Slightly confusing title here. A less confusing title would be “Mozilla drops support for Mercurial, moves Firefox repository to GitHub”.
Mozilla will move Firefox development from Mercurial to Microsoft’s GitHub
Submitted 1 year ago by thehatfox@lemmy.world to programming@programming.dev
Comments
idunnololz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
A less confusing title would be “Mozilla drops support for Mercurial (…)
It’s not even about GitHub at all. Taken straight out of the announcement:
“For a long time Firefox Desktop development has supported both Mercurial and Git users. This dual SCM requirement places a significant burden on teams which are already stretched thin in parts. We have made the decision to move Firefox development to Git.”
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 1 year ago
But a few lines later:
Although we’ll be hosting the repository on GitHub, our contribution workflow will remain unchanged and we will not be accepting Pull Requests at this time
So I don’t know if you meant that the focus of the change wasn’t GH or that they weren’t using GH at all, but it seems like the latter is untrue.
thingsiplay@kbin.social 1 year ago
After thinking through this, what part of the title is confusing in your opinion? It says exactly what is happening. The title you suggest is not really different.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 year ago
The repository will be hosted on GitHub, though the move is expected to take “at least six months before the migration begins.”
Another major opensource project that chooses a proprietary hosting platform 🤷
Sigmatics@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Let’s be honest here, at least like 98% of the popular OSS is on GitHub at this point. You don’t have to like it, but it’s how things are
onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 year ago
Doesn’t mean that they have to continue putting stuff there. But oh well, maybe once ForgeFed becomes a real thing, things might change a little.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 year ago
GitHub is just serving as public code mirror, it’s not going to be their hosting platform.
ericjmorey@programming.dev 1 year ago
Using and financially contributing to Codberg seems like a good to take next step. Doubt they will though.
dekaf@programming.dev 1 year ago
So, from a decentralised solution to the world’s biggest repository that actively infringes on free software by violating licenses in their co-pilot unfree program.
Decisions like these, coupled with the fact they are transparently corrupt make me see no indication that Mozilla is heading towards a better future, or contributing anything of value more than they have contributed in the past.
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
So, from a decentralised solution to the world’s biggest repository
You need to check your notes. Git is decentralized, even if you host a repository somewhere.
Decisions like these (…)
As a Firefox user, these initiatives matter nothing in my decision to use Firefox. In fact, I’m glad they went this way. They need to focus on working on code instead of wasting their time in irrelevant details.
dekaf@programming.dev 1 year ago
You need to check your notes. Git is decentralized, even if you host a repository somewhere.
I am not sure if you’re wilfully ignoring my point about how centeralised GitHub is, but I’ll assume good faith:
GitHub is enshittifying everything that has to do with Git. It presents a very common pattern where nonfree software providers embrace an open standard, extend it maliciously towards a less open experience by raising capital or being acquired by a large company with massive funding then make its users trapped in many systems that make it a hard time to migrate to other places and eventually introduce anti-features and lock-in mechanisms in late stages of the software cycle.
As a Firefox user, these initiatives matter nothing in my decision to use Firefox.
You should care. As a Firefox user, you should be aware of how the funding and hiring of the people working on Firefox go. For example, most notable updates to Firefox, including Firefox Quantum, were developed in Servo, a different browser project that Mozilla completely abandoned and fired all its employees working on it, all the meanwhile in the same year the CEO gave herself a pay raise that would have paid for multiple developers to work on something proven essential to the performance and security of Firefox.
nottheengineer@feddit.de 1 year ago
But what browser do we use then?
dekaf@programming.dev 1 year ago
Firefox (or its forks, depending on how much you value privacy and your needs can be met while breaking some data-collecting websites.)
I am not calling for any action in my comment, but things are not looking good for the future of Firefox.
fzz@programming.dev 1 year ago
Ah! 😣 Why not nest or self-hosted pijul!?
IAm_A_Complete_Idiot@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
It’s not battle tested on massive projects nor does it have the prior mindshare git has. It doesn’t have a lot of tooling either. (Does any CI/CD system support pijul?) It has nice properties, but ultimately git with all it’s terrible warts is well understood.
fzz@programming.dev 1 year ago
Seems to my mistake. You question about CI/CD services that supports Pijul. So yes, almost zero. But it’s like ouroboros. Just use pijul more then git and talk about it, and services will support it soon.
fzz@programming.dev 1 year ago
CI/CD
Pijul as a hit or hg or any other is a VCS, so what are you talking about? If you mean web-service like GitHub with social things and CI/CD services, so yes, nest have CI/CD with nix. But mostly you shouldn’t host your huge project on the Nest because, as I’m absolutely sure, you as anyone other should create your own host (public or private) to support decentralization to prevent github-like centralization situation. Pijul was created with decentralization in first place in mind.
Not tested with big projects in production
Not publicly. Many private projects, personal and in-company, that uses pijul are existing. Personally I have one HUGE personal. Also I worked for two companies where pijul is used.
technom@programming.dev 1 year ago
Neither has reached 1.0. They’re perpetually unstable.
mr_satan@monyet.cc 1 year ago
Chromium has a mirror on GitHub and it’s fine. While it feels a little strange to have just one mirror (on GitHub), after moving to git entirely, nobody is stopping to them from hosting a GitLab mirror.
Traister101@lemmy.today 1 year ago
[deleted]theherk@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Doesn’t make much sense to judge a program by its underlying language. While I don’t enjoy writing Python much anymore for several reasons it can produce perfectly fine applications. Mercurial is one such example.
ActionHank@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Cool now I can actually check it out. Tried to previously but my connection failed about an hour into the clone. --depth=1 --shallow-submodules --recurse-submodules should really be given its own command in git. Not really sure why’d they choose MS as their host though.
robinm@programming.dev 1 year ago
Moving to git is nice but I don’t understand why they don’t self-host a gitlab instance.
knopwob@programming.dev 1 year 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 1 year 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.
SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
Are they moving issues or just code storage to GitHub?
ericjmorey@programming.dev 1 year ago
They’re going to continue using Bugzilla for bug reports.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 1 year ago
It wouldn’t make it more difficult than with mercurial, which isn’t supported by github either.
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 1 year ago
GitHub will just serve as code mirror. Patches and bugs will still go through Mozilla’s usually channels.
lysdexic@programming.dev 1 year ago
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?
lowleveldata@programming.dev 1 year ago
Because Microsoft will eat your ass in your sleep
amju_wolf@pawb.social 1 year ago
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.
amju_wolf@pawb.social 1 year ago
Or, you know, Gitea or such.
SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
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?
Lmaydev@programming.dev 1 year ago
Money most likely.
ck_@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
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.