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Mozilla Firefox – Official GitHub repo

(github.com)
848 points thefilmore | 6 comments | 13 May 25 05:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.01s | source | bottom
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floriangosse ◴[13 May 25 06:55 UTC] No.43970232[source]▶
I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.

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fhd2 ◴[13 May 25 08:14 UTC] No.43970680[source]▶
In my experience, most contributors who are deterred from contributing because they can't use GitHub aren't particularly valuable contributors. I'm sure there's exceptions, but I haven't seen any for non-trivial open source projects I've been involved in. I might even argue that it could be good to have a slightly higher bar to deter low quality one time contributors.
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arp242 ◴[13 May 25 08:39 UTC] No.43970824[source]▶
I spent quite some time writing a patch for FreeBSD and Linux a few months ago, including getting to grips with their contribution process.

Both patches have been ignored thus far. That's okay, I understand limited resources etc. etc. Will they ever be merged? I don't know. Maybe not.

I'm okay with all of this, it's not a complaint. It's how open source works sometimes. But it also means all that time I spent figuring out the contribution process has been a waste. Time I could have spent on more/other patches.

So yeah, there's that.

It's certainly true that making the bar higher will reduce low-quality contributions, because it will reduce ALL contributions.

(aside: FreeBSD does accept patches over GitHub, but it also somewhat discourages that and the last time I did that it also took a long time for it to get reviewed, although not as long as now)

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struanr ◴[13 May 25 08:47 UTC] No.43970876[source]▶
Although I have certainly created pull requests before that have been ignored so not sure GitHub solves this problem.
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arp242 ◴[13 May 25 08:58 UTC] No.43970939[source]▶
GitHub PRs don't solve anything about that, but I wouldn't have to spend (waste) time figuring out the contribution process. At least I learned a few things writing the patches. I learned nothing of value dealing with git email or Phabricator. It's just work of the boring and tedious kind.
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1. TheDong ◴[13 May 25 10:42 UTC] No.43971508[source]▶
Dealing with github is the boring and tedious thing, you have to run huge amount of proprietary javascript, keep up with their weird UX changes, start X11 to open a browser to render their html, overclock your CPU for a large PR review conversation to scroll without locking up your computer for minutes, constantly click "load more" since their webpage keeps hiding comments (while still lagging massively)...

Email is simple. It's just text, there's no weird javascript or html or lag. I don't have to open X11. I can just open mutt and read or write. I can type "git send-email". It's all open source, so I can read the code to understand it, and write scripting around it. It runs on any computer with ease. Even on a slow connection, it's quite speedy.

I totally agree with you about Phabricator though.

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2. arp242 ◴[13 May 25 12:03 UTC] No.43971950[source]▶
"Boo hoo I need to start X11"? Seriously?

I have some unconventional workflows. And I try not to bother anyone else with it, especially in a volunteer driven open source context. It would be selfish to do otherwise.

To be honest based on what you've written here, keeping you out of my projects sounds like a good thing. What a bunch of piss and vinegar over how other people are choosing to work in a way that works for them.

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3. elteto ◴[13 May 25 13:03 UTC] No.43972480[source]▶
Starting X takes forever on his PDP11. Only real way to run Unix.
4. twic ◴[13 May 25 13:41 UTC] No.43972886[source]▶
It's not true that you need to start X11. GitHub's UI renders pretty well under Wayland.
5. Osiris ◴[13 May 25 17:29 UTC] No.43975450[source]▶
Use the GitHub CLI.

You can do nearly everything the website does entirely in the terminal.

6. einsteinx2 ◴[13 May 25 19:43 UTC] No.43976849[source]▶
So you can compile and test your changes to Firefox without starting X11 or “overclocking your CPU” but you can’t use a simple website?