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> It used to be you could email a patch to someone and that patch would get reviewed and committed. May I ask what communities you were involved in, and when?

> It used to be you could email a patch to someone and that patch would get reviewed and committed. May I ask what communities you were involved in, and when? Even formatting patches so they could be reliably applied was a nontrivial matter. It was not uncommon for them to be applied manually (and sometimes faultily). Sometimes you would mail patches to maintainers directly, other times you would share them on mailing lists, where they would undergo a bit of "social review" (works for me!) and would or would not be applied. Some people just mailed entire modified files and expected maintainers to figure out the changes on their own. As for "committed", many maintainers may not even have used source code control (notably Linus didn't use any), and I can't recall a single project with publicly accessible repositories in the 1990s as opposed to tarball releases. > All you needed was a text editor and an email account. Now you need accounts on whatever code forge is involved [...] Getting an account on any of these code forges in 2020 is almost certainly much easier than getting an e-mail account at all in the early 1990s for many people. I don't agree with the author that contributing was easier in the 1990s. Generally, it involved a bit of a social process, trivial drive by fixes were not any more popular than today, there were coding standards to be observed (and not always written ones), in larger projects, you could expect to navigate some flame wars, and sometimes your contributions were rejected anyway because RMS decided to cancel your OS.

tom_ 6y ago
Very much mirrors my experience. Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. No more mailing lists or bug trackers to sign up for and manage! And it's also even got an integrated version control system, that 99.9% of projects then use, and it's one that makes it easy to version control a fork of your own as you work on any patches you might be making. Progress!
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  > Very much mirrors my experience. Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. No more mailing lists or bug trackers to sign up for and manage! And no more need to become emotionally invested in the project, thus furthering its development into a proper community of users and contributors that propel it forward. :(
  - tom_ 6y ago
    But what if I don't want to become emotionally invested in the project? It would still be beneficial for the project if it were easy for me to submit bug reports (and maybe bug fixes) anyway. Emotional investment is always an option for those who want it. And a lower barrier to entry might even increase the chances of it happening anyway, even for those that started out thinking they didn't care much.
- cxr 6y ago
  > Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. Unless you value your privacy. If you take the necessary steps to approximate the level of "privacy in public"[1] that you get by default when dropping into someone's disconnected bugtracker or attaching a patch via email, then GitHub is pretty cumbersome to use. The article argues the case that GitHub is making life easier for people trying to build their personal brand, but not everybody wants that. I don't use GitHub for myself and never have, but I used to make exceptions for projects that are hosted there[2]. Not anymore. There's enough toil involved trying to dodge the unwanted social hoopla that GitHub imposes on you, and the returns I've gotten out of "engaging with the community" are so, so low. Nowadays if I report a bug or try to submit a patch and someone gestures towards GitHub and insists that it's not just the front door to the building but in fact the only way in, then I explain that the only circumstances where I use GitHub involves for-pay work, so unless there's someone I know I can send a bill to, then I'm perfectly content to just never go inside. But people in general seem to have a lot of trouble right now grappling with the notion that submitting a patch or a bug report is not something that I'm doing because it benefits me. (Imagine working as a plumber, showing up for a call wearing coveralls and carrying your toolbag, finding that you've arriving at a club, and then dealing with someone at the door who's trying to argue with you about their entry fee because, hey, this is a club, so they expect you to pay them.) The only thing people seem to understand anymore is the quest to become someone with influencer-level status, and that certainly has something to do with the culture referenced in the blog post. It would be one thing if it were just kids, but it's something that has infected plenty of old hats who were around before GitHub, which is pretty annoying. 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html#unlinked-identity https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan... 2. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profil...

tom_ 6y ago

Very much mirrors my experience. Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. No more mailing lists or bug trackers to sign up for and manage! And it's also even got an integrated version control system, that 99.9% of projects then use, and it's one that makes it easy to version control a fork of your own as you work on any patches you might be making. Progress!

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
> Very much mirrors my experience. Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. No more mailing lists or bug trackers to sign up for and manage! And no more need to become emotionally invested in the project, thus furthering its development into a proper community of users and contributors that propel it forward. :(
- tom_ 6y ago
  But what if I don't want to become emotionally invested in the project? It would still be beneficial for the project if it were easy for me to submit bug reports (and maybe bug fixes) anyway. Emotional investment is always an option for those who want it. And a lower barrier to entry might even increase the chances of it happening anyway, even for those that started out thinking they didn't care much.
cxr 6y ago
> Github provides a very useful project-independent unified UI for drive-by patches and off-the-cuff issues. Unless you value your privacy. If you take the necessary steps to approximate the level of "privacy in public"[1] that you get by default when dropping into someone's disconnected bugtracker or attaching a patch via email, then GitHub is pretty cumbersome to use. The article argues the case that GitHub is making life easier for people trying to build their personal brand, but not everybody wants that. I don't use GitHub for myself and never have, but I used to make exceptions for projects that are hosted there[2]. Not anymore. There's enough toil involved trying to dodge the unwanted social hoopla that GitHub imposes on you, and the returns I've gotten out of "engaging with the community" are so, so low. Nowadays if I report a bug or try to submit a patch and someone gestures towards GitHub and insists that it's not just the front door to the building but in fact the only way in, then I explain that the only circumstances where I use GitHub involves for-pay work, so unless there's someone I know I can send a bill to, then I'm perfectly content to just never go inside. But people in general seem to have a lot of trouble right now grappling with the notion that submitting a patch or a bug report is not something that I'm doing because it benefits me. (Imagine working as a plumber, showing up for a call wearing coveralls and carrying your toolbag, finding that you've arriving at a club, and then dealing with someone at the door who's trying to argue with you about their entry fee because, hey, this is a club, so they expect you to pay them.) The only thing people seem to understand anymore is the quest to become someone with influencer-level status, and that certainly has something to do with the culture referenced in the blog post. It would be one thing if it were just kids, but it's something that has infected plenty of old hats who were around before GitHub, which is pretty annoying. 1. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-january.html#unlinked-identity https://www.colbyrussell.com/2019/02/15/what-happened-in-jan... 2. https://www.colbyrussell.com/2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profile-on-github.html https://www.colbyrussell.com/2016/02/13/keeping-a-low-profil...