GitHub responds to Dear GitHub letter

https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/pull/115

by joshmanders • 10 years ago

763 332 10 years ago

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

That took a long long time for them to respond. It's day 29 now. In fact, they could have communicated something after even a week - probably something similar to what they have actually written, only more 'We're looking at your list and we'll try to get back to you as soon as possible'.

Where is Jono Bacon in all of this?

edit: OK, I feel kind of bad for mentioning Jono because I've watched him do awesome things over the years. I've sent him an email out of the blue asking him to respond - hopefully he gets it.

petetnt• 10 years ago

They did sort of respond on the initial HN thread though. Commenting means committing and if you do the wrong decision in haste, you might screwed up in the process (as an individual or a company). Is 29 days too long? Maybe.

They do address the slowness on the commit too and they provided a timeline.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

Oh, I'm glad they did respond :-) In fact, I actually think that if they hadn't responded they would be seeing an exodus of projects.

Given that the issues being highlighted in that letter are long standing though, I don't think it would have been hasty to say that they appreciate the feedback and they are reviewing.

It's great of course that they responded on HN. But the fact that they only responded on HN and had no way of responding on their own site is... a bit embarrassing actually! At least I sort of feel that they should feel that way.

I actually pay for their lowest monthly tier as my needs are very limited. I largely like GitHub and will stick with them, but they just have to do something about their community engagement. If they don't, then someone is going to eat their lunch!

edit: kind of surprised at how some are responding to my comment - what did I say that was so wrong? I'm genuinely curious - it's not just me saying and thinking this, after all!

joshmanders6• 10 years ago

I agree with you, and when Jono made his post on the original Hacker News thread, I immediately followed him on twitter and even CC'd him on tweets that had people talking about things hoping that he'd respond to them, at least post a public post outside of the HN thread saying that they're working on things... But he was more worried about promoting the community leadership summit.

Kind of sad honestly. Not very good community leadership by ignoring your own community to promote a community leadership conference.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

To be fair, he was flying into linux.conf.au all the way in Geelong - that's a long flight. It could well have been that he's recovering - I notice that his last blog post was February 1st.

And of course I'm kicking myself that I missed the conference entirely. Sigh. Next year I guess.

dmethvin2• 10 years ago

I have to assume he's been told not to speak about details until the executives came up with a plan. If that is the case, GitHub management is really making his job a living hell. Why have someone whose job it is to work with the community if everything has to be micro-managed by higher-ups?

jonobacon2• 10 years ago

My apologies for the lack of public responsiveness. Thanks, chris_wot, for jumpstarting the discussion.

As outlined in Brandon's post linked here, we have been taking some time to really delve into the core of these issues and explore what the best solutions are. This has involved some internal discussion as well as reaching out to various parts of our community to gather feedback and perspectives. We take these concerns really seriously and want to ensure we can explore the best long and short-term solutions. As you can probably understand, we want to have some of our ducks in a row before sharing some next steps.

Rest assured that even though there has not been much publicly shared yet, we are definitely exploring ways to address these issues.

eibrahim• 10 years ago

Wow, It took them 29 days to say "we hear you stay tuned"

drinchev2• 10 years ago

Some other companies usually don't reply at all. E.g. Apple, Microsoft, etc.

giancarlostoro• 10 years ago

It's really sad though when you consider gitlab answered a while back.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

And have suffered for it in the past (though Apple, less so, it is true).

bhouston2• 10 years ago

Apple responded to antennagate and other hardware issues pretty quickly actually. 2 weeks for Antennagate:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/201297/apples_iphone_4_antenn...

dmethvin2• 10 years ago

Aspiring to communicate with developers as well as Apple does is a perverse goal. Microsoft for example has a status page for their browser work [1] just like Google does for Chrome [2]. (The Microsoft page lets people vote for their favorite features, the Chrome one does it via stars on their tickets.) Something like either of those from Github would be great.

[1] https://dev.windows.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/status... [2] https://www.chromestatus.com/features

us0r• 10 years ago

Microsoft usually responds pretty fast with "wont fix"

zanny2• 10 years ago

Gitlab responded to dear github within a week:

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/15/making-gitlab-better-for...

Someone wants your business :p

ianceicys• 10 years ago

Parts of Microsoft actually do respond and provide nice roadmaps. I am hoping Github will do something similiar.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2016/01/11/team-foun...

jcoffland3• 10 years ago

You can add Google to that list but just because some other big companies do it does not make it right. Nor should we accept it.

tomjen33• 10 years ago

I will grant you that. At the same time, it is a horrible benchmark and it is even more deadly when you compare github, a company, among many, that offers hosting to a monopoly that you can't easily move away from.

forgottenpass2• 10 years ago

Or, more cynically, it took them 6 days to find a way to respond to some of the problems raised by the Business Insider article on GitHub without addressing the article directly.

"Dear GitHub" paints a picture of feature requests going unanswered. To a software developer userbase that isn't damning on it's own. We all understand the realities of software project priorities, and users can be accommodating to their timeline (and changing development platforms isn't a trivial task). But that accommodating attitude is severely damaged by learning the business doesn't care about serving that userbase anymore.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

Oh, do you have a link to that article?

s_kilk• 10 years ago

Exactly what I was thinking: The BI article lit a fire under their arse and this is a quick scramble rather than a long-considered response.

res0nat0r3• 10 years ago

It's almost as if planning changes to ui and backend design used by millions of people on a daily basis just can't happen instantly...

Touche2• 10 years ago

Yeah, how dare you take your time to respond to non-paying customers.

Perceptes• 10 years ago

This seems like an unrealistic attitude. The free users running open source projects on GitHub are part of what made them so big and successful.

joshmanders6• 10 years ago

Non-paying customers? I pay for a private repos on my account, and for repos on 3 orgs. That's $82/mo. Many others also pay for private repos. Hardly non-paying customers.

zyx321• 10 years ago

Maybe they were busy fighting such heinous evils as meritocracy and inappropriate language.

HelloNurse• 10 years ago

They could have acknowledged the problem quickly, but without an actual plan to implement something useful in a close time frame someone would have called the bluff.

Insulting customers with empty, insincere declarations is worse than working in silence.

rmc2• 10 years ago

Or, they got the original letter and only then decided to implement some changes. It could take 29 days to get management level approval for switching developement to issues, and to get an idea if all those issue changes are possible, before they are willing to publically announce it

timv• 10 years ago

That's certainly possible, but if so then it's a pretty sad indictment.

If it takes 29 days just to get approval to say you're going to work on the problem, imagine how long it will take to actually get something done.

im3w1l• 10 years ago

I distinctly remember them responding to Dear Github previously, and pretty quickly.

tootie• 10 years ago

They were probably resisting the urge to say "We give you an awesome and extremely valuable product for free and all you fuckers do is complain."

joshmanders6• 10 years ago

My credit card statement every month with 3 charges from GitHub totaling $82 is hardly free.

bhouston2• 10 years ago

Brutal delay in responding to their most important constituent? What the hell? This wasn't a minor user's feature request, it was an open letter signed by a ton of major open source leaders. If I was an investor in GitHub I would fire the CEO.

bryanlarsen• 10 years ago

That's the problem. GitHub brass thinks their most important constituent is the people paying thousands of dollars to buy GitHub Enterprise. The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first. However, at this point their enterprise popularity may be big enough that success there is self-sustaining -- enterprises make decisions based more on what other enterprises do rather than on what open source and small companies do.

That being said, I bet that enterprises are screaming about Issues too. Enterprise loves their custom fields.

ageofwant2• 10 years ago

Enterprises use JIRA and various github plugins, works a treat and keeps PM types happy. This is about OSS projects that are to small for JIRA/Bugzilla, but have outgrown the limited github issue tracker.

x10242• 10 years ago

You say that, but much has changed in the past 10 years. If it truly were "up to enterprises", we wouldn't be using Git in the first place.

mietek3• 10 years ago

The only reason they have the enterprise customers is because they got popular with open source first.

I have absolutely no idea how GitHub could have lost sight of this simple fact.

juandazapata• 10 years ago

I'm glad that you are not.

r3bl2• 10 years ago

Well, if they responded within a day, the answer would be something like "we'll look that up".

Because they waited for almost a month, they can confidently say something like "we thought about your issues thoroughly and we are ready to take some actions to resolve them".

joshmanders6• 10 years ago

Sure, they had a more meaningful response, but a public response immediately saying "We hear you, and we'll have a more detailed response after we look things over. Thank you." Would have sufficed and been way better for their case.

Ignoring your users just to spend a month writing a response to those users is not in the best interests.

munificent2• 10 years ago

Once you strip out the fluff, those sentences are effectively identical. It's not like they said what they'll be doing. Just a bunch of hand-wavey "we're working on it".

mmanfrin• 10 years ago

  their most important constituent

Do you mean their millions of users? In which case, is this one letter a voice for every single one of them and is this one letter the only request to come from those -- again -- millions of users? Or do you specifically mean those on the letter, in which case what makes them their 'most important constituents' over all the other organizations, open source projects, enterprise users, and developers?

sotojuan• 10 years ago

I'll be more optimistic and be happy they replied and very interested in what they have in store. They say "next week" and it's Friday so it won't take that long.

punnerud• 10 years ago

"Issues haven't gotten much attention from GitHub these past few years and that was a mistake, but we've never stopped thinking about or caring about you and your communities."

A lot of thinking but no action. Github, what have you been up to these years??

oldmanjay• 10 years ago

Keeping a gigantic software application running, mainly. The ease of your role as a bystander and critic in no way reflects the work they have to do to keep the system up.

acdha• 10 years ago

You can see a list by scrolling through:

https://github.com/blog

One of the more obvious things is that running a huge, popular app is non-trivial, particularly if your users do things which get e.g. governments to attack your site.

tacos• 10 years ago

I wish more companies would take more time to respond to these sorts of situations. Perhaps this was excessive (I see conflicting reports of where they responded and when). But...

Let things cool off, take a hard look at things internally, get the stakeholders committed to actual change, then provide an update. I'm far more likely to believe that then even a perfectly executed PR play. I've watched even the most pathological and idiotic tech people get good at those the past 10 years. Beware people with good haircuts who say nothing and only appear during times of trouble.

sangnoir• 10 years ago

Let things cool off, take a hard look at things internally, get the stakeholders committed to actual change, then provide an update.

This is not an update - this is "we're looking into it", which should precede the internal soul-searching and actual change. They should have released this the moment they decided they were going to look into it - to outsiders, that moment seemed to be 29 days after the open letter was published.

Siecje3• 10 years ago

I wonder if this has more to do with ESLint[1] than the letter.

[1] https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/5205

jglovier• 10 years ago

Nope. We'd been working on our response ever since Dear GitHub was published. It just took a little time because we wanted to think long and hard about our response - beyond just the words we used to respond – and actually consider how we are interacting with the community, and where we can make demonstrable improvements. It is just coincidence that the ESLint thread happened this week, and our response came out today.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

You really should consider telling those who filed the letter that you were at least working on it. Did you expect them to know?!?

Siecje3• 10 years ago

I think it looks worse that it took so long to respond without any demonstrable improvements.

bphogan• 10 years ago

Just a tip from a person who's interacted with cranky people for a long time....

When I get feedback, especially negative, I like to think about it before I respond. And I may take a month to respond.

But I always immediately respond with something like

"Thank you for providing feedback, and thanks for your patience while I think about your feedback, discuss it, and respond appropriately."

At least you then know I'm not ignoring it.

CaptSpify2• 10 years ago

If they have a culture of "only catering to the big corporate players" like a lot people have been saying, it'd be hard to change momentum. They probably also had to do a lot of internal discussions about how they would address this, and what changes they wanted to make. They also had to be careful about how they responded, for fear of making things perceptibly worse.

I have no insight into their internals, but, IME, getting that many people, especially upper-management to adjust focus is a long, slow process. I'd guess it just took a lot of time to get coordinated.

Siecje3• 10 years ago

I don't think it is because they want to cater to the big players, but more that this got a lot of attention.

BinaryIdiot2• 10 years ago

That would be odd; ESLint is a pretty small project compared to, say, the top 100 or so. I can't imagine their investigation would be much of an issue.

Honestly git is distributed so I don't know why people wouldn't just setup another repo somewhere, say, GitLab and you could experiment with different workflows, etc and essentially have a remote back-up.

progx• 10 years ago

Thank you GitHub, to know that you need 29 days to reply, let my OpenSource GitHub Project look not soooo bad. :-)

r3bl2• 10 years ago

It took GitHub's support exactly 82 days to respond to my issue[1]. In the end, I literally had to ask a GitHub employee on his AMA to look up what the hell is going on.

[1] https://blog.r3bl.me/en/worst-support-experience-ever/

miseg• 10 years ago

That's a great question on the page by EGreg:

I wonder if GitHub itself can use its own issues system for prioritizing feature requests and bugs :-)

ageofwant2• 10 years ago

Great, but please resist the urge and goading to build another JIRA in github. The second best thing about github is its simplicity.

ivl• 10 years ago

I don't thin something that size would be warranted. But, letting users customize Issues, and PR/merge rules, and splitting off another section for requests would be beautiful.

steveklabnik• 10 years ago

This is exactly my fear as well. I really, really like how simple GitHub issues are. While I have some very minor quibbles, I'm also afraid that change here will end up being worse, not better.

joshrowley• 10 years ago

In an ideal world, the Issues team would develop and support a plugin ecosystem for the tracker. Users can customize and add the features they see fit and even create their own custom plugins. Allows flexibility and power for those who want it while keeping the core simple and clean

tomschlick• 10 years ago

This is the best idea.

While some features like +1s and contributing guidelines should be baked in, other features like extra fields, requiring people to sign a disclosure, etc would be best left to plugins that can hook into issues much like CI services hook into pull requests.

mirashii• 10 years ago

Now, if only we could get a movement behind a "merge" button that does fast-forward only commits.

zanny2• 10 years ago

I know that gitlab has it as a project option!

jquast• 10 years ago

or squash

scrollaway5• 10 years ago

Agreed, and here's a git alias I made for the occasion:

  merge-pr = "!f() { git fetch $1 $2; git branch _FETCH_HEAD FETCH_HEAD && git rebase HEAD _FETCH_HEAD && git checkout master && git merge --ff-only _FETCH_HEAD; git branch -d _FETCH_HEAD; }; f"

Syntax: `git merge-pr <remote> <branch>`. You can copypaste url + branch from github's UI above the merge button.

Note: This merges only to master, no way to specify another merge target. Feel free to suggest improvements.

danielsamuels• 10 years ago

I have these for merging a PR into develop and master respectively. Usage is `git pr <#>`

  pr  = "!f() { git checkout develop && git fetch -fu ${2:-origin} refs/pull/$1/head:pr/$1 && git checkout pr/$1 && git rebase -i origin/develop && git checkout develop && git merge - && git push; }; f"
  prm  = "!f() { git checkout master && git fetch -fu ${2:-origin} refs/pull/$1/head:pr/$1 && git checkout pr/$1 && git rebase -i origin/master && git checkout master && git merge - && git push; }; f"

cletusw• 10 years ago

Here are mine, helpful colors and error message included.

  sync = "!f() { echo \"$(tput setaf 4)Syncing this branch with origin master$(tput sgr 0)\" && git fetch origin master && git rebase origin/master && echo \"$(tput setaf 2)Branch sync successful$(tput sgr 0)\"; }; f"

  ship = "!f() { echo \"$(tput setaf 4)Shipping this branch to master$(tput sgr 0)\" && git checkout master && (git merge --ff-only - || (echo \"$(tput setaf 1)Could not merge branch into local master\\nRun git sync before running this command\\nIf this error persists, you have local, un-pushed commits in your master branch\\nPush them to origin master or move them into a branch before running this command$(tput sgr 0)\"; git checkout -; return 1)) && (git push origin master || (echo \"$(tput setaf 1)Could not push branch\\nRun git sync before running this command$(tput sgr 0)\"; git reset --hard HEAD@{1}; git checkout -; return 1)) && echo \"$(tput setaf 2)Branch ship successful$(tput sgr 0)\"; }; f"

The reason they are separate is so that you can

  git push --force-with-lease origin HEAD:<remote-branch-name>

in between. This way, GitHub marks the PR as "Merged" instead of "Closed with unmerged commits". It's a minor detail, but I like it.

throwawayqw12• 10 years ago

They’re already working on it (source: inside info).

K0nserv• 10 years ago

It should really support both. I prefer the current behaviour though.

greggman• 10 years ago

I don't have any giant opens source projects so I guess I don't get bothered by the +1s and cries for help. Chromium gets those on their non-github issues. So does Firefox. I'm guessing WebKit does too.

My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.

Maybe it's because I'm used to Rietveld but my normal workflow is to start reading the patch and adding comments. I might have made 10 separate line comments before I get to a part of the patch that invalidates all those comments. Therefore I don't want them sent until I'm ready. I want to be able to make line comments across all files in the PR and only when I'm ready, send them as one coherent message.

As it is now, AFAICT, the only way to do this is to write line comments in some other file on my computer and then later manually find the lines again in github and add them one at a time. Rietveld also lets you respond to line comments inline and mark them as "done".

is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?

_ea1k• 10 years ago

Excellent idea... some notion of a review session would be nice.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

Gerrit does this as well.

mconley• 10 years ago

Review Board works with GitHub and allows you to publish your review when you're ready.

spankalee• 10 years ago

Just continue to use Reitveld :)

masklinn2• 10 years ago

My biggest issue, which I guess is a non-issue for most others?, is I hate when reviewing a PR that every single line comment generates a message/email.
is there anything for github that does the same? Maybe one of their offline tools?

Nope. Even the API doesn't allow this, you can only create one "review comment" at a time and no matter how fast you create them (or if you carefully create all of them over a persistent connection) each and every one of them will generate one notification and one outbound mail.

That went pretty well the first time I tried to get a linter to annotate a PR. The annotation worked, but I discovered some people's mailboxes can not handle getting 50 mails from the same source in a fraction of a second (and oddly enough people are not fond of getting 50 one-line emails from the same place).

(I asked github support about it, they confirmed the only workaround is to not use inline comments)

nitrogen• 10 years ago

You should also be able to switch to digest emails from GitHub. Do they support that?

delroth• 10 years ago

I recently switched our large-ish GitHub project to use reviewable.io for code reviews. The UI can be hard to understand sometimes, but so far everyone agrees it's a tremendous improvement over GitHub's joke of a code review UI.

MoSal• 10 years ago

Besides the UI, "reviewable.io" is a memory hog. It's simply unusable if you try to browse the site from a device without a lot of free memory (e.g. older tablets, ARM SoCs, etc).

piotrkaminski2• 10 years ago

Reviewable founder here. I'd love to get somebody to sit down with me and rant about the UI so I can figure out how to improve it. Let me know if you're game. :)

bradfitz• 10 years ago

I've been working on a bot to copy Github Pull Requests into Gerrit reviews, using the Google-hosted Gerrit servers.

My bot isn't running publicly yet, but you can see the start of it working at:

https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/546 or https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/545

(Code is at https://github.com/LetsUseGerrit/gerritbot for now, but I don't imagine anybody would use the code themselves... they'd only interact with it via the Github bot)

howeman• 10 years ago

Is there any public "how to" about Gerrit? I've interacted with it a few times for Go codereviews, but not frequently enough to get comfortable. Really simple things like finding the "submit comments" button I have to spend five minutes finding every time.

jeblair2• 10 years ago

Gerrit has an excellent REST API, and because I like working with code in a terminal, I wrote Gertty -- a terminal based interface to Gerrit. It should work with the Google hosted servers.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gertty

phasmantistes• 10 years ago

I was actually shocked two weeks ago when I was talking to someone about Gerrit and they complained that their comments were never addressed. Turns out they hadn't been hitting the "Publish Comments" button, and had been assuming that every draft comment they left was being sent as an individual email.

This taught me (or reminded me of) two things:

* GitHub is so dominant that even its poor decisions are being enshrined as "the way things work"

* Gerrit really needs some UI love as well.

jeblair2• 10 years ago

Hopefully the recently begun work on a Polymer based interface (PolyGerrit) will help in that department.

sethammons• 10 years ago

Not github, but you may be interested in http://phabricator.org/. We hired a guy a while back who swore by it. We had too much momentum in github, so it did not catch on at our org. One of his favorite features, if I recall as it was a few years ago, is what you are talking about.

rafael-rinaldi3• 10 years ago

I would love to know what the reasonable approach would be ideal from the people talking bad things about GitHub. If they responded to issues right away people would complain too.

It's not easy to come up with a solid plan for new features and improvements, specially in a company this big (that has a lot going on as we all know). What? You think they're going to get that list of complaints and start smashing some code? That letter is not even 1 month old. I can kinda understand the frustration but keep in mind that there's a lot of other things to handle, it's more complicated than that.

In the meantime if you're really struggling, there are other great options available out there like BitBucket and GitLab.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

Then they might have grown too quickly then. At this point, is really not that hard to move to GitLab.

merpnderp• 10 years ago

A reasonable approach? When I'm in doubt, I just go with the truth. They could have said "Hey, we hear you, we're starting a group to figure out how best to resolve your issues." or "Hey, we've already been working on this, we'll get back to you in a couple of months." Or even a "Hey, we get you aren't completely happy, but we just don't have the time to address your concerns right no, but when we can, we will."

Any of those would have been better than perfect silence followed with, we'll see what we can do.

rafael-rinaldi3• 10 years ago

Well, they just published a down to earth response didn't they? Some companies don't even respond at all.

As I said, I can understand the frustration but they seem to be working on it. Give them some time or use other tools if you can't wait.

forgottenpass2• 10 years ago

I would love to know what the reasonable approach would be ideal from the people talking bad things about GitHub.

Treat their software development savvy usebase as stakeholders in their ongoing project rather than unwashed masses consuming a loss leader?

A mutually-agreeable reasonable approach probably doesn't exist. Limited visibility into the project may be considered exposing too much of the business for GitHub's tastes. So it will continue to be a one-way relationship, with all the baggage that comes with a one-way relationship (incl "talking bad things").

rafael-rinaldi3• 10 years ago

Well they used to be open about their future plans on their blog[1]. It hasn't been even a month after that letter and we _finally_ have a response from them. It really doesn't seem to be that big of a deal IMO.

[1] https://github.com/blog

tptacek2• 10 years ago

From reading the comments on this thread, one could get the impression that HN Github users would have been happier had Github not responded at all.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

That's an odd impression for you to have gotten!

beachstartup• 10 years ago

once the troll is fed the appetizers, it demands the main course.

striking7• 10 years ago

I think some people are miffed that it took them almost a month to just respond to the letter. Maybe you don't care as much about certain software, but some people are really passionate about it.

Perhaps HNers would have appreciated some more substantive action by now, rather than just a response.

tptacek2• 10 years ago

I'm confused by what these people are asking for. Should Github acquire a time machine? If so, instead of asking for an earlier response to this later, maybe they could just do things differently from the beginning so the letter was never necessary!

xnxn• 10 years ago

Right? Damned if they do, damned if they don't...

tomjen33• 10 years ago

After nearly a month, yes. If significant starfighter users complained about how it worked, how long would it take for there to be a response? 2 hours? That is because you care.

A month is how long you spend when you really don't care, when you rather not deal with it at all, but somebody force you to. Of course people get annoyed when those they think cared about them actually hate them.

VeejayRampay• 10 years ago

Reading the reactions to their addressing the complaints, I really don't envy the folks at Github. A lot of folks in the "Yeah that's nice but what about X/Y/Z" range (and same here on HN).

There's simply no winning.

ohitsdom• 10 years ago

It'd be a little easier to identify key requests if they implemented voting to solve the "+1" comments, as identified in the "Dear Github" letter.

dreamdu5t3• 10 years ago

Yes and no. Some feature requests were years old and hugely popular. For example, displaying tab-spaces code (such as Go) properly was something that took years to implement, despite the enormous feature request thread and extremely simple implementation. It became obvious github had dedicated zero resources to building new features the community had longed-for

elliotpage• 10 years ago

I just hope they also add new features centering around depreciation of repos and the ability to add a "THIS IS NO LONGER BEING MAINTAINED" flag or an equivalent.

Finding a repo that appears to solve my problems only to find a mass of issues and an absent maintainer is a pretty big time sink, for both me and likely the maintainer too!

Blahah• 10 years ago

It's pretty easy right now to just change the header of the README, and/or the project description to indicate deprecation. What added benefit would making it a feature provide?

RichieAHB• 10 years ago

It requires the maintainer to do this. Often if the maintainer isn't maintaining the codebase then they won't be updating the readme either.

mattcantstop• 10 years ago

I usually look at the "Pulse" part of the repo page. That tells me how often it has activity and if it is an active repo.

tomjen33• 10 years ago

That is a really bad way to solve the issue, since smaller pieces of software may not need further development.

hobofan• 10 years ago

What's wrong with putting that in the project description ,or prepending it with a "DEPRECATED"? I mean the easily editable field in the header of every repository.

rogerbinns8• 10 years ago

I complain every 6 months about their "releases" page - eg this one for my project https://github.com/rogerbinns/apsw/releases

They unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at that tag. But the repository is in a maintainer state, so the "Source Code" isn't useful to an end user because various tools need to be run (eg building help, automake/autoconf, dependencies). The people mislead by Github due to this "Source Code" contact me, not github.

Every six months for several years, I send the email explaining how this doesn't serve anyone's interest, how it hurts, and that I am happy with any solution (eg don't auto add, change the name to make it clear, be able to label an existing file as the "Source Code" etc). I get the usual response of understanding and sympathy, and vague suggestion that it may be addressed. Three years and counting ...

wnevets• 10 years ago

They unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at that tag.

I fall for this everytime I go to use that link.

danielweber• 10 years ago

The people who dogfood Github, by using it every day, know how to get around places.

The people who is it once every week or two, like me, get lost each time. It's always a hunt when I want to figure out how to do something, even if I know I've done it before.

Sir_Cmpwn• 10 years ago

I also have a problem with the "download zip" button on repositories. It doesn't include submodules. I've asked Github several times to give me a button to remove it from my repo, or to add submodules, to no avail.

rogerbinns8• 10 years ago

I'll bet they have zero positive feedback over the Source Code zip, and you confirm yet more negative feedback over it.

speg• 10 years ago

They unhelpfully add a "Source Code" link, which would be great if that is what it was. Instead it is actually just a zip file of the repository at that tag.

Huh, if all the files of the repository at that tag aren't the "source code" of that release what is?

striking7• 10 years ago

A ZIP file is less helpful than the GitHub interface pointed at that specific commit ID.

david-given• 10 years ago

Source distribution packages aren't necessarily a simple snapshot of the repository.

For example: for autotools based build systems you want to run autoconf and automake to generate the Makefile.in and configure scripts.

maaku• 10 years ago

Any reasonably complicated project has some pre-processing that has to be done for a source release. e.g. creating the configure script for autotools repos, or building the documentation. These steps can and should be automated, but github is not providing hooks to perform these automated tasks.

grk• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, but you can edit release assets using Github's API: https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/releases/#list-assets-...

mietek3• 10 years ago

Adding a script that builds the project from “maintainer state” and referencing it in the README may save you some aggravation.

rogerbinns8• 10 years ago

Not really. Not many people have the whole autotools/automake tool chain installed, let alone document building tools, and whatever other processing the project does (eg SQLite uses some TCL scripts). So they'd have to go and get all those, obeying any version constraints. And after all that they'd end up at the same point as getting an archive intended by the maintainer for them to build and install.

pravka• 10 years ago

Absolutely. This feature is such an integral part of a repo that distributes releases that I'm surprised it hasn't gotten more attention from Github. I, for one, would love to see them provide the checksum for the archives that are published via Releases -- it's not currently available when you create a release and relies on the operator to implement a workaround that creates a digest and publishes it on an external endpoint.

sytse15• 10 years ago

We have the same 'Source Code' link in GitLab on our tag/release page. Should we rename it into 'download source' to be more clear?

mdaniel• 10 years ago

Or I am always a fan of putting a checkbox in the project's Settings page "show 'download source code' link" and a text box underneath it with "source code download label", enabling the project to use language they are happy with

That said, I am also cognizant that "checkbox overload" is a real thing, so merely "for your consideration"

rogerbinns8• 10 years ago

Google Code used to have labels, in particular one named "featured". You can label files in the release with it, and the ui put those at the top. Consequently it was clear to users which release files would be best.

"Source Code" has two meanings. One is the preferred form of contributing to the project. The other is the preferred form for building and installing it on a system. Sometimes they are the same. However I argue someone going to a release page is more interested in the latter, and the former is confusion.

I'd suggest making your UI reflect the page visitor's goals. "Repository Archive" is better wording, but still not that good.

radarsat1• 10 years ago

Glad someone else acknowledges this.. the number of times I've had to answer questions about how to get automake to work, etc., from people who should be just downloading the tar and running `./configure`. People are starting to get this tendency to check out the whole repository just to use the software. (I've been guilty of this too! There is something about it..) But people: If you're not going to work on the software, use the release distributions!

In one project I went as far as making a "releases" branch, and actually putting the "make dist" output there, in full, and tagging that instead of the master branch. This was a pretty good compromise, since the github download link now points at the actual release tarball, and you can easily see from `gitk` which commit from the development branch each releases branches from.

However, it's annoying not to be able to use tags as a way of navigating the development branch, and since I wasn't the one officially putting together final releases, eventually it was found that this was just too complicated to keep doing for each release. And it's just a dumb trick to satisfy github's weird releases interface anyway, so I couldn't justify the complexity.

trevorrowe• 10 years ago

The GitHub API allows you to provide much more useful content for a release. See this project as an example: https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-ruby/releases - Notice that it has links for build artifacts, generated docs, and even contains links to issues closed by the release. Also, its pretty easy to automate a "release" from travis.

cdcarter2• 10 years ago

The problem isn't that you can't add more content to a release, it's that you can't remove the misleading zipball/tarball links which are labelled source code but break traditional tarball conventions (e.g. not running autotools first).

donretag• 10 years ago

So tempted to add a +1 comment...

(This is a joke, please do not do it)

shadowmint• 10 years ago

Can't wait to see what actually tangible outcome this will have.

I think that's far more interesting than that they took 29 days to respond; ok, they did. Deal with it. They have responded now.

What's important is what happens next.

A public issue tracker?

A rust style RFC process? (https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs)

Just please, whatever you do, do it fast, and stop people from doing what babel did and migrating to phabricator. :P

smoyer• 10 years ago

Since they only offered a "receipt" for the original letter, why did it take two months? They could have put this response out the same day the "Dear GitHub" letter was posted.

gerbilly• 10 years ago

And the first response to their letter was a:

:+1:

Etheryte• 10 years ago

What's the point of "we're going to reply next week" post on a Friday? Just make a statement next week.

johnsea• 10 years ago

Quite nice answer. - Googled for some background and stumbled upon the following:

[Danilo Campos, has been known to tweet similarly strong views about diversity. Campos joined in August]: "don't think we'll succeed teaching white, male middle managers empathie and compassion anytime soon so let's limit their scope of damage"

Such a rubbish. I think GitHub has their priorities / focus wrong. - Glad I'm using Gitlab.

robalfonso• 10 years ago

A couple of thoughts come up, I'm not a white guy and I'm offended by that guys statement, its prejudiced and I'd be embarrassed if that came out of my mouth.

Second if a company is going to trade on being a meritocracy, then be a meritocracy. Why have a diversity council, why be concerned over a bunch of "white guys" and what they can't learn. If they are the best at what they do and if github considers good management traits include compassion and empathy, then whats it matter what color they are the best people would rise up regardless.

This is just prejudice plain and simple.

hga2• 10 years ago

Second if a company is going to trade on being a meritocracy....

They haven't for some time: https://www.google.com/search?q=github+meritocracy+rug

slig• 10 years ago

He isn't very fond of HN / Y Combinator as well. His article "Y Combinator and the Negative Externalities of Hackernews" (2014) http://danilocampos.com/2014/09/y-combinator-and-the-negativ... and the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389163

kuschku5• 10 years ago

Have you read this HN comments on racism?

They're disturbing.

I don't think he understands the difference between /being racist/ and /neither working towards nor against, just taking profit of a racist situation created by someone else/

(a) is racism, and needs to be fought directly.

(b) is capitalism, and a whole different story (although one could argue that it should be fought, too, and companies should work for the advancement of society, not just profit)

When he mislabels (b) as (a), he distorts the meaning of racism — same with sexism.

redsymbol• 10 years ago

To any githubbers reading this:

A lot of people posting here are being unreasonable, demanding, and childish. Recognize that for what it is, don't let it affect you, and just continue moving forward based on the constructive part of the feedback.

dominotw• 10 years ago

thanks coach.

hueving2• 10 years ago

Yes, continue to ignore feedback from the community and enjoy your market lead because once you have that users will never leave for another product.

dreamdu5t3• 10 years ago

Yeah.. Poor github. I'm playing a tiny violin made of hundreds of millions of dollars.

searine• 10 years ago

A lot of people posting here are being unreasonable, demanding, and childish.

Yes, please ignore all reasonable expectations for communication and go back inside the hugbox.

Karunamon3• 10 years ago

I see frankly none of those things here. I see annoyance that it takes a month to respond to a frickin' letter, and I see many opportunities for improvement.

A smart organization will focus on that, rather than weak tone arguments.

dreamdu5t3• 10 years ago

Remember it took years just to get them to properly display code that uses tabs (and we still didn't get a simple ui setting).

lhnz2• 10 years ago

If they take 29 days to respond to this, I wonder how long they might take to respond to the fairly shocking allegations within the recent Business Insider article [0]?

In fact I wonder if this response was ever going to happen on its own? Perhaps the cause of the response was their recent string of bad press - dear github, business insider, eslint, etc.

It strikes me as strange that a company that has so many people focused on community and social impact doesn't have time to talk to its users.

I hope they manage to sort themselves out as it's getting embarrassing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11049067

zzleeper• 10 years ago

Maybe the overhauling meant they had no resources to respond? i.e. everyone was busy hiring?

the_mitsuhiko• 10 years ago

Why do they have to respond at all to that article? I fail to see how that article is relevant for anyone who has projects on GitHub.

lhnz2• 10 years ago

They're not being forced into responding.

But it was unsettling to hear an anonymous source say they were avoiding interviews on racial grounds. That sounds illegal if it's true - and even if it's not true, surely it's something you should be open about? People care about fairness.

ptio2• 10 years ago

GitHub should consider "open sourcing" GitHub itself so the community can submit PRs and RFPs.

BinaryIdiot2• 10 years ago

But if they did that it might hurt their enterprise, non-SaaS, offering considering people could then install it on their own.

ptio2• 10 years ago

True, but that's GitLab's business strategy anyway.

programminggeek• 10 years ago

TLDR; We've been busy making piles of money in Enterprise land and forgot that we acquire customers via FOSS. Oops.

shade23• 10 years ago

this would be a better link : https://github.com/bkeepers/dear-github

devonoel• 10 years ago

Github is a large bloated organization that's slow to move, more news at 6.

I don't see how it should shock anyone that its taken Github 29 days to respond. Github can't move at the speed of say, an open source project with a hand full of contributors. They're a company of 100s of people. And the larger an organization is, the harder it gets to make a decision about anything, because more people have to agree. In this case, they have to agree about how to respond to open criticism while saving PR face, which is a difficult task.

I'm fairly confident that the stink this whole Dear Github thing has raised will result in positive changes of some kind, but let's be real, Github is still just a corporation that faces a lot of the same problems other corporations face. They're probably scrambling to get a whole bunch of people to agree on what it is they should do.

aledalgrande2• 10 years ago

Well, even if quality is declining I wouldn't know where else to go for now. Gerrit doesn't cut it and neither does Bitbucket. Guess we will see.

jcoffland3• 10 years ago

Next we need to figure out how to light this same fire under Docker. In someways they're even worse. They often close issues because they won't be addressed in the next release. I've tried to explain that this is exactly the case where you want to leave an issue open. They said they would think about that but still leave issues they don't want to work on right now closed.

nv-vn• 10 years ago

Ironic that most of the replies were '+1's

thejameskyle2• 10 years ago

Some of the responses here are kinda obnoxious. I helped kickstart the original letter and I'm very happy about this response.

GitHub more than anything has been a blackbox, and this was a very notable first step towards opening up. It should be encouraged, not shut down.

Privately (and some publicly), in the past few days, a lot of major open source projects were discussing a coordinated move away from GitHub. This likely puts that all on hold, but we'll see what changes GitHub makes and how people want to respond to it.

Again, I'm very happy about this response, as should everyone in this thread. We'll see in the coming weeks what it really means though.

jcoffland3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure it puts anything on hold. Some real action might.

bovermyer3• 10 years ago

Where would those projects move to? There's no real alternative to GitHub, at least none that combines the social side of it with the Gittiness of it.

That I know of, anyway.

scrollaway5• 10 years ago

Gitlab is a worthy alternative. It's only missing critical mass, which gives Github the upper hand in considerations such as "all my foss contributions are on there in one place and that's what companies look at when they offer me a job".

Hey, sytse - I know you're reading this. Have you guys thought about a way of including, in gitlab profiles, user info from Github in a non-intrusive way?

blktiger• 10 years ago

I'm curious, what about bitbucket prevents it from being a real alternative to github?

thejameskyle2• 10 years ago

People are split between:

- GitLab

- Phabricator

- GitHub + Phabricator Maniphest (or alternative)

yuhong2• 10 years ago

SourceForge is probably not worth it now, but it is also worth watching.

urda4• 10 years ago

GitLab and Bitbucket are equally as powerful. I've actually really enjoyed trying out GitLab for the past few days.

icholy• 10 years ago

Very obnoxious. It's embarrassing to see a community I respect so much acting so childish ...

halayli• 10 years ago

What's the reason behind not allowing issues to be deleted?

r0muald2• 10 years ago

And yet, look at this blog post from 2 days ago: https://github.com/blog/2110-migrate-your-code-with-the-gith... still offering to migrate your existing SVN or Mercurial repositories to GitHub, without any mention of all the other data that are typical of a software project like issues. Should I migrate my Trac or Bitbucket issues manually to GitHub?

enknamel• 10 years ago

This is rather a nonresponse. It basically says GitHub read the letter. It makes no promises, proposes no solutions and no timeline. After working in gaming for years we would post responses just like this all the time and get something scheduled 6 months to a year out knowing that just responding with general affirmations would placate customers without having to do actually fix anything.

lutorm• 10 years ago

The fact that this discussion is being made by committing to a README.md file seems to point to a serious lack of tools for interaction...

trengrj• 10 years ago

Not sure why they did this on a Friday. I know the standard PR playbook says to release bad news on Friday but I wouldn't call a response to this bad news.

SFjulie1• 10 years ago

I complain every day more about how we organize our works and need the insanely complex git to collaborate because we have insane ways of producing code.

An industry that requires increased insane level of complexity for simple task to "progress" amaze me at failing to get the problem is not in the tools.

I can guarantee that for 10 weeks work with "old" technologies (python + whatever static HTML server) I can make a one size fits all website for all restaurant that can be customized without security holes. Make it in a free license so that people make money with my second creation ... on purpose. And we would all win. All the economy from having something simple and well thought.

But I can't do it. I am not an influent trend maker so no one will bet a kopek on my business.

And you know, these tools cognitive load on the brain, is a load that should be spent on business problems, where cost efficiency matters.

Where operational expenses are better kept low whatever the initial investment is.

The fact we all use at least git (+ a ticket tracker) that are heavyweight, should tell us that we are dangerously inflating the cost of building software. Hence, contradicting our very primary reason to be : which is to diminish operational expenses the most we can.

And we still have not proven anything about how much money this increased expenses due to complexity finally create value anywhere... In decreased price, decreased incidents, higher quality, better jobs, better economical growth ... saved lives...business values true SLA (and not the one measured by the editors/operators)...

So, well, github may not be the problem.

avitzurel• 10 years ago

I think a lot of the disappointed comments are understandable here. (obnoxious or not).

I know I personally expected one of either to happen

1. Github responds in 2-3 days with the EXACT response they made.

2. Github responds in 1-2 weeks with a concrete plans that addresses at least some of the concerns the original letter addressed.

They basically did the bad combination of both.

One of the things that frustrates me the most about companies responding to feedback is "We have it planned" and "we don't have an exact timeline".

More than anything I really dislike the "stay tuned". I don't want to stay tuned, you should either tell me when to expect it or I will tune out (and I think that's what most people think).

To me, this is a non-response.

I like Github, I use it every day. I don't have any plans to move away from Github. If I had a project that I felt wasn't fit for Github, this response would not change anything for me, I would still likely research for alternatives.

camhenlin• 10 years ago

Has anyone else made the decision to switch due to github's internal racism and sexism rather than technical reasons? That's my biggest reason for looking at alternatives lately (although I haven't made the move yet, but plan to as soon as I have some spare time)

Revisor• 10 years ago

We haven't switched an existing project, but we're looking around for a place for a new library we're going to publish in a few weeks. It will most probably be on Assembla or Gitlab.

barely_stubbell• 10 years ago

What I want, more than anything, is to search on commit hashes.

alexandrerond• 10 years ago

Oh wow, that's all they have to say after weeks? Funny enough Gitlab responded in hours. Opportunistic or not, that is why people are taking it seriously.

erikb• 10 years ago

Businesses are ridiculously slow. What I can tell you about a business that is a blackbox to you which will surprise you: It's a blackbox to them as well. They just don't know how to manage so many people and ideas. And the sad part is most managers don't. So I don't think it will change. The solution would be to educate the manager about how to find out what's not working and how to resolve such problems, or switch the manager with one that is willing to constantly work on getting things to work instead of just keeping the head above the water. It's a really hard problem though, since as an employee you don't gain much by resolving true systematic problems, and you even may lose some value with your coworkers by changing their daily processes that they are used to so well. It's really something that must come from the top, but if there is nobody to do that then it won't happen.

quadrangle• 10 years ago

Right, this is typical for proprietary software. Everyone has to beg and petition and then if a company isn't awful, they'll respond and do something. Meanwhile, you still can't adapt things to your needs or submit pull requests or otherwise do what you could with free/libre/open tools. And if GitHub does a good job addressing these requests, it will encourage everyone to stay with GitHub… where we're still helpless serfs.

If we all demand software freedom, then we won't be so helpless in the future with whatever issues come up.

GitHub responds to Dear GitHub letter

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