (maybe shared with a friend I happen to be working on it with)