Comment on Mozilla will move Firefox development from Mercurial to Microsoft’s GitHub
robinm@programming.dev 10 months ago
Moving to git is nice but I don’t understand why they don’t self-host a gitlab instance.
but I don’t understand why they don’t self-host
Why would anyone self-host a FLOSS project? Trade secrets is not a question, nor is it barring access to the source code repository. Why would anyone waste their resources managing a service that adds no value beyond a third-party service like GitHub?
Because Microsoft will eat your ass in your sleep
Because Microsoft will eat your ass in your sleep
So Microsoft has access to Firefox’s source code. So what? Isn’t the point of a FLOSS project that your source code should be made available to everyone?
Mozilla allegedly stands for a bunch of stuff that is be definition incompatible with hosting code on GitHub as it is. I bet a lot of people were expecting a lot more from them and instead got this move. Well… I guess this is like unique browser ID that each installation has or the fact that it contacts a 3rd party analytics company no matter your settings - people start by complaining and eventually even say it is right. lol so much for privacy and whatnot.
I think they were making a joke
Go on…
Because while you do have control (and “copies”) of the source code repository, that’s not really true for the ecosystem around it - tickets, pull requests, …
If Microsoft decided to fuck you over you’d have a hard time migrating the “community” around that source code somewhere else.
Obviously depends on what features you are using, but for example losing all tickets would be problematic for any projects.
What if you self host in AWS and Amazon decides to fuck you over? What if you decide to self from home and your ISP decides fuck you over? What if? So many what ifs… How do you even live in this world?
Yeah like, wtf
When you use a cloud solution (and especially one with a vendor lock in like Amazon) then yeah, you are fucked there too and I’d question why you did it in the first place.
If you have your own infrastructure - be it a server at home or whatever - then you can always just move it elsewhere, get some other ISP, whatever. There is no lock-in. Inconvenience, sure, but you can migrate elsewhere. That’s just not true about all the other things mentioned, or the friction would be much higher.
Because while you do have control (and “copies”) of the source code repository, that’s not really true for the ecosystem around it - tickets, pull requests, …
The announcement to drop Mercurial quite clearly states that their workflow won’t change and that GitHub pull requests are not considered a part of their workflow.
Also, that’s entirely irrelevant to start with. Either you care about software freedom and software quality, or you don’t. If you care about software freedom you care about having free and unrestricted access to FLOSS projects such as Firefox, which GitHub clearly provides. If you care about software quality you’d care about the Firefox team picking the absolute best tools for the job that they themselves picked.
Or, you know, Gitea or such.
I keep hearing people only on Lemmy bring up Gitea but I haven’t really heard of it otherwise. What’s the appeal and what’s keeping it locked away with the Lemmy community?
Money most likely.
I would doubt that. Github for organizations becomes rather expensive rather quickly if you want to retain some level of control, so I doubt Mozilla will opt for the minimum “free for open source” offering.
Github for organizations becomes rather expensive rather quickly (…)
I’m not sure if that’s relevant. GitHub’s free plan also supports GitHub organizations, and GitHub’s Team plan costs only around $4/(developer*month). You can do the math to check how many developers you’d have to register in a GitHub Team plan to match the operational expense of hiring a person to manage a self-hosted instance from 9-to-5.
knopwob@programming.dev 10 months ago
Imho the main argument for github is that it lowers the hurdle for new ane ad-hoc contributions like issues. I’m problably too lazy to registsr a new account for your instance just to open a bug report.
I’d love a federated git/issue/wiki thing
xoggy@programming.dev 10 months ago
In my opinion that sounds like a plus. People that are too lazy to register an account to put in a code merge request or report a bug aren’t going to be writing quality code or quality bug reports.
jack@monero.town 10 months ago
Yes but knowing of a bug is better than not knowing of a bug
xoggy@programming.dev 10 months ago
Working in a busy codebase for a long time when I have to spend time a non-trivial amount of time triaging through tickets I can’t reproduce that is taking time away from legitimate bug and request tickets I can be working on. It can seriously lead to burnout.
dragnet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Speak for yourself, I’ve been prepared to submit detailed bug reports before the process in place to do so turned me off.
xoggy@programming.dev 10 months ago
I did speak for myself. I said “In my opinion”.
SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
Are they moving issues or just code storage to GitHub?
allywilson@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
Code storage. They’re keeping bugzilla.
ericjmorey@programming.dev 10 months ago
💀
ericjmorey@programming.dev 10 months ago
They’re going to continue using Bugzilla for bug reports.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 10 months ago
It wouldn’t make it more difficult than with mercurial, which isn’t supported by github either.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 10 months ago
GitHub will just serve as code mirror. Patches and bugs will still go through Mozilla’s usually channels.