Are you guys fine with these new shenanigans from Github. I found a bug and wanted to check what has been the development on that, only to find out most of the discussion was hidden by github and requesting me to sign-in to view it.
It threw me straight back to when Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure, now microsoft is exploiting free work from the community to train its AI, and building walls around its product, are open source contributors fine with that ?
Microsoft acquired Github and the discussions around the future of opensource on a microsoft owned infrastructure
Personally I’m impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground
I moved to Codeberg
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home
Personally I’m impressed it took them so long to start driving it to the ground
You mean their copyright washing of FOSS projects using copilot wasn’t enough of a warning?
No, that is actually useful. Blocking access for anonymous users is not
If anything, the boom of LLMs like copilot and chatgpt actually shows the power of open source and open access to information. Underlying algorithms would mean nothing without open source, open access to stackoverflow, forums, etc
Federated forges can’t come soon enough. Git is already federated. There is absolutely not fucking reason for this.
Git is already federated.
New to me. Do you mean decentralized instead of federated?
Distributed version control system
I would not say that distributed is federated. But i could not find a widely accepted definition of it.
For example i would call FTP also not federated🤷♂️
Agreed. That said, with a few remotes and a cron job git could facilitate “duct tape and zip ties” federation.
Exactly. There’s no way that could ever go tits up.
Eh, in a myopic sense yes, but folks are using Microsoft GitHub for their CI, issue tracker, forums, kanban, Wiki & so forth. By choosing their Markdown fork, you are locked into that too. Some communities like Elm, Unison, Nix use MS GitHub as your primary community identifier (Elm doesn’t even allow you to create packages on another platform). Many tools only allow MS GitHub single sign on. If you fork off of MS GitHub, in most scenarios you’ll still be required to have an MS GitHub mirror or you won’t be able to submit a pull request as most projects don’t have an alternative contribution channel.
Some of this can be migrated, some of it can’t & the whole time being entrenched in MS GitHub land projects will fear friction & loss of users/contributors if they move (& the platform they would move to likely isn’t offerering anything more than being open source).
So can you just move the code elsewhere since Git is a DVCS? Yep. But projects are more than just the source code.
While admirable, I really don’t think email is the path forward if you want to replace GitHub. There’s a reason people use things like GitHub, it’s user friendly and you don’t need to use email or look at long mailing lists.
Can’t wait for the day when I can collaborate with all my Forgejo homies.
Forejo-mies?
Don’t forget you’re contributing your code to Bill’s AI
Which is under litigation https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/
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Good take, but anyway, we are going to ignore all of them anyway
Waiting for forgejo federated repo search, federated code search, federated issues, then we can finally block github on DNS level
Honestly I don’t think there’s a truly good git hosting website right now.
GitLab works if you wanna get away from Micro$oft but the UI is all over the place. Every other alternative either has an infinitely worse UI or charges money to use
What about codeberg? It is free and forgejo is easy to use.
i <3 codeberg
I’ve been enjoying Codeberg a lot lately.
Yeah, Codeberg’s UI is almost the same as github, its good tbh.
P.S. i came to the conclusion that codeberg/github UI is good, when i went to sourcehut. Holy crap, my mind couldnt comprehend what am i looking at. (Could be a skill issue tho)
SourceHut is crap. I’ve found that just because something is open source it doesn’t mean it’s automatically good.
codeberg, sourcehut, git.gay, cgit…
The biggest issue with gitlab is the web editor. They swapped out a really fast and light-feeling one for this frankenstein monster that looks like whatever the hell the barbies and kens writing powershell are using. It’s so slow, and so ugly.
Everything else about gitlab, so far, has been great. From v9 to here, it’s been easy to use and easy to upgrade; but we can debate the capricious worsening of the sidebar for something surprisingly worse each time .
Who even uses the web editor on any git website though? For anything besides micro fixes for projects I don’t already have cloned, I find it easier to just update things locally and push.
Don’t even get me started on github rendering tabs as EIGHT spaces.
A lot of people do. Especially on GitHub, where you can just browse a random repository, find a file you want to change, hit the edit button, and edit it right there in the browser (it does the forking for you behind the scenes). For people unfamiliar with git, that’s huge.
It’s also a great boon when you don’t want to clone the repo locally! For example, when I’m on a slow, metered connection, I have no desire to spend 10+ minutes (and half of my data cap) for a repo to clone, just so I can fix a typo. With the web editor, I can accomplish the same thing with very little network traffic, in about 1 minute.
While normally I prefer the comfort of my Emacs, there are situations where a workflow that happens entirely in the browser is simply more practical.
I went from a company that used github to one that uses gitlab. I thought it was going to be great and was excited for using a new thing. But it’s really clunky in comparison.
I’m fine with it so alternatives will be used more in the future.
I’m not as optimistic. Some people will complain and move to alternative platforms. But the vast majority won’t care and continue using the abusive platform, forcing the rest to use it sometimes. The best example for this is Reddit and Lemmy.
I’m not forced into anything, i can choose to not contribute anything to Reddit and still read it via alternative frontends to keep user number measurement low.
I found a place here and i choose to contribute here with people like me going the extra mile just because we can and we have the options. The majority can stay over there, some of these people made my blood boil too often anyway and i’m far better off with like minded people.
I’m using Lemmy and Mastodon and so many open source projects because i believe in it and want to support the cause.
This is why enshittification might be a good thing ¯_(ツ)_/¯
No, that’s why we host our own gitea.
Or Forgejo, or cgit, or Aylla, or Radicle, or SSH+HTTP server. There’s loads of options to try. And this is just the options for Git—not to mention the other DVCSs worth looking into.
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The company that makes it seems invested in crypto, but what does radicle itself have to do with it?
There isn’t anything I see either. The only reference is being built similar to Bitcoin’s Lightning network (while also it says it is inspired by Secure Scuttlebutt & BitTorrent (hence “seeding” a repo)). It doesn’t solve my issues in the space, but it is at least trying something novel.
Anyone want to revive the GitTorrent project?
I hope github “enshitifies” to bankruptcy
Let’s use codeberg :))
and or sourcehut @ sr.ht supporting foss is always based.
Anyone else remember when MS bought github and a LOT of folks were saying this is where we’d see that they have changed and won’t fuck things up this time because Nadella is so much cooler than Balmer? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I know people don’t like sending patches to mailing lists and prefer the zoomer PR UI but god damn if you look only at the protocol openness perspective nothing comes close. sr.ht is great in that regard
Useful write-up about how to do it: https://git-send-email.io
Just another silly thing related. I tried to view the magnolia bypass paywall clean on gitlab the other day (after it had the DMCA takedown) and my gitlab account got “blocked”. Maybe because I was also on my VPN? Or was it because I viewed that repo? I have no idea. Total shit.
Please mirror your stuff on forgejo or another open source git forge. They‘re working on federation and this might just be the best thing ever. Being able to not make an account on another one‘s forge would be awesome. I have like 6 plus accounts and its driving me nuts.
My hot take is the quickest way out of this quagmire is to abandon Git. With the education system & bootcamps raising the next generation to think MS GitHub is Git, it would probably be less work to start rolling with another VCS as megacorp Microsoft won’t have the agility to pivot away from Git. Git isn’t even that great—arcane CLI, patches don’t commute, basically permanently locks in your name & email, large files require a separate tool, etc. And most of the popular alternative forges are literally just trying to clone MS GitHub rather than invent something new or solve the shit problems it doesn’t like threading, pull request model sucks, source code doesn’t need to be a social media platform with gamified stars & anxiety-inducing activity charts to encourage that MIT code in your free time the corpos will use & never contribute back while demanding you use it to build your résumé… or it’s built on email as the common denominator with fingers in ears as if mailing lists are the optimal workflow for all projects when a majority of folks don’t even know how to bottom post & keep their mail with the same evil Microsoft or the other evil Google. Nothing is being bold enough to actually have a better user experience—currently the best lure is… free software, but worse UX? Being a better UX the Microsoft GitHub is not a even that high of a bar. Some folks claim “network effect” but it seems clear that a lot of folks already want out.
Nah. Start anew. Check out Darcs, Pijul, Fossil, Mercurial, Bazaar, or whatever else is out there. Build on the ideas that improve version control.
Wtf just use gitlab/gitea/whateverthefuck instead of Microsoft garbage
Your project will inevitably get forked onto MS GitHub & the SEO will rank that fork above you—changing VCS adds a layer of friction that discourages forking back onto MS GitHub. Best you see is these pretty please attempts to encourage not forking to Microsoft’s platform. Microsoft has a massive pull in the direction Git goes, & whatever MS GitHub does, the alternative forges seems to want to clone even if it’s bad (look at Forgejo diverging from Gitea to copy Actions verbatim even tho we all know working with YAML for CI is a bad idea that scales poorly). When you look at the latest release notes for Git, often the first publisher is GitHub’s blog—this is what gets shared around the link aggregators. Part of the strategic purchase of GitHub on Microsoft’s part was getting access to that project sway (& upselling services—it’s not pure conspiracy—with some of the changes definitely being for the better).
And again, Git is not the best DVCS—but folks are hesitant to try other platforms since there is less forges & tooling. If Microsoft is controlling the Git ecosystem like it is, that effort, in my opinion, would be better spent choosing a better DVCS system that isn’t already infected by Microsoft or Google or Apple or similar.
I don’t agree, but it’s a unique, interesting thought that I can upvote.
That’s how a “hot take” should work
Git is not the best DVCS
What would you suggest is a better DVCS than git?
Personally, I find the Patch Theory options the most compelling since fundamentally patches should commute—meaning it doesn’t matter if patch α or patch β was merged first & you start to feel weird that you get merge conflicts despite the same end result in something snapshot-based. The two big contenders are Darcs, the still-maintained pioneer in the space & new(ish)comer, Pijul. Darcs has less rough edges being about as old, stable as Git but has some performance issues (where some of the old perf issues are fixed, some remain) & being Haskell, libraries get created since that community loves to code more than it likes to maintain so libraries can go out of date & package tooling still isn’t what it could be. Pijul, memes aside, is written in Rust with some more modern sensibilities & has a really cool independent identity management system (you can hide your name/email for privacy, or change it to not be deadnamed & not have to raise a merge request to rebase your new identity on all repos you’ve contributed to), but it’s pretty barebones despite being technically feature complete I believe—with
rebasebeing missing feels like a glaring issue as the way to fix muliple patches without losing metadata isn’t fully exposed. Nest, the forge from Pijul’s creator, is pretty lackluster too IMO from featureset to self-hosting stack without any real alternative yet. It’s still a project worth watching & SSH+HTTPS work fine for hobby projects. For Darcs, Darcsden is fine but not great & showing its age, but newly started Smeederee seems to be going in a good direction, the rest of the old forges are written in like Python 2. …Which is the part where I would like to see some of that yet-another-Git-forge effort & enegery flow into these channels.Fossil is interesting too for shipping the whole forge, & have heard it’s great for small teams as that is what it’s optimized for, but I haven’t used it.
Pijul is a very exciting project. I’ve wanted to try it for months buy haven’t found the time.
Not to say don’t (do try it), but Darcs might be better if you just want to understand some of the fundamentals since it’s more mature. A small project will not perceive any performance difference. If you use Git’s CLI heavily, Pijul’s CLI will seem barren in comparison & tooling even like vim-signify doesn’t have support. Pijul’s
diffisn’t GNUdiffcompatible so that tooling won’t help either.If you grasp Darcs, moving to Pijul is pretty simple since they are based on the same theory—you just might need to be invested enough to start building your own tooling which is more of a time commitment. Pijul is meant to be scripted which is partly why it’s barren—so for a trivial expample I created a small shell script
pijul-amendwhich wrapspijul record --amendwhich is picked up aspijul amendmimickingdarcs amend. Maintenance is easier when a project supports only the minimum set of commands, but you’ll be building your own ergonomics (no rebase, no send-mail, etc.). Maybe in the future when there is a bigger contrib space to fill in the gaps, it won’t be such an investment to just to test out.
The two big contenders are Darcs … Darcs … has some performance issues (where some of the old perf issues are fixed, some remain)
If Darcs has performance issues, how is it better than git?
In many scenarios you probably won’t notice… but also Pijul has ‘fixed’ that fundamental perfomance issue. The Patch Theory states that patches, without depending patches that would cause a conflict, should commute—i.e. patch α + patch β ≡ patch β + patch α in the same way 1 + 4 ≡ 4 + 1 (order does not matter, output is equivalent). What this eliminates is an entire class of merge conflicts & opens up new ways to handle diffing. This particular class of conflicts makes it easier to work in a distributed project as anyone can pull in anyone else’s patch at different times in project without conflicts. In practice with Git being snapshot-based & patch order mattering, this tends to cause folks to rely on a centralized, canonical Git server to merge into to be able to ask what the order should be so everyone doesn’t get stuck in their rebases/pulls (
rererefails a lot).It turns out there is more to version control than how fast CPU go; if we measured programming languages with the same stick, we’d all only write assembly since everything else has a performance penalty.
The Patch Theory
The way you write about this seems very evangelical.
patches, without depending patches that would cause a conflict, should commute
get stuck in their rebases/pulls
I use git every day and I don’t recall patch ordering ever being a problem.
I self-host GitBucket, and honestly your reasoning behind giving up arguably the best version control application, just because of one hosting site, is downright ludicrous.
Yeah, I stand by my stance that Microsoft has poisoned the whole Git experience, where everyone will be comparing all forges to MS GitHub & the direction of the Git project ship is being steered heavily by Microfsoft. I also disagree with “best” VCS—I will agree with Git having currently the most/best tooling around it which can lead to a better overall experience, but Git’s fundamentals are not without some obvious flaws.
It hasn’t. There are literally thousands and thousands of developers using Git daily without having nothing to do with GitHub.
You are entitled to your opinion, but that’s a fact. What MS does or doesn’t, with GitHub, has no effect on these devs. You can see how egregious it is to read a random person sayint we should stop using a certain tool, because Walmart also uses it? Jeesh.
I would venture while thousands use Git without MS GitHub, 98% have an account since you largely can’t contribute to many projects without due to lock-in.
If Walmart was the biggest funder, making the most calls to the project, & optimizing it to be sold in their stores, I would 100% have hesitance against something if I could find an alternative (physical vs. digital goods working a bit different).
It’s not that I don’t see your point, it’s just that I’m pessimistic that the open source community at large would in practice move off of MS GitHub or otherwise offer alternative contribution channels before we would see another tool + platform supplant Git as the status quo in the next generation of VCSs. I would rather accelerate that future—unless like Google or Facebook is the clear leader of that new tool, but many projects right now not named Jujutsu seem to be independent.
The great majority of developers never contribute, that’s a false expectation. Majority of programmers work in the private sector and use local git hosts/solutions instead of GitHub.
Again, expecting those devs to not use git because of one hoster, is a ludicrous idea in itself.
git isn’t even that great…
What? Th E fuckv
Have you tried anything contemporary to or newer than Git (i.e. not CVS or Subversion)? It’s quite an anomaly that Git has held it’s reign as long as it has compared to other software & to assume it’s not worthy of criticism or isn’t regularly criticized online is delusional. There has been a lot of interesting work in VCS space that many have ignored since their heads are just stuck in the Git bubble. Was Git better than things before it? Mostly yes, but there are options now (& around the same time frame) with more ergonomic CLI, better conflict resolution, handling of large file blobs, better project management, & so on.
You seem to know a lot about VCS. Recently I’ve been looking for a VCS that handles binary files well, has deduplication, allows for deletion/forgetting of older versions without too much hassle, deals well with binary file conflicts, and allows for storing the old binaries on another server (like git LFS). Do you happen to know something that fits that description?
My memory could be failing me but I believe the gaming industry prefers Perforce for large files. Pijul’s FAQs seems to point in the direction that it could be good enough for some use cases. I haven’t put too much effort into researching solving that specific hard problem, but if I was to create a video game, you really need to look at how to best handle your assets.
I have heard of Perforce but it doesn’t seem to be FOSS. Pijul seems interesting, I’ll check it out. I’m currently using Nextcloud to sync projects between my desktop and laptop, but it’s a bit of a pain. It takes up to 18 hours for the initial sync and uses a lot of CPU.
Well the games industry is largely not FOSS so not a huge surprise. Parts of that might be changing after the debacle with Unity with those moving to Godot–not that Godot doesn’t have issues. For a minute before the Zoom buyout I was using Keybase to sync with some folks files, but I don’t know about long term. I’ve also heard some folks like Resilio Sync (formerly BitTorrent Sync), but I can’t say much about it. It’s a hard problem to solve since these files don’t diff.
You seem to not understand that github is not git, it uses git, period.
You didn’t even read to sentence #2? That is the whole point—at this point with a sizeable portion folks thinking they are one in the same & Microsoft with one hand reaching across the driver to steer the Git project while basically defining how Git forges should look with every big alternative trying to clone MS Github, it could be easier to get out of the vehicle directed by Microsoft & create a new future where Microsoft doesn’t have its sticky hands already in everything.
Just because some (really dumb) people think git is from Microsoft doesn’t mean we should stop using it.
With that logic we should stop using half the protocol and utilities out there. Remember that open source can be used by anyone, so that includes Microsoft.
Just setup your own open source gitlab or something and use that. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater
Then you are suggesting “the people” can take Git back from that narrative–because you can’t deny that the majority of projects are on Microsoft’s platform. Maybe they can, & I hope they can too! …But I am skeptical that any true migration will actually be done before there is a tool adopted anyhow, so I would prefer we accelerate the adoption of that new tool+platform instead since I think there are some underrated tools that folks are missing as they have never even looked outside the Git bubble. I migrated everything I could off in 2016 with the Microsoft purchase, & so many folks said they would too. It’s been 8 years, & even with some folks going elsewhere, more new folks are replacing them on MS GitHub than there are those leaving (thanks education system).
Git has nothing to do with Microsoft and I think most tech people (th only people using git) know that.
I have seen and used alternative tools. Git has issues, just like all alternatives. Its just that git is vastly superior to all alternatives, and it’s open source.
If (once) Microsoft gets abusive with GitHub, people will leave for alternatives, such is the life of open source
Hard disagree with “vastly superior to all alternatives”, but I hope you are right about that last part.
