Re:GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
by bigger_cheese on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:49AM
(#17253371)
Aren't a lot of open source communities based around IRC channels or is that old hat now?
I remember back in the day IRC was the place to be for Debian. Ditto for when I was doing stuff with Perl.
IRC is a good substitute for being in the same room, but you still need more formal discussions recorded in issues and pull requests (the recorded part is quite important if you project is around for more than a few weeks).
Re:GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
by bad_user on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:43AM
(#17253567)
Well now that you mention it, in the communities I care about, IRC was replaced by Gitter (https://gitter.im/).
Which is also linked to GitHub accounts and repositories. Ironically, Gitter was bought by GitLab and open sourced, but they haven't changed the implementation to allow for chat rooms linked to GitLab repos. At the glacial pace it is evolving, it wouldn't be unfair to say that Gitter is probably relying solely on OSS contributions at this point.
While gitter generally is a good idea I have yet to land in a active channel. The partly abondened IRC channels often still show a lot more activity even when they link to their gitter in their meta.
Re:GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5B Undo Button
by bad_user on Thursday June 07, 2018 @07:52AM
(#17254973)
Not my experience, it depends on the community you're talking about I guess. Here's some channels I'm on, all being so active that I have a hard time keeping up:
- https://gitter.im/scala/scala
- https://gitter.im/scala-js/scala-js
- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats
- https://gitter.im/typelevel/cats-effect
It's more than that too, workflows, CI, release process are all built around GitHub (your release artifacts automatically show up on GitHub when you push a tag right?). GitLab doesn't even have "releases" in the GitHub sense; their closest equivalent is the "tags" page hidden in a submenu and it only allows you to attach some Markdown text to the tag. Issue tracking the feature: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41766
For open source projects of multiple contributors, yes, because that's where the community is, along with all relevant traces, e.g. issues, comments, PRs, all linked to their user's accounts.
I've seen people here suggest that GitLab's import tool is pretty good in importing the history of issues. It's also a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, but beyond the import, the problem is that the community isn't there.
Not to mention that many projects have been uninspired enough to use GitHub as their homepage, which means that the web is littered with links to GitHub that aren't replaceable.
I've seen people here downplay the difficulty of moving off GitHub. Such people do not maintain popular or multi-contributor open source projects.