It seems like they went through and deleted all previous versions of the comment so there isn't even any context left of this discussion. Pretty shameful.

Why does GitHub allow anyone to edit other people's comments? I could imagine an extremely limited number of scenarios where it would be useful and many where it would be harmful.

First, only anyone can edit other people’s comments; only repository admins can edit messages in the repository. Also, anecdotally, it is overwhelmingly positive to me, only harmful in extremely limited number of cases (this be one of them). Many people don’t know how to use Markdown (probably don’t bother to learn) and produce gibberish issue reports. Those would have been difficult to manage if edit were not allowed. Sure, it is possible to do without edit, but it’s the same the other way around (GitHub does keep edit history).

Github may keep edit history, but it seems like maintainers have the ability to remove previous edits of comments entirely, as is the case in the linked PR (perhaps it's limited to Enterprise?)

I don't like this. A maintainer can fake another users' comments for some very nefarious purposes.

Yeah, it's an optimistic biased system, but it's a decent practical approach. The cases of maintainers being lousy seems pretty uncommon.

AFAIK the reason maintainers can completely remove revisions of comments, is because occasionally a well intentioned user pastes sensitive info into a comment and doesn't realise.

While pointing it out to the user so they can remove it themselves does work, that's an unbounded time frame (perhaps never). So just nuking it directly is "safer" in that instance.

Doesn't seem like there's any really perfect solution.

I know our team commonly uses it to edit canonical issues over time. It’s much easier to follow a long issue if you keep the latest information in the original text.

Also github has a lot of use outside of public repositories. If I’m not the admin of my own issue tracker, I’d switch to one where I am.

They also de-list older versions of popular packages like PHP 7.0. A package manager should never de-list. There are many valid reasons why someone might want to install an old version of a package.

As a user I'm not a big fan of the order of their CLI switches. For example to restart PHP-FPM:

brew services restart [email protected]

In Ubuntu the same thing is

sudo service php7.0-fpm restart

Should restarting a service require sudo? I think it should.

Should the service name be first and then the operation? I think it should as well.

Good luck convincing brew maintainers of this. It's like talking to a brick wall.

The advantage to having the service name last is that you can easily list multiple services. On a default Ubuntu installation, this is now possible with systemd, another opinionated piece of software:

    sudo systemctl restart php7.0-fpm

I tend to prefer this syntax because I can perform an action on multiple services with a single command.

Also easier to make aliases instead of functions, if args require to be in the middle of other arguments.