Re:I found a one-char typo in the docs for Python's typing_e...
by da39a3ee on Friday January 07, 2022 @12:19PM
(#29841779)
Right, exactly. It's moving to issues and PR-based workflows that's the important thing. If GitHub becomes problematic in the future, they can switch to some other provider of similar functionality, and all the millions of programmers around the world who are familiar with issues and PR-based workflows can follow them.
I am personally someone who only knows PR-based workflows and is somewhat ignorant about other workflows. There are the mailing lists and old-school bug trackers which I am pretty sure I don't like. But I know that several (most/all?) big US tech companies use non-PR-based workflows via tools like Gerrit and Phabricator. I am not at all clear yet on the pros and cons of those workflows versus PRs.
I certainly don't think the problem with GH is that it's for "mindless kids". I hate mailing lists and I hate old-school bug trackers that don't support code markup or rich linking. In the short and medium term, I'm grateful that things will become a lot easier. The long term is what worries me.
But I'm also probably being a bit too cynical. If and when in 5-10 years they want to move off of GH, they will be able to do so. I'm not envisioning some kind of catastrophic "rug pull" from Microsoft where suddenly the Github API disappears and the issue tracker becomes locked-in.