8 ms·

Deprecating outdated issues on the GitHub public roadmap

116 points by preya2k 2y ago

MortyWaves 2y ago
What the fuck? A casual browse of that list and these are very real features that appear to already have had some development. No command palette? JS and TS precise code navigation being cancelled? SSH connections to GitHub Actions? What on earth is this new “roadmap” then? More AI garbage slop and less focus on developer tooling and source control? This is a very dark day.
cloudking 2y ago
Translation: here's a bunch of useful features requests customers asked for, but we don't have engineering budget to build them and not enough customers asked for them, so we're not building them. Plus they don't say "AI" so our executive team said to axe them.
eqvinox 2y ago
Is IPv6 reachability on some other issue tracker or why am I not finding it?
brookman64k 2y ago
At my project we are forced to use Enterprise GitHub including Actions. Often 80% of the build time consists of up- or downloading intermediate or final build artifacts. This can take more than 40 minutes which is extremely painful. I was really looking forward to finally getting a speedup here. The promise: > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server #930 … We will be extending support for v4 of the actions to upload and download artifacts to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES). This new version improves artifact upload and download speeds by up to 98%. I don‘t understand at all how this is not a priority anymore. :-(
- jmainguy 2y ago
  I believe the future is GitHub enterprise cloud. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/overview/about-github-enterprise-cloud https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/ove... all the benefits of GitHub enterprise, with none of the cons
  - richbell 2y ago
    > all the benefits of GitHub enterprise, with none of the con To some organizations, having to use a cloud SaaS instead of hosting the application on-prem is a con.
    - btreecat 2y ago
      Isn't that the value GitLab is trying to provide?
      - richbell 2y ago
        Perhaps. The point remains that GitHub currently offers a self-hosted solution (GitHub Enteprise Server), and saying that the cloud version is the exact same (no cons) isn't true.
- theamk 2y ago
  Why bother with Github Artifacts at all, especially for intermediate steps? At our self-hosted GHE instance, we use either (self-hosted) Artifactory, or raw S3. Fast, and easy to work with.
RadiozRadioz 2y ago
This was a bad way to announce closing these issues. With a big list like that, everyone's going to find something they're pissed off about not having. They should have closed the issues slowly and quietly in the background - individually they're small enough that people probably wouldn't notice. But like this, many more people see what's happening and get angry together. Not a good way to do PR. Maybe the idea was to rip the band-aid off and hope the outrage burns out quickly.
philipwhiuk 2y ago
Heh even CISA.gov is grumpy: https://github.com/github/roadmap/discussions/1014#discussioncomment-11328929 https://github.com/github/roadmap/discussions/1014#discussio... Personally I'm not a fan of "we haven't got round to it in ages, let's close it" Issues at the bottom of your backlog: a) Cost you basically nothing b) Document previous demand c) Can be useful tasks for new joiners who are skilling up on the project d) Can be bumped if demand re-awakens e) Documents known feature gaps
preya2k 2y ago
I assume none of their AI features were deprecated.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  all of the important AI features, like building models from the code, were almost certainly pushed. customers don't care about those, though, and this is a good way to distract from any discussions about the implications.
- shakna 2y ago
  Whilst I'd still take it with a grain of salt, two have been. Mostly their code scanning AI stuff though (or pieces of them), which... Has had a lot of issues, compared to more traditional approaches. + Code scanning: AI-powered autofixes for CodeQL alerts integrated into VS Code + Secret scanning push protection for gists
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    CodeQL has never worked anyway and I’m unsure why it’s even a thing given it doesn’t work
    - jonathonlacher 2y ago
      Could you expand on what doesn't work for you?
Thev00d00 2y ago
[flagged]
walterbell 2y ago
Could Github developer workflow metadata (e.g. issues) be exported/serialized into a git repo for decentralized replication and/or import into an alternative?
- nicman23 2y ago
  not to git but there are bots to export to ie gitlab
- simonw 2y ago
  Yes. I built a tool for that a few months ago: https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues I have it running in one of my repos using a GitHub Action that's triggered when an issue is created or updated - it commits a JSON export of that issue back to the repo. Then I can git clone the repo and get all of the issues data.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Perfect, thanks!
oldpersonintx 2y ago
Guess who turned GitHub into a SPOF? We did.
littlestymaar 2y ago
[flagged]
- rgovostes 2y ago
  I disagree. Etymologically, "enshittification" is the ongoing transformation of something into shit. But here, GitHub is declining to make certain changes; it is expressly resisting transformation. At best you could argue it was already shit due to the lack of these specific enhancements that would deshittify it. Doctorow, who first studied enshittification, identified three distinct phases of the process: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." I don't see how this applies to the specific set of declined enhancements.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  It got shittier, but not in the way Cory Doctorow was talking about.
azalemeth 2y ago
Ever since GitHub was bought by Microsoft things have got worse for me as an end user -- browser compatibility is worse and I run into bugs frequently when on not-chrome; their academic programme now requires an insanely invasive localisation check that instantly fails for me on Linux and their support couldn't advance the process as I hadn't submitted an application yet; and their tooling slowly pushes people away from FOSS and towards proprietary methods. I wish they'd figure out how to make it a hacker friendly place again.
- Szpadel 2y ago
  out of curiosity what browser do you have in mind? I use Firefox on Linux and I didn't have any issues annoying enough to stick in my memory.
  - Drakim 2y ago
    I use Firefox on Windows (on multiple machines), and when somebody has an image embedded in an issue or comment in Github, and I click it to see the original sized image it will not load, and simply shows a blank page instead. It's been like this for two years or so.
    - pitaj 2y ago
      Can you link a specific (publicly accessible) example? I want to try reproducing.
  - Pooge 2y ago
    Using Librewolf 131.0.3-1. Going to the GitHub homepage makes the tab freeze and I have to go to /login or a repository page directly.
  - kreetx 2y ago
    Same here. (I think I've ever seen one minor bug: for any repo in the clone dropdown, the "SSH" tab was hidden for me a while ago. Unfortunately I don't remember if this was browser related.)
  - 2y ago
fergie 2y ago
Going to stick my neck out here. A lot of these "improvements" fall into the following 3 categories: 1) More complexity around issue tracking 2) More complexity around permissions 3) IDE-ness and general visual-studioification of the web interface. Since many of the issues make GitHub bloated and more difficult to use for general use cases, they _should_ be removed.
- alganet 2y ago
  Yes. And maybe this goes for features that are already implemented as well.
- dandellion 2y ago
  Yes, the last thing they need is more bloat. I wish they removed achievements as well.
- samiv 2y ago
  I agree, also the source code viewer (not sure what it's called) has regressed tremendously. A few years back it was simple, quite snappy and just worked. Now it has become slow and bloated and barely works for me on the desktop and the mobile version is full of rendering bugs rendering the whole thing rather useless. (Using firefox both on mobile and on the PC) All they had to do, literally, was to do nothing but no, can't have that. MUST ADD BLOAT.
  - rhdunn 2y ago
    I wish it would remain as a basic viewer with syntax highlighting. If you want an edit/cursor mode you should have to click a button to enable it. At the moment, clicking on thepane places a cursor at that location which breaks using the arrow keys for scrolling the window -- if the cursor is off screen it will scroll to the cursor location not where the viewport is currently located.
- nixpulvis 2y ago
  GitHub is primarily as issue tracker though... and code runner I guess.
simonw 2y ago
"After an in-depth review, we’ve identified a number of open issues that have become outdated over time—some for several years." Sounds fair enough to me.
- riiii 2y ago
  "Leave them until they're outdated" isn't a valid way to deal with issues in my book.
  - simonw 2y ago
    Plenty of large projects need to go through and do a bit of a sweep of old issues every few years. If your projects have the discipline to never need that I congratulate you.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    But "Don't sweat over any little issue, especially if they have gone multiple years without major complaints from a sizeable part of your user base" is.
  - rizky05 2y ago
    [dead]
  - mst 2y ago
    Clutter accumulates in any bug tracker. Ideally they'd've been cleaning it out more regularly and these feature requests would've been marked "not currently on the roadmap" and closed much sooner. But I don't think I've ever seen a team do a perfect job of that, and I'm probably worse at it than they are.
- Pikamander2 2y ago
  If they were all truly outdated, then sure. But as the comments have pointed out, Github also closed at least half a dozen still-relevant issues like "Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request" that would be significant UX improvements.
brainwipe 2y ago
The only one that directly annoys me is not being able to have threaded comments at the PR level. https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 You can do it with "quoting", which is fine if there are two of you but turns into a mess if there's more than that. They've said that they're watching the discussions for feedback, so I hope they listen and implement that one. Happy that they are being transparent (rather than letting the issues rot), annoyed that they appear to be prioritising marginally useful AI stuff for basic UX.
- dmazin 2y ago
  That is surprising to me. I am so tired of commenting on random lines with the usual "commenting on a random line for the sake of threading" apology.
  - progbits 2y ago
    Also commenting on random irrelevant changed line because you can't comment on unchanged ones (but they might need changes due to rest of the PR). Github code review is horrible and I think it's actually worse than not having anything at all because now it's hard to convince people we should switch to something better. "Oh I don't want to learn another tool, github is good enough"
    - n4r9 2y ago
      > Also commenting on random irrelevant changed line because you can't comment on unchanged ones (but they might need changes due to rest of the PR). Gitea does this as well, it's a real bugbear.
- habosa 2y ago
  Shameless plug but this is one of the many GitHub code review limitations I set out to fix when I created CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). You can comment on any line, a whole file, or a whole PR and all comments are threaded and tracked to resolution. They are never hidden because they’re outdated or because the discussion is too long.
Deukhoofd 2y ago
There's some weird stuff there. > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server So they're deprecating Artifacts V3 next week, and now announced they won't upgrade Enterprise Server to v4?
- jlbooker 2y ago
  Probably a subtle push to sell the cloud-hosted Enterprise version. I bet the on-prem Enterprise will slowly stop getting all the latest-and-greatest features. Producing and supporting the on-prem version has extra costs, but probably doesn't bring in enough (extra) revenue to justify working on it as much.
- thiht 2y ago
  This one doesn’t make any sense, it HAS to be a mistake
Kudos 2y ago
Where did the "basic functionality" quote come from? I haven't looked at all 42 in detail, but it largely seems like _advanced_ functionality to me.
- dang 2y ago
  We've reverted the title now. (Submitted title was "GitHub removes 42 "basic functionality" features from their roadmap") Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- simonw 2y ago
  Yeah I don't see the term "basic functionality" anywhere on the linked page, having that in quotes in the post title here feels misleading to me. Renaming this post to match the original title would be appropriate: "Deprecating Outdated Issues on the GitHub Public Roadmap"
  - croemer 2y ago
    I've emailed @dang
- latexr 2y ago
  This is exactly why HN discourages editorialising titles. This one was clearly modified to spark outrage. People click on it with a predisposition to be mad instead of being given the chance to reflect first.
- yxhuvud 2y ago
  How on earth is threading comments on PRs advanced in any way?
  - kreetx 2y ago
    Maybe overcomplicated is the better term? Constantly adding "basic" features on top of each other might create us a Jira.
dangsux 2y ago
[dead]
mihaaly 2y ago
"At GitHub, transparency and clarity are at the heart of our relationship with the community." When these kind of carefully crafted prety slogans has to be a prime statement before anything is told then my suspicious mind gets very alert. Probably even overcompensate. Do people take these kind of forefront self evaluations as facts or have suspicion when this has to be announced and highlighted, stated (instead of being obvious). I do not know why (of course I do!) but these kind of self admirative statements have the opposite effect on me. Even when they are true.
- bananapub 2y ago
  I mean, it was clearly phrased by the marketing team, but it's on a post where they actively close a lot of bugs and clarify they won't be doing them, instead of doing what most companies do and just ignoring them for years.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
latexr 2y ago
This is why you don’t announce future changes until they’re essentially ready to go out the door. Apple used to understand this better than most. Until you build the feature, you’ll have people asking you constantly when it’ll be done. After you build it, you’ll have people complaining that it doesn’t work exactly like they imagined it in their head. If you end up not building it and say so, you’ll get attacked for it, even by people who never knew about the plans before the cancellation. Keep quiet about internal plans only you can affect. Let features requests come to you, monitor interest in those, and reply if they’re interesting or not feasible, so you can discuss and figure out what would work best for your users. Engage but don’t commit unless you’re certain something will happen. I’m surprised the conversation hasn’t devolved to a bigger mess yet (maybe it’s being well moderated). It’s a shame they’re having to preemptively lock issues, but I completely get it. It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.
- eviks 2y ago
  If you consider anything such a big issue, then your suggestion solves nothing - people still complaint, and now they also complaint about no transparency (see Apple) > It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure. What's so exhausting about ignoring like all of these corporates do?
  - latexr 2y ago
    > What's so exhausting about ignoring like all of these corporates do? Maybe have some empathy for the people who have to interact with individual customers. There’s not an amorphous blob of “corporates” who deals with everything, there are real people with an life just as rich as yours on the other side.
    - eviks 2y ago
      Let's test your hypothesis on this issue: a "real person with rich life" posted a corporate statement and interacted 0 times with responses. Was that too exhausting?
donatj 2y ago
I am going to call it, Microsoft has not been particularly good stewards of GitHub. They have over complicated so much of it to please corporate customers that it has really lost what made it great to begin with. It used to make everything seem simple and manageable. Changes were slow, sure, but they felt like they were at least thought through. The docs used to be simple and easy to navigate. Everything is about 10x more complex now.
manicminer 2y ago
The inability to comment on any line in a PR is a real pain. I’m disappointed to see the plans for this abandoned.
nixpulvis 2y ago
Death by committee or death by microsoft, take your pick.
o_m 2y ago
I wish they would put more effort in Github Issues (the project management product). They are so close to have something that just exactly what I need. But it seems like they haven't touched it in a couple of years. There are still many rough edges that has been there since the beta.
- croemer 2y ago
  Like issue search being not instant, it's impossible to find duplicates if it takes 5 seconds per search and not 500ms.
donatj 2y ago
> Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request This is infuriating that it's missing. Not being able to just say "Hey, missed updating this line" is just an insane oversight
lawgimenez 2y ago
I wish they put their focus more on GitHub Projects/Issues, it is just too slow.
mst 2y ago
The trouble with bug tracking / project management software is that everybody wants Just One More Feature. But if you implement them all, it will become an overcomplicated mess, somebody will replace it with a simpler version, and the cycle will repeat. Would I like some of the features they've decided not to implement? Yes. Would I hate the results if they implemented everything on this list? Also yes. And making everything configurable so you can pick the exact subset you want is (a) an incredible amount of work to make the resulting combinatorial explosion of possible choices all work nicely (b) tends to inevitably lead to something like JIRA. I do appreciate people being annoyed about specific features they'd really like getting removed from the roadmap, but so it goes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
shrikant 2y ago
I'm confused -- are they just closing the issues because they're outdated for various reasons, or are they yanking those features entirely where there's some attempt already made? For example, the top one in that list is the "Command Palette" -- but it's already live and working fine! And I'm pretty sure "Precise code navigation" also already exists for TypeScript. So are these features that are already GA going to be removed..?
- dcreager 2y ago
  > "Precise code navigation" also already exists for TypeScript We had conflated JS and TS support into a single release issue. JS support never landed, but TS did: https://github.blog/changelog/2024-03-14-precise-code-navigation-for-typescript-projects/ https://github.blog/changelog/2024-03-14-precise-code-naviga... When we first created the release issue, the thinking was that we wanted to launch support for those two languages at the same time, and for that support to be compatible with each other. (So we could correctly follow e.g. a TS library referencing a definition in an upstream JS library.) Unfortunately we never got JS support to the point where we could GA it. Largely for scaling reasons — there is a HUGE amount of JS on GitHub, and JS is a dynamic enough language that we have to do more per-file processing on it than for TS or Python. We decided not to wait for JS to be GA-ready before releasing TS, but then never corrected the release issue to account for that.
- jonasb 2y ago
  Yeah, I hope it doesn't mean that they will remove Command Palette. Unfortunately, it's still an opt-in "feature preview", so who knows what this means. For me it's a key navigation tool in GitHub, but I can understand that it's more of a power user feature.
joeyagreco 2y ago
no idea how [this](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552) was closed as "outdated"

116 points by preya2k 2y ago

What the fuck? A casual browse of that list and these are very real features that appear to already have had some development. No command palette? JS and TS precise code navigation being cancelled? SSH connections to GitHub Actions? What on earth is this new “roadmap” then? More AI garbage slop and less focus on developer tooling and source control? This is a very dark day.

cloudking 2y ago

Translation: here's a bunch of useful features requests customers asked for, but we don't have engineering budget to build them and not enough customers asked for them, so we're not building them. Plus they don't say "AI" so our executive team said to axe them.

eqvinox 2y ago

Is IPv6 reachability on some other issue tracker or why am I not finding it?

brookman64k 2y ago

At my project we are forced to use Enterprise GitHub including Actions. Often 80% of the build time consists of up- or downloading intermediate or final build artifacts. This can take more than 40 minutes which is extremely painful. I was really looking forward to finally getting a speedup here. The promise: > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server #930 … We will be extending support for v4 of the actions to upload and download artifacts to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES). This new version improves artifact upload and download speeds by up to 98%. I don‘t understand at all how this is not a priority anymore. :-(

jmainguy 2y ago
I believe the future is GitHub enterprise cloud. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/overview/about-github-enterprise-cloud https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/ove... all the benefits of GitHub enterprise, with none of the cons
- richbell 2y ago
  > all the benefits of GitHub enterprise, with none of the con To some organizations, having to use a cloud SaaS instead of hosting the application on-prem is a con.
  - btreecat 2y ago
    Isn't that the value GitLab is trying to provide?
    - richbell 2y ago
      Perhaps. The point remains that GitHub currently offers a self-hosted solution (GitHub Enteprise Server), and saying that the cloud version is the exact same (no cons) isn't true.
theamk 2y ago
Why bother with Github Artifacts at all, especially for intermediate steps? At our self-hosted GHE instance, we use either (self-hosted) Artifactory, or raw S3. Fast, and easy to work with.

RadiozRadioz 2y ago

This was a bad way to announce closing these issues. With a big list like that, everyone's going to find something they're pissed off about not having. They should have closed the issues slowly and quietly in the background - individually they're small enough that people probably wouldn't notice. But like this, many more people see what's happening and get angry together. Not a good way to do PR. Maybe the idea was to rip the band-aid off and hope the outrage burns out quickly.

philipwhiuk 2y ago

Heh even CISA.gov is grumpy: https://github.com/github/roadmap/discussions/1014#discussioncomment-11328929 https://github.com/github/roadmap/discussions/1014#discussio... Personally I'm not a fan of "we haven't got round to it in ages, let's close it" Issues at the bottom of your backlog: a) Cost you basically nothing b) Document previous demand c) Can be useful tasks for new joiners who are skilling up on the project d) Can be bumped if demand re-awakens e) Documents known feature gaps

preya2k 2y ago

I assume none of their AI features were deprecated.

red-iron-pine 2y ago
all of the important AI features, like building models from the code, were almost certainly pushed. customers don't care about those, though, and this is a good way to distract from any discussions about the implications.
shakna 2y ago
Whilst I'd still take it with a grain of salt, two have been. Mostly their code scanning AI stuff though (or pieces of them), which... Has had a lot of issues, compared to more traditional approaches. + Code scanning: AI-powered autofixes for CodeQL alerts integrated into VS Code + Secret scanning push protection for gists
- MortyWaves 2y ago
  CodeQL has never worked anyway and I’m unsure why it’s even a thing given it doesn’t work
  - jonathonlacher 2y ago
    Could you expand on what doesn't work for you?

Thev00d00 2y ago

[flagged]

walterbell 2y ago

Could Github developer workflow metadata (e.g. issues) be exported/serialized into a git repo for decentralized replication and/or import into an alternative?

nicman23 2y ago
not to git but there are bots to export to ie gitlab
simonw 2y ago
Yes. I built a tool for that a few months ago: https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues https://github.com/simonw/fetch-github-issues I have it running in one of my repos using a GitHub Action that's triggered when an issue is created or updated - it commits a JSON export of that issue back to the repo. Then I can git clone the repo and get all of the issues data.
- walterbell 2y ago
  Perfect, thanks!

oldpersonintx 2y ago

Guess who turned GitHub into a SPOF? We did.

littlestymaar 2y ago

[flagged]

rgovostes 2y ago
I disagree. Etymologically, "enshittification" is the ongoing transformation of something into shit. But here, GitHub is declining to make certain changes; it is expressly resisting transformation. At best you could argue it was already shit due to the lack of these specific enhancements that would deshittify it. Doctorow, who first studied enshittification, identified three distinct phases of the process: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." I don't see how this applies to the specific set of declined enhancements.
Brian_K_White 2y ago
It got shittier, but not in the way Cory Doctorow was talking about.

azalemeth 2y ago

Ever since GitHub was bought by Microsoft things have got worse for me as an end user -- browser compatibility is worse and I run into bugs frequently when on not-chrome; their academic programme now requires an insanely invasive localisation check that instantly fails for me on Linux and their support couldn't advance the process as I hadn't submitted an application yet; and their tooling slowly pushes people away from FOSS and towards proprietary methods. I wish they'd figure out how to make it a hacker friendly place again.

Szpadel 2y ago
out of curiosity what browser do you have in mind? I use Firefox on Linux and I didn't have any issues annoying enough to stick in my memory.
- Drakim 2y ago
  I use Firefox on Windows (on multiple machines), and when somebody has an image embedded in an issue or comment in Github, and I click it to see the original sized image it will not load, and simply shows a blank page instead. It's been like this for two years or so.
  - pitaj 2y ago
    Can you link a specific (publicly accessible) example? I want to try reproducing.
- Pooge 2y ago
  Using Librewolf 131.0.3-1. Going to the GitHub homepage makes the tab freeze and I have to go to /login or a repository page directly.
- kreetx 2y ago
  Same here. (I think I've ever seen one minor bug: for any repo in the clone dropdown, the "SSH" tab was hidden for me a while ago. Unfortunately I don't remember if this was browser related.)
- 2y ago

fergie 2y ago

Going to stick my neck out here. A lot of these "improvements" fall into the following 3 categories: 1) More complexity around issue tracking 2) More complexity around permissions 3) IDE-ness and general visual-studioification of the web interface. Since many of the issues make GitHub bloated and more difficult to use for general use cases, they _should_ be removed.

alganet 2y ago
Yes. And maybe this goes for features that are already implemented as well.
dandellion 2y ago
Yes, the last thing they need is more bloat. I wish they removed achievements as well.
samiv 2y ago
I agree, also the source code viewer (not sure what it's called) has regressed tremendously. A few years back it was simple, quite snappy and just worked. Now it has become slow and bloated and barely works for me on the desktop and the mobile version is full of rendering bugs rendering the whole thing rather useless. (Using firefox both on mobile and on the PC) All they had to do, literally, was to do nothing but no, can't have that. MUST ADD BLOAT.
- rhdunn 2y ago
  I wish it would remain as a basic viewer with syntax highlighting. If you want an edit/cursor mode you should have to click a button to enable it. At the moment, clicking on thepane places a cursor at that location which breaks using the arrow keys for scrolling the window -- if the cursor is off screen it will scroll to the cursor location not where the viewport is currently located.
nixpulvis 2y ago
GitHub is primarily as issue tracker though... and code runner I guess.

simonw 2y ago

"After an in-depth review, we’ve identified a number of open issues that have become outdated over time—some for several years." Sounds fair enough to me.

riiii 2y ago
"Leave them until they're outdated" isn't a valid way to deal with issues in my book.
- simonw 2y ago
  Plenty of large projects need to go through and do a bit of a sweep of old issues every few years. If your projects have the discipline to never need that I congratulate you.
- rglullis 2y ago
  But "Don't sweat over any little issue, especially if they have gone multiple years without major complaints from a sizeable part of your user base" is.
- rizky05 2y ago
  [dead]
- mst 2y ago
  Clutter accumulates in any bug tracker. Ideally they'd've been cleaning it out more regularly and these feature requests would've been marked "not currently on the roadmap" and closed much sooner. But I don't think I've ever seen a team do a perfect job of that, and I'm probably worse at it than they are.
Pikamander2 2y ago
If they were all truly outdated, then sure. But as the comments have pointed out, Github also closed at least half a dozen still-relevant issues like "Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request" that would be significant UX improvements.

brainwipe 2y ago

The only one that directly annoys me is not being able to have threaded comments at the PR level. https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 You can do it with "quoting", which is fine if there are two of you but turns into a mess if there's more than that. They've said that they're watching the discussions for feedback, so I hope they listen and implement that one. Happy that they are being transparent (rather than letting the issues rot), annoyed that they appear to be prioritising marginally useful AI stuff for basic UX.

dmazin 2y ago
That is surprising to me. I am so tired of commenting on random lines with the usual "commenting on a random line for the sake of threading" apology.
- progbits 2y ago
  Also commenting on random irrelevant changed line because you can't comment on unchanged ones (but they might need changes due to rest of the PR). Github code review is horrible and I think it's actually worse than not having anything at all because now it's hard to convince people we should switch to something better. "Oh I don't want to learn another tool, github is good enough"
  - n4r9 2y ago
    > Also commenting on random irrelevant changed line because you can't comment on unchanged ones (but they might need changes due to rest of the PR). Gitea does this as well, it's a real bugbear.
habosa 2y ago
Shameless plug but this is one of the many GitHub code review limitations I set out to fix when I created CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). You can comment on any line, a whole file, or a whole PR and all comments are threaded and tracked to resolution. They are never hidden because they’re outdated or because the discussion is too long.

Deukhoofd 2y ago

There's some weird stuff there. > GitHub Actions: Artifacts v4 available in GitHub Enterprise Server So they're deprecating Artifacts V3 next week, and now announced they won't upgrade Enterprise Server to v4?

jlbooker 2y ago
Probably a subtle push to sell the cloud-hosted Enterprise version. I bet the on-prem Enterprise will slowly stop getting all the latest-and-greatest features. Producing and supporting the on-prem version has extra costs, but probably doesn't bring in enough (extra) revenue to justify working on it as much.
thiht 2y ago
This one doesn’t make any sense, it HAS to be a mistake

Kudos 2y ago

Where did the "basic functionality" quote come from? I haven't looked at all 42 in detail, but it largely seems like _advanced_ functionality to me.

dang 2y ago
We've reverted the title now. (Submitted title was "GitHub removes 42 "basic functionality" features from their roadmap") Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
simonw 2y ago
Yeah I don't see the term "basic functionality" anywhere on the linked page, having that in quotes in the post title here feels misleading to me. Renaming this post to match the original title would be appropriate: "Deprecating Outdated Issues on the GitHub Public Roadmap"
- croemer 2y ago
  I've emailed @dang
latexr 2y ago
This is exactly why HN discourages editorialising titles. This one was clearly modified to spark outrage. People click on it with a predisposition to be mad instead of being given the chance to reflect first.
yxhuvud 2y ago
How on earth is threading comments on PRs advanced in any way?
- kreetx 2y ago
  Maybe overcomplicated is the better term? Constantly adding "basic" features on top of each other might create us a Jira.

dangsux 2y ago

[dead]

mihaaly 2y ago

"At GitHub, transparency and clarity are at the heart of our relationship with the community." When these kind of carefully crafted prety slogans has to be a prime statement before anything is told then my suspicious mind gets very alert. Probably even overcompensate. Do people take these kind of forefront self evaluations as facts or have suspicion when this has to be announced and highlighted, stated (instead of being obvious). I do not know why (of course I do!) but these kind of self admirative statements have the opposite effect on me. Even when they are true.

bananapub 2y ago
I mean, it was clearly phrased by the marketing team, but it's on a post where they actively close a lot of bugs and clarify they won't be doing them, instead of doing what most companies do and just ignoring them for years.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

latexr 2y ago

This is why you don’t announce future changes until they’re essentially ready to go out the door. Apple used to understand this better than most. Until you build the feature, you’ll have people asking you constantly when it’ll be done. After you build it, you’ll have people complaining that it doesn’t work exactly like they imagined it in their head. If you end up not building it and say so, you’ll get attacked for it, even by people who never knew about the plans before the cancellation. Keep quiet about internal plans only you can affect. Let features requests come to you, monitor interest in those, and reply if they’re interesting or not feasible, so you can discuss and figure out what would work best for your users. Engage but don’t commit unless you’re certain something will happen. I’m surprised the conversation hasn’t devolved to a bigger mess yet (maybe it’s being well moderated). It’s a shame they’re having to preemptively lock issues, but I completely get it. It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure.

eviks 2y ago
If you consider anything such a big issue, then your suggestion solves nothing - people still complaint, and now they also complaint about no transparency (see Apple) > It’s exhausting having to deal with abuse on public forums when you’re on the receiving end and always have to keep your conposure. What's so exhausting about ignoring like all of these corporates do?
- latexr 2y ago
  > What's so exhausting about ignoring like all of these corporates do? Maybe have some empathy for the people who have to interact with individual customers. There’s not an amorphous blob of “corporates” who deals with everything, there are real people with an life just as rich as yours on the other side.
  - eviks 2y ago
    Let's test your hypothesis on this issue: a "real person with rich life" posted a corporate statement and interacted 0 times with responses. Was that too exhausting?

donatj 2y ago

I am going to call it, Microsoft has not been particularly good stewards of GitHub. They have over complicated so much of it to please corporate customers that it has really lost what made it great to begin with. It used to make everything seem simple and manageable. Changes were slow, sure, but they felt like they were at least thought through. The docs used to be simple and easy to navigate. Everything is about 10x more complex now.

manicminer 2y ago

The inability to comment on any line in a PR is a real pain. I’m disappointed to see the plans for this abandoned.

nixpulvis 2y ago

Death by committee or death by microsoft, take your pick.

o_m 2y ago

I wish they would put more effort in Github Issues (the project management product). They are so close to have something that just exactly what I need. But it seems like they haven't touched it in a couple of years. There are still many rough edges that has been there since the beta.

croemer 2y ago
Like issue search being not instant, it's impossible to find duplicates if it takes 5 seconds per search and not 500ms.

donatj 2y ago

> Commenting on unchanged lines in a pull request This is infuriating that it's missing. Not being able to just say "Hey, missed updating this line" is just an insane oversight

lawgimenez 2y ago

I wish they put their focus more on GitHub Projects/Issues, it is just too slow.

mst 2y ago

The trouble with bug tracking / project management software is that everybody wants Just One More Feature. But if you implement them all, it will become an overcomplicated mess, somebody will replace it with a simpler version, and the cycle will repeat. Would I like some of the features they've decided not to implement? Yes. Would I hate the results if they implemented everything on this list? Also yes. And making everything configurable so you can pick the exact subset you want is (a) an incredible amount of work to make the resulting combinatorial explosion of possible choices all work nicely (b) tends to inevitably lead to something like JIRA. I do appreciate people being annoyed about specific features they'd really like getting removed from the roadmap, but so it goes.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

shrikant 2y ago

I'm confused -- are they just closing the issues because they're outdated for various reasons, or are they yanking those features entirely where there's some attempt already made? For example, the top one in that list is the "Command Palette" -- but it's already live and working fine! And I'm pretty sure "Precise code navigation" also already exists for TypeScript. So are these features that are already GA going to be removed..?

dcreager 2y ago
> "Precise code navigation" also already exists for TypeScript We had conflated JS and TS support into a single release issue. JS support never landed, but TS did: https://github.blog/changelog/2024-03-14-precise-code-navigation-for-typescript-projects/ https://github.blog/changelog/2024-03-14-precise-code-naviga... When we first created the release issue, the thinking was that we wanted to launch support for those two languages at the same time, and for that support to be compatible with each other. (So we could correctly follow e.g. a TS library referencing a definition in an upstream JS library.) Unfortunately we never got JS support to the point where we could GA it. Largely for scaling reasons — there is a HUGE amount of JS on GitHub, and JS is a dynamic enough language that we have to do more per-file processing on it than for TS or Python. We decided not to wait for JS to be GA-ready before releasing TS, but then never corrected the release issue to account for that.
jonasb 2y ago
Yeah, I hope it doesn't mean that they will remove Command Palette. Unfortunately, it's still an opt-in "feature preview", so who knows what this means. For me it's a key navigation tool in GitHub, but I can understand that it's more of a power user feature.

joeyagreco 2y ago

no idea how [this](https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552 https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/552) was closed as "outdated"