New tools for open source maintainers

https://blog.github.com/2018-04-18-new-tools-for-open-source-maintainers/

by joeyespo • 8 years ago

164 63 8 years ago

blog.github.com

Nullabillity• 8 years ago

The "retirement" feature is a good start, but oddly over-engineered. Just stop allowing username reuse, period!

tmerse• 8 years ago

Maybe it is in order to prevent something like domainsquatting – just for usernames.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Minimized comments (hot take): A fancy new feature for AMP developers to ignore serious security and openness concerns about AMP.

Namespace retirement: Agreed with Nullability, just disable username reuse, it causes a lot more oddities than just cloning projects from unknown sources, old comments link to incorrect users and the like, it's awful.

Accidental PR protection: So this won't affect anyone, if I read it correctly, who types something in the PR description? As long as that's the case, fine, but I definitely don't want to overly impose upon the drive-by contributor... as an occasional drive-by contributor. (Sometimes I fix spelling errors, someone's gotta do it.)

Gaelan• 8 years ago

Maintainers were always able to delete comments. Minimization doesn’t do anything worse that what was already possible.

quiq• 8 years ago

I'm really hoping they're only blocking PR's from non-collaborators if the PR description is empty. Requiring someone to be a collaborator on a repository to open a PR is a step backwards to me. It's really nice to notice a trivial fix like a typo when browsing the code, fix it in the integrated editor and hit PR right there. I could see having the option to disable PRs useful, but removing the functionality entirely

fourthark• 8 years ago

I think they meant, when the contributor is also not the author of the changes. At least I hope this is what they meant.

maxnoe• 8 years ago

Can someone explain the Pull Request restrictions?

What does: "the changes are not explained in the commit body" actually mean?

Is this opt in?

rurban• 8 years ago

I see this new feature as a bug.

If you don't like a pull request close it or ignore it. But disabling accidental and “drive-through” pull requests sounds very bad to me.

chr1• 8 years ago

Sometimes people use compare view and accidentally create pull requests without description from branches on which they do not have any commits.

On popular projects this happens often enough to become annoyance for maintainers.

I don't see any case when opening a pull request from someone else's branch and without a description could be done intentionally.

handbanana• 8 years ago

If I understand the changes correctly, I agree.

TheDong• 8 years ago

If you wish to create a pull request, you can always push the content you wish to PR to your fork of the repo and create one.

It does add an extra step if you wish to PR someone else's code (you now have to fetch it from their remote, push it to yours, and then make the PR vs directly cross-repo PR between two repos you don't own).

It's not a heavy extra step though and I don't see this as removing the ability for any number of small PRs.

pietroalbini• 8 years ago

As far as I understood this means you can't create pull requests of branches you don't have push access to (for example other people's forks) unless you're a project collaborator. It shouldn't affect your own branches.

claudiulodro• 8 years ago

I believe it's an attempt to stop PRs like this: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/pull/19545

We get at least one of those a day and they are user error, spam or something. Definitely a useful feature for popular open source projects.

justinclift• 8 years ago

That one (in your URL) looks like the result of a PR between mismatched branches. eg instead of being the intended/correct source and destination branch, it's between two branches fairly far apart.

Thus a shed load of commits to try and resolve the difference.

Hopefully this new behaviour does fix the problem. On the other hand, I have a feeling it might alienate potential contributors who just aren't that familiar with git yet and could instead do with some guidance (ie how to use the correct branch to base changes on).

I guess we get to find out. :)

dfabulich• 8 years ago

The main thing I want to hide in minimized comments are "+1 fix this plz!" comments on bugs, comments that add nothing above and beyond a thumbs-up reaction.

The "reasons" Github offers for minimizing comments are: Spam, Abuse, Off Topic, Outdated, and Resolved. "+1" isn't exactly any of those. (I guess they're kinda "Spam" but they're not unsolicited commercial messages.)

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Maybe the missing feature here is that GitHub should "just" automatically minimize +1 comments. Or even better, delete them without sending a notification to maintainers/watchers, and automagically have the user who posted it add a thumbs up to the original issue.

(Personally, I would consider them spam.)

reificator2• 8 years ago

I think they were valuable back when you couldn't react to a specific comment.

I also think they're still valuable when you have Github and another VCS host, where one mirrors the other automatically.

joshfriend• 8 years ago

automagically have the user who posted it add a thumbs up to the original issue.

I was astonished that they didn't do this when they introduced the emoji reactions feature.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

Or even better

Well then the user would learn nothing. A better solution would be to notify them that this is wrong, delete their comment, and then prevent them from commenting on github.com for a period of time (1 hour? or more?)

Mashimo• 8 years ago

They don't contribute to the topic, I would mark them as Off Topic.

raarts• 8 years ago

Why not create a category 'redundant'?

jerrac• 8 years ago

Is there a way for users to easily demonstrate the need/desire for an issue to be fixed to developers? Do developers actually pay attention to how many reactions there are on issues?

If you don't have anything more to add to the discussion, but it seems like the issue is not being considered, a "+1" comment seems like the most effective way to communicate the need to the devs.

Ideally a thumbs up reaction would do the same thing, but does it? Do devs use the sort by "reaction" feature in real life?

I have not yet had the chance to be on the other side. I'm pretty sure I'd check that list occasionally, but I bet I'd forget a lot of the time. Especially if I had a busy project. Sorting by "most recent" or "number of" comments would be more likely. And that would make a "+1" comment more effective.

kazinator9• 8 years ago

I get all this by not using github.

Minimized comments: I run the mailing list and can enable moderation at any time.

Retire namespace: I control the web server and so every aspect of the URL after the domain name.

Unwanted pull requests: no different from unwanted anything else.

codetrotter2• 8 years ago

As someone that frequently makes small issue reports and occasional pull requests I am incredibly glad that people are using GitHub. As a contributor it makes things much simpler that all projects use one system instead of everyone inventing their own that works in different ways.

Furthermore GitHub is great for quickly looking over a project when trying to determine if it suits my needs and for getting an impression of how complete it is, how maintained it is and what the code is organized like.

I love GitHub, it is the single best thing that happened in software development for a long while.

GH is not perfect, but it is awesome nonetheless.

reificator2• 8 years ago

Furthermore the serious concern with a VCS hosting monopoly is portability, but as long as Github uses git, portability is a non issue.

Cloned the repository? You can now declare yourself the canonical source for that repo instead of Github, host it from your own machine, and let others pull directly from you. Not that you'd usually want to do that, but it's available as an option if you do.

If Github closed down tomorrow, we'd lose a lot of code. If Github announced that in one year they were going to close down, then we'd only lose private repositories that no one bothered to clone.

There is the issue of, well, issues. And pull requests and wikis and all that.

But wikis are, as far as I know, just git repos themselves, so that's not too bad.

Issues and pull requests and all of that sort of data probably has to be pulled out through the API into some format that's hopefully useful in other places. Could easily lose a lot of work here if Github went poof.

Not that I think they will or that I want them to, just something that's important to consider when a service becomes a monopoly becomes critical infrastructure.

kazinator9• 8 years ago

I didn't invent git, cgit or e-mail, all of which predate Github.

Github imposes a Terms of Service; I don't have to agree to any Terms of Service to use my own site. I am the Terms of Service.

There is all sorts of cruft in the ToS. Here is something I just spotted: "GitHub does not target our Service to children under 13, and we do not permit any Users under 13 on our Service." If a good programmer has produced a good patch, I want it, whether they are twelve or 92; and they are welcome to post it to a mailing list or send it to me directly. GH have to have this kind of rule because they can't 100% control what goes on their site, 24/7. (Really, if they were smart, they would make that 18.)

Another: If you believe that content on our website violates your copyright, please contact us in accordance with our Digital Millennium Copyright Act Policy. No spectre of DMCA hanging over my own site.

Abuse or excessively frequent requests to GitHub via the API may result in the temporary or permanent suspension of your account's access to the API. I can hammer my own server with as many requests as I want.

GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. No comment required. Today, you have a bustling project; tomorrow it's gone.

fake-name• 8 years ago

Downside: Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible.

Major downside: You miss a huge percentage of possible contributors.

kazinator9• 8 years ago

I don't want to deal with people who think e-mail is terrible, or contributors who can't copy a URL from a page served up CGIT, do a "git clone" on it, and then mail off the results of "git format-patch" when they are done. This stuff is incredibly easy.

drej• 8 years ago

This is fairly sad, because a lot of software is still maintained using mailing lists. Often not because it's the best solution, but because it's the least bad (for some). Also, if one wants to ensure that the whole lineage will be with us 20 years from now, a mailing list is a better bet than all the Gerrits and Githubs of the world.

I remember I wanted to check out what was happening in Postgres, since it's my favourite database. But the sheer complexity of getting to the code diffs and comments and all that... I quickly gave up, because the environment was rather unfriendly to newcomers (actually, I didn't completely give up, I just browsed the Github mirror, which was the only usable part of their version control).

And I'm not blaming them, it works well for the core devs, but they can't expect many new contributors (and contributions are even things like documentation, tests etc.!). Which is a pity.

kuschku2• 8 years ago

Solution: gitlab, gitea and gogs exist.

Same advantages of self hosting, simple UI for inexperienced users, all the ability to control your own stuff.

andrewmcwatters• 8 years ago

I love mailing lists. They're a natural filter and get rid of a lot of the demographic you don't want in the first place.

u801e5• 8 years ago

Holy shit fuck mailing lists. They're terrible.

What do you find terrible about them? When browsing email lists like the one used for developing git itself, I find it very easy to go through various patch sets and follow the discussion they have on each commit. My client makes it easy to search for subjects, expand or collapse threads, search for authors, etc.

The emails themselves are easy to read and don't require an excessive amount of scrolling to go through even if the patch set has multiple commits. It's quite easy to see comments on a patch set inline with the patch itself.

benatkin• 8 years ago

This comment hiding is a good feature. For judicious use, it greatly enhances the experience for both collaborators (people with write access to the repositories) and viewers. When overused, it allows collaborators to do what they want, as they should be able to, because GitHub provides tools for organizing communities* rather than communities themselves. For astute viewers, it provides a chance to observe the way that the collaborators manage their communities.

* For an alternative of having shared ownership of open source, see Zed Shaw's post about Launchpad https://web.archive.org/web/20120318224723/http://sheddingbi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2299748

mattbierner• 8 years ago

I really hope they add some sort of "highlighted" or "closed by" comment feature as well. I've occasionally had to lock closed issues to stop a flood of "+1" comments from crowding out the comment that fully addressed the originally reported problem. Manually hiding or deleting all new "+1" comments would be a lot of work in these cases

raimue• 8 years ago

[...] The author is not a bot account [...]

How does GitHub identify "bot accounts"? I thought there is just one type of user accounts. You can give the API tokens generated on that account to a bot. But there is no flag in the settings to make it a "bot account".

dflock• 8 years ago

I think when GitHub says bit, they mean app.

New tools for open source maintainers

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