They slowly started locking down the platform for people without accounts and it has been really annoying to use the website since. First it was not possible to search for code, then even searching for issues got more and more difficult with it randomly failing, and now it’s gotten to the point where I can’t search for a fucking project anymore!
Github’s search is becoming as bad as reddit’s, where if you want to find anything, a secondary service like SourceGraph, GrepApp, or even a dumb search engine is better. Sometimes those haven’t indexed what I need (especially code search), so I have to download the bloody tarball and rg for whatever the fuck it is I was looking for.
Sometimes it will also block the VPN I’m using, so I have to proxy to a non-VPNed machine. The world could do without these unnecessary roadblocks.
What also grinds my gears is requiring an account to contribute. There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there, so by if a project being on github, you have no choice but to give Microsoft your data to participate in opensource. Don’t get me wrong, mailing-lists are filth, but and I’d rather claw my eyes out than participate in any project demanding their use, but Microsoft being the “lesser evil” is not a good look.
Please, for the love of opensource, get your project off of github, please. It’s a monopoly at this point and doing microsoft things. This isn’t the end and they’ll probably do more stuff to see how far they can push it. We’ll all be the boiled frogs.
Yes, I know they have a CI and some other features, but if all you’re doing is hosting your code, please consider an alternative.
Possible alternatives in alphabetic order:
- Codeberg (could have federation in the future)
- Gitlab (has CI)
OneDev (no git SSH clone but feature-rich)not an instance for the public- Radicle (no CI, but federated)
- Sourcehut (minimalist, but fast as fuck)
or maybe others will suggest more.
I selfhost using forgejo (the same project codeberg is using) and I only clone on github.
This should be a good first step to decentralize.
For a small project I recently switched to fossil from git. It’s also distributed version control, but includes a bug tracker, wiki, and other stuff as well. It’s minimalist, but hosting yourself is super easy.
Default git over ssh is often enough as well. Combine with any bug tracker and CI you like. You don’t need to use an all in one tool like GitHub.
Specifically for the rate limit issue, a lot of nix’s derivations are hosted on GitHub and now and then the rate limit problem comes up when I rebuilds a dev environment.
Nixos.org is kind enough to host gigabytes of cache, but to get a ~40MiB tarball, we need to beg at the door of M$. Path dependency is really a trap.
Yeah, nix is utterly dependent on github and there have been many discussions about it. The majority of the community is very against migrating and refuses investing in anything else.
I remember a project abused github as their CDN, and github shut that down. Can’t remember the name but it was something plant-related (the name). Pods or something. If nix ever scales up massively, github just might rate limit the repo.
That’s M$ doing their EEE-dance as usual. Actions is pretty egregious, my company’s decided that All must be in the cloud™, even CI/CD, so Actions it is… Soon enough, bit by bit, a lot will depend on GitHub’s functionality and there you have it, full circle, it’ll be a pain to move elsewhere. Or do you still think all GitHub is is a git front-end?
Codeberg is criminally underrated. The UI is great, it’s 100% open source, it has CI, and it will have federation in the future. It’s a shame more people don’t use it. Piefed/river and a bunch of cool niche projects are on it though :D
The lemmy developers should seriously think of moving lemmy to codeberg, it’d be in line with lemmy’s anti-corporate stance.
The choice every developer has to make is between having a potentially successful project, with contributors and community engagement, or hosting their stuff on an open platform. PeerTube even has a GitLab of their own, and yet they host their main software on GitHub, because they simply have to.
Only if they measure their success in terms of traffic on a Microsoft web site.
Successful projects predate GitHub.
I really don’t understand it.
It is 5 minutes to create an account and you can even use the same SSH key everywhere technically.
Then just put a bit config per website and it literally requires nearly 0 additional work ever. You can commit to all the different places practically simultaneously.
I guess you have to go to different websites for issues and I don’t know if codeberg specifically has CI/CD tools, but I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
the actual problem is not that you need an additional account, but as OP said, the terms. with an account they can tie all your searches, what repos have you visited and how often, and other non-public activities to you. basically the same data mining that youtube, facebook and others do, just in an earlier stage
Pushing commits is just one of many concerns.
Do you want to suggest synchronizing issue tickets as well?
I am not talking about federated git repos. You are right, that is a huge undertaking with many issues to overcome.
I am simply talking about dev’s willingness to work only within X Y or Z website’s ecosystem even if another project they want to contribute to exists on another ecosystem (for example KiCAD which exists on their own gitlab instance and needs a separate account or gadgetbridge on Codeberg). It is enough to stop many people from contributing.
I don’t get why devs refuse to work on things outside github.
Herd mentality, it affects devs too.
Yep, codeberg is great for personal/hobby or small projects, but beyond that it’s not ideal. The worst part is git is a decentralized protocol; yet github has centralized it, basically forcing developers to use it if they want their projects to live, or get a job. It’s a vicious cycle.
But i still think developers should migrate to codeberg, if all of us just wait for codeberg to get big to use it, there’d be no users in the first place. Even if you put your project as a mirror, it’s still a step, or even better: vice versa, see river.
That’s BS, if the software’s good people (i.e. devs) will find the source, unless all they do is spent their day on the github website.
Most fine software i find is through social media and websites, i then proceed to checkout the code.You picked one concern of multiple: Code discoverability of an already known project.
Multiple times I have found project sources on their own platforms, and when I would have contributed tickets or code, I did not because of requiring yet another account on yet another platform, with whatever yet unknown signup workflow.
And there is man other concerns, some of which the comment you are replied to mentioned.
For yet another account i use a password manager and an email address i only use for crap. It’s a one time process.
If that’s too much for you then perhaps you’re not that interested in contributing to <project>?Exactly. It’s a matter of barrier and interest. Signup requirements are a barrier to drive-by improvements and reports, and them as entry points to further contributions.
I am seeing a LOT of the emulation crowd over at codeberg and other type of sites. Its gaining some popularity which is nice.
I get that, and I even made an account on PeerTube’s GitLab just to submit a tiny fix on a secondary project of theirs, but do you think an average issue submitter would bother? I do not. And it’s not as simple as this process separating the wheat from the chaff, either.
They are on Codeberg, but it’s only as a github mirror.
I didn’t know, thanks. But last commit was 8 months ago :(
I never sat foot on github, but moved from some shady place to Codeberg and it’s just fantastic. It just works.
Only thing missing is some 5/10€ monthly plan where you get a golden leaf or something :-p
On a more serious note, gotta check out how to support them in some meaningful way.
They have a donate button. 🙂
Yeah, figuring to go member, it’s only 24€ a year (FYI 12€ if you can’t shell out that sum) and this is one of the first projects that I’d really like to see take off.
I’m looking forward to when they implement fediverse integration.
Yeah. I know in my heart that I will get off my ass and move some projects over to Codeberg after federation arrives.
If I have to search something in a repo, I just clone it and use my IDE. GitHub search sucks, but I don’t think it’s possible to have a web experience that is on par with an actual environment an IDE.
I literally just need dumb search. No regex, no nothing, but just for that you now need an account. Especially on mobile, I’m not going to clone every repo I come across. It’s a hassle already.
If I really do care and dependent on the repo, I’ll clone it. Otherwise I just drop it most of the time or use a third party service. But ever since Microsoft bought github, it’s been really annoying.
without these unnecessary roadblocks
But then how will they harvest your data?
While I agree about most of your gripes. I don’t think requiring an account to contribute is unreasonable. I can underdtand not wanting to create an account and give them personal info and such. But if that is your stance, stop using them entirely. Giving them code is even worse.
Gitlab probably isn’t much better these days but at least it’s open sauce. Until I build a forgejo instance it’s gitlab for me.
I sound like a corporate shill but like, I don’t know if this is due to abuse.
GitHub actions and certain things were free until the crypto bros started abusing it. There are certain challenges that happen at scale.
I would be pretty interested in reading a more robust analysis between the alternatives you list and GitHub itself. Going to each one and giving them a glance really doesn’t show me much other than “yup, it’s similar to GitHub”.
Complaining about needing an account to contribute is wild to me.
You’re not okay with anonymous malicious prs? How prude! /s
I read it as needing a Microsoft account, and having to accept Microsft’s terms and conditions, in order to contribute to an unrelated (and probably open-source) project. That’s a valid complaint.
The problem is that you end up using software that’s hosted on GitHub and then you’d like to report a bug or contribute a fix. You also don’t want to give your data to Microsoft. Both can be true, because the projects on GitHub don’t exist in isolation there.
idk, the only “personal data” GitHub requires is an email address… If you don’t have a throwaway one not associated to your identity yet, what are you even doing on the internet :D
I support moving off GH but
There is no way to send in a patch, raise an issue, or anything without an account there
Currently this is the case everywhere? With the exception of projects that take email patches, currently all the options are centralised/not federated, and even if e.g. Forgejo finished adding ActivityPub integration you’d still need an account on some Forgejo instance to contribute. Same for email patches; they still require having an email address. If it’s specifically about giving MS your data, sure, although iirc the only data they actually require is an email address. You can use duckduckgo’s duck addresses to get one that’s relatively anonymous (i.e. can be deanonymised by duckduckgo but I doubt anyone’s conspiring that hard to deanonymise a random github user).
If you look at a project on sourcehut while not logged in, you will see instructions on the side how to create a patchset and mail it directly to the maintainer, no account needed.
You still need an email address…. which is functionally an account.
Pretty sure gitlab requires you to enter a CC to make an account as well, which turned me off from submitting a bug report a few weeks or so back
Yeah and that makes sense. There’s plenty of examples of open source projects that have had their issue trackers flooded with politics rather than real issues and they have to then spend all their time policing and cleaning that up and that’s using GitHub’s user reg system and basic protections against spam accounts. Without requiring any sort of auth or user reg that would be impossible
rip gitorious
Who?
First result of a search:
Gitorious was a free and open source web application for hosting collaborative free and open-source software development projects using Git revision control. Although it was freely available to be downloaded and installed, it was written primarily as the basis for the Gitorious shared web hosting service at gitorious.org, until it was acquired by GitLab in 2015.
Gitlab just reduced their monthly ci minute cap.
Fucking… Goddammit Gitlab!
