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Using a mailing list to manage (incl. browse) contributions really sucks. The way that GitHub abuses pull requests and all the anti-productive derpiness that h

by cxr 5y ago

Using a mailing list to manage (incl. browse) contributions really sucks. The way that GitHub abuses pull requests and all the anti-productive derpiness that has arisen around it, though, sucks even more. It will be nice when the world gets shaken out of the collective hallucination that GitHub is at all a reasonable and efficient way to do things, instead of what it actually is: another dark-pattern-employing, walled garden social network that prioritizes engagement and growth over productivity, privacy, accessibility, and quality of interaction.

pcwalton 5y ago
The pull request workflow is not "anti-productive derpiness". You literally click one button and the pull request is merged. With email you have to save the patch from your webmail client† somewhere, then apply it on the command line, and then push your changes. This workflow inefficiency is multiplied by the number of patches you have and therefore adds up quickly. There is no good reason for it other than nostalgia for the old days of Unix when everything was email based because the Web wasn't very mature yet. †Yes, most people use webmail, not native desktop email clients, and no, it is not reasonable to expect people to switch for this.
- carapace 5y ago
  You're arguing the old argument CLI/Terminal vs. GUI. Clicking a button vs. typing some commands is not the productivity bottleneck (or if it is you have bigger problems, eh?) (I've seen terminal jockeys do things that blew my mind, emitting continuous streams of characters that seamlessly switched between terminals and functions, orchestrating their machine like some virtuoso pianist, moving so fast it was impossible to follow. GUIs offer such folk nothing and I wouldn't be surprised if Fabrice Bellard was of this ilk.)
- badsectoracula 5y ago
  As a contributor i found sending (or attaching to a bug report) .patch files much easier than the pull request-based workflow, especially when there are changes after the patch is made.
- cxr 5y ago
  You have your thumb on the scale and are subjecting GitHub to the more lenient half of a double standard. Just like lots of software that gets billed as working with "a single click" even though it doesn't[1], there's lots more to it than you're saying here. Go do a sober and objective measurement of how involved GitHub actually is, including scenarios for "I don't have an account yet", "I have an account, but I haven't forked/changed/committed my contributions yet", "I have cloned the original repo to my computer and committed the last few days of my work and need to submit my changes now", and "I need to maintain my privacy from casual snooping and to protect myself from people who would be casually willing to hurt me"[2]. And I'm continually astounded whenever I bring up any GitHub criticism and get in response folks so hurried to try and "but Hillary!" me while leaping to the conclusion that I like mailing lists—even here in this case where I deliberately took special effort to start off by outright saying they suck. Let me be emphatic (again): mailing lists _really_ suck. > This workflow inefficiency is multiplied by the number of patches you have On the topic of things that suck: Git's CLI. Having said that, I'm not going to lie about it being worse than it is. You've moved your thumb off the scale. You're now saying things that aren't true. Git's native workflows should be better. So should GitHub's. > There is no good reason for it other than nostalgia for the old days of Unix Go nerd-strawman someone else. I'm not Drew DeVault. I'm not the easily-take-downable bogeyman that, for your own convenience, you wish you were engaging with. I'm saying GitHub sucks because it does. (As further data points: it's been only since, like, sometime after COVID lockdowns began that GitHub's site was finally fixed so that when you visit on mobile now, you don't get a horizontal scrollbar anymore. And this is the pre-eminent, tech-oriented platform that people can't stand to see being heralded as anything other than the thing that makes doing technical work feel like normal and approachable for normal people? Their "wikis" aren't even wikis, for fuck's sake.) 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20090202140249/http://www.bengoodger.com/2008/12/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090202140249/http://www.bengoo... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942501
carapace 5y ago
The rise of GitHub seems to me one of the strangest things in the world. I've heard it called "the front page of the FOSS movement"! But the code for GitHub is not available on GitHub! It was weird enough when a closed-source proprietary company put themselves in front of an open-source distributed VCS and got traction, but then they were acquired by Microsoft!? That's like Sauron buying the Shire and charging the hobbits rent on their own land or something. I feel a rant coming on, so I'm going to check myself here. I think if the world ends, it won't be due to Fire or Ice. I think the name of doom is "Convenience".
- deckard1 5y ago
  I'll continue your rant. Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond fucked us. They took freedom and made it a commodity palatable to corporations. Now, Microsoft, via Github Copilot, has plans to sell our own code back to us as a subscription-based B2B productivity tool for businesses to create proprietary code. I couldn't even imagine such a dystopian outcome in 1998.
  - jart 5y ago
    Some proprietary software authors would likely feel the same way about free software. For example, Phil Katz drank himself to death after zlib used his invention to create the most prolific library in the world. I'd also imagine all the jobs software is eating would feel the same way. Now software is eating itself.
    - carapace 5y ago
      > Now software is eating itself. I thought it would happen much faster. Programming isn't that much harder than Go (the game not the lang) is it? Once automated programming becomes common and useful the problem domain shifts to mapping human intention(s) to the automated machinery, or how to write tame AI that can re-write itself w/o going feral? (Personally, I don't think it's possible, and Isaac Asimov pointed out why. It's the same "strange loop" explored in a handful of sci-fi stories that have hyper-lucky characters. What, ultimately, is good?) In re: Free software vs. charging for copies of software, I looked at the world situation when I was younger and figured that no company or even nation could pay me what I'm worth (in terms of the value that my ability with computers could potentially unlock) and the most efficient way to "work" would be to give away my output and take advantage of the "rising tide that lifts all boats". I took Bucky Fuller very seriously, and still do: we have all the technology to make a secular utopia, it's just a matter of logistics and psychology. And the computers can handle the logistics easily. I figured the psychology would handle itself once word got around, but it hasn't really. (I don't know if I was just incredibly naive or if humans are just incredibly stupid, it's a problem that still vexes me.)

by cxr 5y ago

pcwalton 5y ago

The pull request workflow is not "anti-productive derpiness". You literally click one button and the pull request is merged. With email you have to save the patch from your webmail client† somewhere, then apply it on the command line, and then push your changes. This workflow inefficiency is multiplied by the number of patches you have and therefore adds up quickly. There is no good reason for it other than nostalgia for the old days of Unix when everything was email based because the Web wasn't very mature yet. †Yes, most people use webmail, not native desktop email clients, and no, it is not reasonable to expect people to switch for this.

carapace 5y ago
You're arguing the old argument CLI/Terminal vs. GUI. Clicking a button vs. typing some commands is not the productivity bottleneck (or if it is you have bigger problems, eh?) (I've seen terminal jockeys do things that blew my mind, emitting continuous streams of characters that seamlessly switched between terminals and functions, orchestrating their machine like some virtuoso pianist, moving so fast it was impossible to follow. GUIs offer such folk nothing and I wouldn't be surprised if Fabrice Bellard was of this ilk.)
badsectoracula 5y ago
As a contributor i found sending (or attaching to a bug report) .patch files much easier than the pull request-based workflow, especially when there are changes after the patch is made.
cxr 5y ago
You have your thumb on the scale and are subjecting GitHub to the more lenient half of a double standard. Just like lots of software that gets billed as working with "a single click" even though it doesn't[1], there's lots more to it than you're saying here. Go do a sober and objective measurement of how involved GitHub actually is, including scenarios for "I don't have an account yet", "I have an account, but I haven't forked/changed/committed my contributions yet", "I have cloned the original repo to my computer and committed the last few days of my work and need to submit my changes now", and "I need to maintain my privacy from casual snooping and to protect myself from people who would be casually willing to hurt me"[2]. And I'm continually astounded whenever I bring up any GitHub criticism and get in response folks so hurried to try and "but Hillary!" me while leaping to the conclusion that I like mailing lists—even here in this case where I deliberately took special effort to start off by outright saying they suck. Let me be emphatic (again): mailing lists _really_ suck. > This workflow inefficiency is multiplied by the number of patches you have On the topic of things that suck: Git's CLI. Having said that, I'm not going to lie about it being worse than it is. You've moved your thumb off the scale. You're now saying things that aren't true. Git's native workflows should be better. So should GitHub's. > There is no good reason for it other than nostalgia for the old days of Unix Go nerd-strawman someone else. I'm not Drew DeVault. I'm not the easily-take-downable bogeyman that, for your own convenience, you wish you were engaging with. I'm saying GitHub sucks because it does. (As further data points: it's been only since, like, sometime after COVID lockdowns began that GitHub's site was finally fixed so that when you visit on mobile now, you don't get a horizontal scrollbar anymore. And this is the pre-eminent, tech-oriented platform that people can't stand to see being heralded as anything other than the thing that makes doing technical work feel like normal and approachable for normal people? Their "wikis" aren't even wikis, for fuck's sake.) 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20090202140249/http://www.bengoodger.com/2008/12/ https://web.archive.org/web/20090202140249/http://www.bengoo... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18942501

carapace 5y ago

The rise of GitHub seems to me one of the strangest things in the world. I've heard it called "the front page of the FOSS movement"! But the code for GitHub is not available on GitHub! It was weird enough when a closed-source proprietary company put themselves in front of an open-source distributed VCS and got traction, but then they were acquired by Microsoft!? That's like Sauron buying the Shire and charging the hobbits rent on their own land or something. I feel a rant coming on, so I'm going to check myself here. I think if the world ends, it won't be due to Fire or Ice. I think the name of doom is "Convenience".

deckard1 5y ago
I'll continue your rant. Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond fucked us. They took freedom and made it a commodity palatable to corporations. Now, Microsoft, via Github Copilot, has plans to sell our own code back to us as a subscription-based B2B productivity tool for businesses to create proprietary code. I couldn't even imagine such a dystopian outcome in 1998.
- jart 5y ago
  Some proprietary software authors would likely feel the same way about free software. For example, Phil Katz drank himself to death after zlib used his invention to create the most prolific library in the world. I'd also imagine all the jobs software is eating would feel the same way. Now software is eating itself.
  - carapace 5y ago
    > Now software is eating itself. I thought it would happen much faster. Programming isn't that much harder than Go (the game not the lang) is it? Once automated programming becomes common and useful the problem domain shifts to mapping human intention(s) to the automated machinery, or how to write tame AI that can re-write itself w/o going feral? (Personally, I don't think it's possible, and Isaac Asimov pointed out why. It's the same "strange loop" explored in a handful of sci-fi stories that have hyper-lucky characters. What, ultimately, is good?) In re: Free software vs. charging for copies of software, I looked at the world situation when I was younger and figured that no company or even nation could pay me what I'm worth (in terms of the value that my ability with computers could potentially unlock) and the most efficient way to "work" would be to give away my output and take advantage of the "rising tide that lifts all boats". I took Bucky Fuller very seriously, and still do: we have all the technology to make a secular utopia, it's just a matter of logistics and psychology. And the computers can handle the logistics easily. I figured the psychology would handle itself once word got around, but it hasn't really. (I don't know if I was just incredibly naive or if humans are just incredibly stupid, it's a problem that still vexes me.)