"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now : opensource

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 89 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.

Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month's promotion. It doesn't seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It's some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella's mouth. I don't get it, but it's very consistent with Microsoft.

[–] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

They want to make stuff that look good in the quarterly earnings report. They want to show they’re fully committed to AI in all their products or whatever.

They don’t want satisfied customers. They want satisfied investors.

[–] intrepid@lemmy.ca 12 points 3 months ago

The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user's query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.

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[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 54 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Give a hacker a github, they'll commit for a week.

Give a hacker a mailing list and an ssh, and they'll be selfhosting for the rest of their life.

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Right, because mailing lists are easier to use

Hiring the barrier of entry is one way to reduce your ticket load. And, uh, not having any ticket system at all.

[–] scott@lem.free.as 10 points 3 months ago

"Hiring"? Is "raising" a better word?

[–] luciddaemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 3 months ago (8 children)

Fediverse version of github when? Unless it already exists?

[–] akincisor@sh.itjust.works 46 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's called git. It's been distributed from day 1. GitHub was an attempt to centralize it.

[–] gomp@lemmy.ml 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Yeah... does git have issue tracking? actions? C'mon: it's not like github & co. are just git.

[–] herrvogel@lemmy.world 28 points 3 months ago (3 children)

It doesn't have discussions, it doesn't offer pull request management with commented/annotated code reviews, it doesn't have built-in ssh and key management features, no workflows, no authorization tools of any kind...

In short I find the "just use git itself lmao" to be an exceedingly weird thing to say and I find it even weirder that it gets said as often as it does and it gets upvoted so much. Git by itself is not very useful at all if there are more than one a half people working on the same code.

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[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Again, like OP said, those are typically distinct functionality: issue tracking, source control, deployment etc. GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization. The more stuff you add to a platform the harder it makes it to leave or replicate.

But no, technically speaking you don't need to have all of it in one place. There's no reason for which you must manage everything together.

I don't even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks. The fact it still doesn't have a decent history visualization to this day is mind-boggling.

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools. GitHub's "one size fits all" approach is terrible and only holds because people are too lazy to look for any alternative.

[–] intrepid@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 months ago

I don't even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

I agree with this part.

GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.

Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, "Yeah, no! I don't want to learn that many tools".

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.

The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.

[–] gomp@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.

It's not that complicated... people use it because everyone has an account there and so your project gets more visibility (and your profile too, for those who plan to flex it when they look for the next job) and more contributions. Even a lot of projects that aren't on github have some sort of mirror there for visibility.

Suppose you wanna contribute to gnu grep (or whatever)... do you happen to know off the top of your head where the source repo and bug tracker are? And do you know what's the procedure to submit your patch?

If you are a company doing closed source, I agree that I don't see why you would choose github over the myriad alternatives (including the self hosted ones).

Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools

That's a great way to spend your resources developing yet-another-source-forge-thingie instead of whatever your actual project/product is supposed to be :)

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[–] flatlined@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

What combination would you recommend to replace most common GitHub functionality?

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[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 36 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Forgejo is what you're wanting

[–] luciddaemon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That seems to be it. I didn't know that existed.

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 3 points 3 months ago

I'm glad I get to introduce you to it! The biggest instance is Codeberg. Fediverse integration isn't there yet but the general consensus is its coming very soon since that's Codeberg's main focus for the forgejo project right now

[–] Vittelius@feddit.de 24 points 3 months ago

https://forgejo.org/faq/#is-there-a-roadmap-for-forgejo

[–] wasabi@feddit.org 17 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Git is already decentralized

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They're asking for a federated forge, not decentralized VCS.

I should be able to log into my own instance and use that account to open a bug report with your project, for example.

[–] Flipper@feddit.org 4 points 3 months ago

Forgejo is working on that, but it's not there yet.

[–] intrepid@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 months ago

Github is more than just git. We need decentralized solutions for associated services and persistently online repos.

[–] camr_on@lemmy.world 15 points 3 months ago

Gitlab and forgejo

[–] liliumstar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Something like radicle?

https://radicle.xyz/

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (13 children)

Piping curl into sh in install instructions is a fast track to me not taking a project seriously

[–] delirious_owl@discuss.online 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, like Lemmy

[–] Cube6392@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago

Excited for Sublinks...

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[–] piracysails@lemm.ee 8 points 3 months ago

I once heard of torrent git

[–] Eezyville@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago

I've read that GitLab is experimenting with the concept.

[–] intrepid@lemmy.ca 26 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I don't know what's happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary 'features'.

[–] belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It was bought by Microsoft and all efforts are going towards AI shit. Once they have your subscriptions to copilot, windows, github, etc, they dont give a fuck about making anything easier for you

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Hey now. A lot of that effort has been poured into turning a code forge into a corpo social media platform like Microsoft LinkedIn as well as a way to siphon out a percent chunk of donations via Sponsors too.

[–] Contravariant@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's kind of neat you can launch a version of Visual Studio code by pressing '.' though.

Still not sure why, especially given that it's pretty much impossible to find out that you can even do that.

[–] intrepid@lemmy.ca 16 points 3 months ago

I can understand why it excites you. But I'm old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I'm perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.

Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that's designed to do exactly this.

[–] Kelly@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it.

I feel like this has been the case for a while now. Luckily they offer other search tools so its a gotcha that you only have to hit once.

In edit mode they capture the crtl-f keystrokes and offer their own search and replace tool. An argument could be made that they should offer a custom search tool for read mode if they are going to break the browsers built in tooling.

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[–] wuphysics87@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago

"GitHub"

[–] toastal@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I want to see good forges for alternative DVCSs. Git itself feels like legacy software full a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults that just keeps bloating. Most software makers at this point have never even used a non-Git VCS.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

legacy software full [of?] a truckload of arcane commands & flags with bad defaults

You need to learn about xargs. It'll make you cry. But when I needed to properly parallelize a RHSatellite run - wow is pulp ever a bag of shit - so it would finish in under 9 hours and not trip over itself with 105 (no shit) different repos, it was integral.

There are three different kinds of regular grep, and they have incompatible command line switches.

I'm not gonna list the plethora of tools with arcane and/or lengthy option lists, but I do wish I could impress upon you the idea that every tool evolves , and evolution is usually coupled with growth and specialized additions.

[–] spikespaz@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago

I'd like to add my opinion that git is definitely not the worst offender

[–] kbin_space_program@kbin.run 11 points 3 months ago

Based on the article, the problem is that Github isn't being treated as legacy software, but isn't able to load a full file using the currently popular JS framework they are using.

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

They should try Bitbucket

[–] gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Codeberg is where it’s at

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago

Whenever I encounter a project that is not hosted on GitHub, such as https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot I get totally delighted because navigating and browsing it actually works.

In GitHub if I am browsing the source code I now have to open it in a raw page without highlighting, because GitHub’s features absolutely gunk it up. I have no intention of ever putting a new project on GitHub again. Bad user experience, untrustworthy leadership, and bad values (I.e. Silicon Valley ones)

[–] steeznson@lemmy.world 9 points 3 months ago (3 children)

lol we used to call it Buttbucket at my old work where we used it. Should be a relatively easy product to deliver but Atlassian just couldn't keep it up and bug free

[–] DavidDoesLemmy@aussie.zone 2 points 3 months ago

I meant if they think GitHub feels like legacy software, they should try Bitbucket. That's real legacy software.

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[–] sexy_peach@beehaw.org 5 points 3 months ago

Amazing

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