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Dear GitHub

1678 pointsby msvanover 9 years ago

85 comments

jonobaconover 9 years ago
Hi Adam, Addy, Andreas, Ariya, Forbes, James, Henry, John-David, Juriy , Ken, Nicholas, Pascal, Sam, Sindre,<p>My name is Jono and I started as Director of Community back in November at GitHub. Obviously I am pretty new at GitHub, but I thought I would weigh in.<p>Firstly, thanks for your feedback. I think it is essential that GitHub always has a good sense of not just what works well for our users, but also where the pain points are. Constructive criticism is an important of doing great work. I appreciate how specific and detailed you were in your feedback. Getting a good sense of specific problems provides a more fruitful beginning to a conversation than &quot;it suxx0rs&quot;, so I appreciate that.<p>I am still figuring out how GitHub fits together as an organization but I am happy to take a look into these issues and ensure they are considered in how future work is planned. We have a growing product team at GitHub that I know is passionate about solving the major pain points that rub up against our users. Obviously I can&#x27;t make any firm commitments as I am not on the product team, but I can ensure the right eyeballs are on this. I also want to explore with my colleagues how we can be a little clearer about future feature and development plans to see if we can reduce some ambiguity.<p>As I say, I am pretty new, so I am still getting the lay of the land, but feel free to reach out to me personally if you have any further questions or concerns about this or any other issue. I am at jono@github.com.
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deathanatosover 9 years ago
This, I feel, is the most important bug, even though it precedes the list:<p>&gt; <i>We’ve gone through the only support channel that you have given us either to receive an empty response or even no response at all. We have no visibility into what has happened with our requests, or whether GitHub is working on them.</i><p>I&#x27;d like to call out that the GitHub user @isaacs maintains an <i>unofficial</i> repository[1] where the issues are &quot;Issues for GitHub&quot;. It&#x27;s not much more than a token of goodwill from a user to open a place like that to organize bugs (GitHub: you are lucky you have such a userbase!), but it&#x27;s the best thing I know of for &quot;has someone else thought of this?&quot;[2]. Many of the issues that have been filed there are excellent ideas.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isaacs&#x2F;github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;isaacs&#x2F;github</a><p>[2]: though I&#x27;d say if you also think about it, you should <i>also</i> go through the official channel, even if just to spam them so they know people want that feature.
Osirisover 9 years ago
The author mentions that if GitHub was open source, they would implement these features themselves.<p>Gitlab[1] is an open source repository manager that supports local installs as well as public hosting at gitlab.com. If author appreciates open source, perhaps they should put their efforts into improving an existing open source option rather than relying on a proprietary solution.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gitlab.com&#x2F;gitlab-org&#x2F;gitlab-ce&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master</a>
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jballancover 9 years ago
It&#x27;s 2016, and GitHub is stagnant.<p>GitHub used to bill itself as &quot;Social Coding&quot;, but the &quot;Network&quot; graph has not seen <i>ANY</i> updates since its original introduction in April of <i>2008</i>. Issues has seen <i>very</i> few updates. Even the OSS projects that GitHub uses <i>internally</i> have grown stagnant as GitHub runs on private, internal forks and maintainership passes to non-GitHub-employed individuals (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;resque&#x2F;resque&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1372" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;resque&#x2F;resque&#x2F;issues&#x2F;1372</a>).<p>The word &quot;Social&quot; no longer appears on GitHub&#x27;s landing page. They&#x27;re chasing some other goal...whatever it is.
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zzzeekover 9 years ago
We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent. Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue trackers, which is really a huge part of a project&#x27;s documentation, to a for-profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good interoperability.<p>If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it&#x27;s time to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever having the advantage of &quot;locking in&quot; its users with extremely high migration costs.
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monkmartinezover 9 years ago
I do not operate a popular OSS project, but I have experienced the +1 spam and it sucks. The suggestions, in my opinion seem rational.<p>Interesting side note: With the exception of Selenium, most of signees are maintainers of JS&#x2F;HTML OSS projects. I wonder if we could objectively compare JS to &lt;lang&gt; projects in terms of the problems mentioned in the document. For example, there is a strong correlation between +1&#x27;ers and JS repos vs. Python or vice versa. Perhaps, we could walk away with JS devs are more chatty than CPP developers when discussing issues... I don&#x27;t know, just a thought.
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Permitover 9 years ago
This first request is the anti-thesis of GitHub&#x27;s simple approach:<p>&gt;Issues are often filed missing crucial information like reproduction steps or version tested. We’d like issues to gain custom fields, along with a mechanism (such as a mandatory issue template, perhaps powered by a newissue.md in root as a likely-simple solution) for ensuring they are filled out in every issue.<p>Every checkbox, text-field and dropdown you add to a page adds cognitive overhead to the process and GitHub has historically taken a pretty solid stance against this.<p>From &quot;How GitHub uses GitHub to Build GitHub&quot;[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;1yJx8CG.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;1yJx8CG.png</a><p>There are tools like Jira and Bugzilla for people who prefer this style of issue management. I hope GitHub resists the temptation to add whatever people ask of them.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zachholman.com&#x2F;talk&#x2F;how-github-uses-github-to-build-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zachholman.com&#x2F;talk&#x2F;how-github-uses-github-to-build-g...</a>
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jasodeover 9 years ago
The bullet points of complaints feel like a continuation of Linus Torvald&#x27;s refusal of github pull requests in May 2012.[1]<p>Taken all together, it seems like github is on a path of alienating their most valuable members. Github was unresponsive to Linus&#x27; feature requests and it turns out that theme continues almost 3 years later.<p>If github plans to evolve into a full-featured ALM[2] like MS Team Foundation or JIRA instead of being relegated to being just a &quot;dumb&quot; disk backup node for repositories, they have to get these UI workflow issues fixed.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;linux&#x2F;pull&#x2F;17#issuecomment-5654674" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;linux&#x2F;pull&#x2F;17#issuecomment-56546...</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Application_lifecycle_management" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Application_lifecycle_manageme...</a>
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bsderover 9 years ago
Distributed revision control users whining about centralized repository lacking features.<p>Ummm ... anybody getting the irony here?<p>And, from a GitHub business perspective, why do I hear Lily Tomlin: &quot;We don&#x27;t care. We don&#x27;t have to.&quot;<p>Everybody anointed GitHub as &quot;the chosen one&quot; over strenuous objections from some of us that creating another monopoly for open source projects is a <i>bad idea</i>.<p>Pardon me for enjoying some Schadenfreude now that GitHub leveraged the open-source adoption into corporate contracts and now doesn&#x27;t have to give two shits about open source folks.<p>Lily Tomlin&#x27;s Phone Company Sketch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw</a>
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asbover 9 years ago
There&#x27;s been no mention of phabricator yet so I thought I&#x27;d give it a shout out. It&#x27;s used by LLVM, FreeBSD, Blender, Wikimedia and others and I love it. It&#x27;s under very active development and even if it doesn&#x27;t solve every issue in this letter, by using an open source tool for development you of course have the option to customize it to the needs of your community.
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marknutterover 9 years ago
Is this a case of the squeakiest wheels getting the grease? What if these problems aren&#x27;t representative of the overall user base? What if far more people prefer a more simple, minimalistic interface than an ultra-customizeable interface with myriad custom actions and events. I&#x27;ve always appreciated software that deliberately keeps things simple (Basecamp and Workflowly come to mind). It sounds like these people want a full blown Jira&#x2F;Stash installation.
AndyKelleyover 9 years ago
I don&#x27;t like the general feel of these suggestions. It sounds like more bureaucratic features, the lack of which is a big part of why GitHub is so pleasant.<p>Making an issue or a pull request feels like having a casual chat with the project maintainers. Adding fields and other hoops to jump through puts distance between people.
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carapaceover 9 years ago
Wow, what a bunch of whiners. If you hate github so much why don&#x27;t you just fork it and fix-- Oh, right. It&#x27;s not open source.<p>Well, there&#x27;s your problem right there.<p>(I have sooooo much more in this vein but I&#x27;ll spare you. ;-)<p>EDIT: No I won&#x27;t. Fuck it. This is too ridiculous.<p>These guys (and they are all guys) chained themselves to github&#x27;s metaphorical car and now they&#x27;re complaining that the ride is too bumpy and the wind is a little much.<p>Don&#x27;t whine about not getting to sit inside the car! Unchain yourself and go catch one of the cars where the doors are unlocked and open and the driver and other passengers are beckoning you to join them. (Apologies for the mangled metaphor.)<p>These folks come off to me like masochistic babies.
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beshrkayaliover 9 years ago
I do like Github, and I understand how it makes the entire process of maintaining a code repo a lot easier, but what I&#x27;d genuinely like to know is why don&#x27;t big projects just move to their own thing? I understand that there isn&#x27;t a single solution that exactly matches what Github has, and that maintaining your own git server + git management&#x2F;issues&#x2F;etc.. app is a pain, but I see it as the only real solution. Developing in the open can&#x27;t be done on platforms where restrictions apply, and they do apply. I&#x27;m saying this with no intention of sounding like a jerk, but 18 project maintainers and&#x2F;or developer need to write an open letter to get Github to give&#x27;em a &quot;me too&quot; button? I understand the issue, but i still find it rather silly.<p>The only aspect I could think of where Github has the pro is the community of developers it has, but does it really matter that much? Especially for established&#x2F;big projects that probably don&#x27;t care about the fork&#x2F;stars numbers, or the random look around-ers that pass by.
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anarchy8over 9 years ago
I feel like there is a great opportunity right now for anyone to make a Github replacement. Sounds like a lot of these features are sorely needed at the moment. Why has Github been complacent?
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notabotover 9 years ago
My company pays me to work on a fairly old-school free software project and we run our own git service. Our workflow is email based so we won&#x27;t ever consider switching to GitHub.<p>That said, we do sometimes consider setting up an official mirror on GitHub. Ideology aside (some team members might think we shouldn&#x27;t promote a propriety solution for free software project), the main thing that puts us off is that there is no way to disable pull requests. Closing all pull requests by hand is not appealing; leaving all pull requests open is not desirable. We can probably write a bot to close pull requests, but that is just yet another administrative burden.<p>Not sure if GitHub will ever consider allowing users to disable pull requests though. That seems to go against GitHub&#x27;s core interest.
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arasmussenover 9 years ago
I work on a very relevant project called Product Pains.<p>React Native, the open source project, is using Product Pains instead of GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. This is because there were thousands of open issues and, just as this document mentions, it&#x27;s impossible to organize them. The comments are all &quot;+1&quot; and it&#x27;s really hard to tell what&#x27;s important and what&#x27;s just noise.<p>If you take a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productpains.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;react-native?tab=top" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productpains.com&#x2F;product&#x2F;react-native?tab=top</a> you&#x27;ll see the power of being able to vote on these issues.<p>So why&#x27;s Product Pains relevant?<p>1. It&#x27;s a temporary alternative to GitHub issues. I&#x27;m guessing GitHub will get to adding votes eventually. If you want to use Product Pains for organizing issues for your open source project, go for it. I&#x27;ll even give it away to you for free.<p>2. It&#x27;s a community dedicated to improving products. This document is chock-full of great, constructive, actionable feedback. Product Pains is a community built for posting exactly this. You can post feedback publicly, about any product, people can vote on it, and posts with a lot of votes create a social responsibility for the company to respond.<p>3. It&#x27;s a way for your voice to be heard. Posting on Hacker News lasts a day and will get your voice heard. If you post actionable, constructive feedback on Product Pains, and 150 people vote on it, it lingers waiting for GitHub to do something about it. Around 600 users on Product Pains are also React Native developers. They&#x27;d probably be ecstatic to vote on constructive feedback for GitHub.<p>For example, go make an account and vote here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productpains.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;github&#x2F;implement-voting-for-issues&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;productpains.com&#x2F;post&#x2F;github&#x2F;implement-voting-for-is...</a>
mplewisover 9 years ago
Bitbucket kills GitHub issues with these two features:<p>- Multiple assignees for an issue - An &quot;Approve&quot; button so that maintainers can stamp a PR with the seal of approval
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neilgreyover 9 years ago
Yup, I love GH, use it every day, but issue management is the pits.<p>It&#x27;d be really nice if I could custom sort the queue of issues so that I know what&#x27;s next up in my queue of things to do; right now I&#x27;ve got 5 tags called NextUp:1 -&gt; NextUp:5 on each repo; this takes way more manual updating than a simple drag&#x2F;drop widget.<p>Like they mentioned, having a voting system would be super useful for knowing what matters -- I cringe every time I leave a +1, so I&#x27;ve gotten into the habit of at least adding a comment after it --- but the premise and the pain are the same.
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rmchughover 9 years ago
A shame that GitHub aren&#x27;t more responsive to the community that enables their success when they make such a big deal of their openness. It is also our own fault that we have allowed ourselves to become dependent on a single provider of a relatively simple service.<p>That said, I&#x27;m extremely grateful to the platform for enabling collaboration on open source and to the company for its work on Git, Resque etc.<p>GitHub&#x27;s strategy is to open source everything except the business critical stuff, but it seems to me that their business is in enterprise support rather than in actual software. Perhaps they should just open source the whole platform and count on their service business being enough to carry the company?
jonduboisover 9 years ago
I like GitHub issues as they are. I wouldn&#x27;t like to force people to adhere to a particular format when reporting problems.<p>I find it strange that some project maintainers get annoyed when people use the issues section to post questions. What&#x27;s wrong with that? A question can reveal design failures about your software... Maybe if your software was better designed, people wouldn&#x27;t be asking the question to begin with.<p>I do think there should be a +1&#x2F;like button though.
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athenotover 9 years ago
I have mixed feelings about these requests. Yes it would be nice to have these extra features in GitHub. Its issue handling has always been a bit light on the workflow side—but IMHO has made up for it with a pleasant way to organize conversation around issues. The simple and smooth UX is part of what makes GitHub so great.<p>For the opposite side of the spectrum, there&#x27;s the Bitbucket+Jira combo. It is customizable to a PM&#x27;s heart&#x27;s content, and in the process can become a mess of a tool.
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aaron695over 9 years ago
After the whole incident where they deleted forks of a project without notice, due to their belief on what is and is not appropriate words to use in code without an apology I think we really need to re-assess GitHub in general.<p>Their &#x27;control&#x27; of code and lack of respect to the people running projects is very disappointing and they seem to not want to move forward on the issues.<p>I&#x27;m surprised the open community is allowing this de-facto ownership of the worlds code and how it&#x27;s written to take place, I&#x27;m not so sure they are a benevolent dictator.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20150802&#x2F;20330431831&#x2F;github-nukes-repository-over-use-word-retard.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20150802&#x2F;20330431831&#x2F;githu...</a>
guessmynameover 9 years ago
Interesting petition, and I agree with it; but I wonder why are all projects mentioned in the _Signed by_ section based on JavaScript? I know there are other languages involved in some of those projects like C++ and Java in Selenium and PhantomJS but this specific thing in the document makes me believe that only JavaScript developers _(at least the ones using GitHub)_ are more prone to complain than other type of developers.
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pvorbover 9 years ago
The problem is that GitHub has a monopoly and is considered _the_ current standard for Open Source. But I think that once some of the major projects move to alternatives like GitLab (which has many of the features described in that letter) GitHub will have to obey its user base. Unfortunately no Open Source project with a large user base will dare to do the first step.
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rlaferlaover 9 years ago
Github needs two major features: 1. discussion groups for users vs. devs as people use issues for it currently. and 2. A searchable &quot;license&quot; attribute for all projects with standard license templates for MIT&#x2F;Apache&#x2F;GPL&#x2F;etc... When looking for a source code, you need to consider the platform, language and license.
duncan_bayneover 9 years ago
&quot;It&#x27;s the world&#x27;s tiniest open source violin&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;743&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;743&#x2F;</a>
aesthetics1over 9 years ago
Each and every suggestion is a sane and much needed improvement.
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sqsover 9 years ago
At Sourcegraph, we&#x27;re trying to help solve these problems for developers everywhere (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com</a>), both in open source and inside companies. GitHub’s commercial success and contributions to the world of development are impressive (and I&#x27;m speaking as a GitHub user for 8 years), but they can’t build <i>everything</i> developers need on their own.<p>We’re really pumped about improving dev team collaboration in the GitHub ecosystem by (soon) letting anyone use Sourcegraph.com’s code intelligence (semantic search&#x2F;browsing), improved pull requests, flexible issue tracking with Emoji reactions instead of +1s (example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;src.sourcegraph.com&#x2F;sourcegraph&#x2F;.tracker&#x2F;151" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;src.sourcegraph.com&#x2F;sourcegraph&#x2F;.tracker&#x2F;151</a>), etc.—all on their existing GitHub.com repositories.<p>All of Sourcegraph’s source code is public and hackable at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;src.sourcegraph.com&#x2F;sourcegraph" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;src.sourcegraph.com&#x2F;sourcegraph</a>, so it can grow over time to solve the changing needs of these projects. (It’s licensed as Fair Source (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fair.io</a>), not closed source like GitHub or open source.)<p>Email me (sqs@sourcegraph.com) if you’re interested in beta-testing this on your GitHub.com repositories.
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fphilipeover 9 years ago
My biggest gripe with GitHub has been the notification system. Personally I can&#x27;t use the web UI for notifications because they bundle multiple notifications per issue. This leads to potentially missed notifications since it is up to me to scan the issue&#x2F;PR for new comments.<p>My workaround has been to use email notifications exclusively. I have a Gmail filter that applies a label to all notifications and skips the inbox. Then in my mail client I have a smart mailbox that only shows me unread notifications with that label (or that folder, from an IMAP perspective). The smart mailbox then shows me a counter of unread notifications. This way I don&#x27;t oversee comments when multiple ones are made in a PR.<p>Problem 1: No context in these notifications. It would be nice if these emails could show the code in question for diff comments or the entire comments thread.<p>Problem 2: Now what is really bad with these notification emails is that the link &quot;view it on GitHub&quot; sometimes no longer links to the comment I&#x27;m being notified of. This happens when the comment was made on a PR on a line of the diff that no longer exists, as sometimes is the case when new commits are pushed. I then have to go to the main PR page, expand all collapsed &quot;foo commented on an outdated diff&quot; comments and manually search for the comment in order to get the context and be able to reply.<p>By fixing problem 1, problem 2 would be automatically fixed with it and make my workflow much more productive. Is there anyone else annoyed by this?
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felhrover 9 years ago
I just created and maintain a little Android library (a very rewarding experience by the way) so most of the complaints about Github doesnt really apply to me because the size and reach of my project (I understand the point perfectly though).<p>But I read some complaints about the users and the issues they tend to open and I fully agree. They are a minority but I can&#x27;t only imagine what people with bigger projects have to deal with. This is what I&#x27;ve found:<p>- People with little to zero experience in the language&#x2F;framework that simply state that my project doesn&#x27;t work without providing more information and sometimes they didn&#x27;t reply to my &quot;give me more info&quot; inquiries.<p>- Guys who just want to get their homework done and They are basically trying to get it done using me as non-paid freelance.<p>- And my favourite one, junior dev in a company, he needs to get their work done with more pressure than the previous one so became anxious about their problems and I feel it even via email. Eventually He gets the thing done but He notices I changed the build system to Jitpack for better dependency handling and and start to complain about Man in the middle attacks to his company and black-hat hackers replacing my lib with a malicious one (I guess it could happen but come on).<p>But it is a very rewarding experience besides these anecdotical cases
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runn1ngover 9 years ago
All this problems seem to me like <i>good</i> problems to have.<p>They all seem to stem from the fact that <i>github is too successful</i>. And too many people are on github and too many people are using it, often in wrong ways.<p>Of course github should solve them all. But still, it&#x27;s still better to have problems with too many people and too much interest, than have the opposite problem - dying platform that people are leaving (see: sourceforge and Google Code).
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dragonshover 9 years ago
Look at kallithea SCM at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kallithea-scm.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kallithea-scm.org&#x2F;</a>, we have used it and in most cases it works well. Also it supports both git and mercurial. Python should learn a lesson when they decided to move their repository to closed source system like github. But obviously as people use Facebook, developers use github for the same reason, network effect.
vmarsyover 9 years ago
A lot of these points are fair and interesting, but I fail to grab some of the points, especially that one:<p><pre><code> Ability to block users from an organization. </code></pre> What does blocking users mean? Blocking from commenting&#x2F;making PR&#x2F;cloning?<p>Why blocking a whole organization from an <i>open source</i> project? What would prevent such users to use a personal account instead to do what they organization counterpart is blocked from anyways?
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some-guyover 9 years ago
I work at a large company with a central GitHub Enterprise instance, and we use GitHub as a code-reviewing and code-hosting platform. Everything else (including build-automation) is integrated through web-hooks to Atlassian tools for many of the reasons noted in this letter. It works for us, but I am hopeful that GitHub will listen and maybe someday we can have everything on there.
teenover 9 years ago
I actually disagree with some of these suggestions, I find the simplicity of Github issues is what makes it so great. I think this should be solved with 3rd party tools, such as waffle.io
mpdehaan2over 9 years ago
While I don&#x27;t maintain Ansible anymore, +9 billion on this. GitHub is hard at scale.<p>GitHub is fantastic because everyone is on it, but the issue system has not improved since inception - and I felt the UI changes have actually stepped back.<p>We had to implement our own bot to comment on tickets that did not appear to follow a template, and I would have given a kingdom for a template that let people filter their own tickets into whether they were bugs or feature requests or doc items.<p>We also had a repo of common replies we copy and pasted manually (this because there was so much traffic and me replying quickly would likely tick someone off - but this too could have been eliminated mostly with a good template system). Having this built-in (maybe I could have picked a web extension) would have also been helpful.<p>So many hours lost that could have been features or bugfixes - and by many, I mean totally weeks, if not cumulative months.<p>GitHub does the world a great service, and I love it, but this would help tons.<p>I always got a response when I filed a ticket - ALWAYS - but a lot of them were in the &quot;we&#x27;ll take that under consideration&quot; type vein.<p>I feel opening GitHub RFEs up to votes is probably not the answer to serve the maintainer side of the equation, since users outnumber maintainers, but these needs to be done and would greatly improve OSS just based on expediting velocity.<p>If you don&#x27;t use the GitHub tracker you lose out on a lot of useful tickets. However, if you use it, you are pretty much using the most unsophisticated tracker out there.<p>It&#x27;s good because there&#x27;s a low barrier to entry, but just having a template system - a very very very basic one, would do wonders.<p>A final idea is that GitHub really should have a mailing list or discussion system. Google Groups sucks for moderation, and I <i>THINK</i> you could probably make something awesome. Think about how Trac and the Wiki were integrated, for instance, and how you could automatically hyperlink between threads and tickets. The reason I say this is often GitHub creates a &quot;throw code at project&quot; methodology, which is bound to upset both contributor and maintainer - when often a &quot;how should I do this&quot; discussion first saves work. Yet joining a Google Group is a lot of commitment for people, and they probably don&#x27;t want the email. Something to think about, perhaps.<p>Also think about StackOverflow. It&#x27;s kind of a wasteland of questions, but if there was a users-helping-users type area, it would reduce tickets that were not really bugs, but really requests for help. These take time to triage, and &quot;please instead ask over here and join this list&quot; causes people pain.<p>I love all the work to keep up site reliability, maybe I&#x27;d appreciate more&#x2F;better analytics, but I totally say this wearing a GitHub octocat shirt at the moment.
thockingoogover 9 years ago
I could rant for hours about all the things GitHub doesn&#x27;t do (or does wrong) for &quot;real&quot; software development.<p>+1 from the Kubernetes project
john2xover 9 years ago
I wish Github would add a &quot;Discussions&quot; tab for repos, so projects don&#x27;t need to create a separate Google Group (which require a Google account!) for questions-that-are-not-quite-issues.
chippyover 9 years ago
There are three groups within GitHub, and this article is about the issues faced by the first - big open source projects (a small number).<p>The main bread and butter of GitHub is from private or organizational projects and do not have these issues<p>The majority of accounts on GitHub are folks like the majority of HN readers - developers, coders, hackers and do not have these issues.<p>So all these complaints are in a sense not applicable to the vast majority of both GitHubs revenue generating customers and the vast majority of GitHub users.
bad_userover 9 years ago
While I like to bitch and moan about stuff myself, I don&#x27;t really agree with the first point.<p>What I like about GitHub&#x27;s issue tracking is that (compared with alternatives, such as Redmine or Jira) it is free form. It doesn&#x27;t force users to fill information such as steps to reproduce and I don&#x27;t think it should. And that&#x27;s because the needs of every project is slightly different. Consider how different the &quot;steps to reproduce&quot; are for a web user interface, versus the usage of some library. Yes, it can be painful for an issue to not provide all the information required, but on the other hand GitHub does a better job than alternatives at fostering conversations and keeping people in the loop. I&#x27;ve even seen projects use the GitHub issues as some sort of mailing list.<p>On the second point, I do agree that GitHub needs a voting system for issues. Given that GitHub has long turned into some sort of social network, adding a voting system for issues is a no-brainer. But then a voting system doesn&#x27;t address the problem of people getting frustrated about issues taking too long to get fixed. +1&#x27;s are annoying, but sometimes that&#x27;s a feature and I&#x27;ve been on both sides of the barricade.
rahelzerover 9 years ago
Do the undersigned send any money to github? It might be better to phrase your demand in the form of a question, &quot;how much can we pay you to do this work for us?&quot;
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iwwrover 9 years ago
Is there an issue tracking system out there that works on top of the Github issue system?
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ssmootover 9 years ago
+1 to the notification spam. Being @sam on github sucks sometimes. And as far as I can figure out there&#x27;s no way to set watching&#x2F;following&#x2F;notifications to opt-in only.<p>So every time someone who knows a &quot;Sam&quot; uses @sam incorrectly in an issue I get notified, have to unsubscribe, ignore, and leave a polite message to let them know they&#x27;re doing it wrong.<p>It&#x27;s really lame that they&#x27;ve never fixed this.
Karunamonover 9 years ago
Most of this stuff seems pretty common sense and reasonable. I really only have a couple of objections:<p>* Issue templating.<p>It&#x27;s one thing to prefill the entry box, it&#x27;s quite another to add fields that everyone must fill out. I quite like that filling out something on Github is totally the opposite of filling out something on Jira.<p>* Issues and pull requests are often created without any adherence to the CONTRIBUTING.md contribution guidelines<p>This is a people problem that has plagued open source from day one. You cannot engineer your way around it in a manner that doesn&#x27;t annoy your contributors.<p>There was a blurb in here about getting rid of the big green &quot;new pull request&quot; button, but that was when this link went to a google doc. Good - if someone doesn&#x27;t want to take PR&#x27;s, then they have almost no reason to be on Github in the first place. Put another way, it&#x27;s the mark of someone that wants a repo as a signpost of sorts without actually interacting with its community.
its2complicatedover 9 years ago
I think if these people have that many issues with GitHub, they should find a replacement. That&#x27;s what happened in the Node community and it led to a better Node. That&#x27;s a big list of complaints and GitHub doesn&#x27;t have much incentive to fix &#x27;em except to silence a bunch of cry babies that are bitching about a free tool.
orfover 9 years ago
I&#x27;ve felt the same way. The worst bit is notifications, so I get a notification that someone replied to an issue I opened. How do I get there? It&#x27;s not in my notification page, I have to go to the email and click the link from there. Things get missed.<p>GitHub needs to step it up. They got to the top first, but can they stay there?
zAy0LfpBZLC8mACover 9 years ago
What I don&#x27;t get ... why do people building free software even consider forcing their users and in particular their contributors to use proprietary development tools such as github? (Or, for that matter, exclude people from contributing to their projects who only use free software.)<p>Next, we&#x27;ll see public complaints to Microsoft because MS Word doesn&#x27;t properly support the way they want to maintain their project&#x27;s documentation?<p>I mean, sure, feel free to complain all you like, but how is this not exactly what was to be expected from the beginning, and why do you expect them to care in the future, given that you just seem to have realized that they didn&#x27;t care in the past, for obvious reasons, and given that their incentives haven&#x27;t changed, and there is no reason for them to change in the future?
transfireover 9 years ago
Many times, I&#x27;ve asked GitHub to add icons for :test:, :doc:, :admin: and a couple others. I use them in commit messages as it helps categorize the type of commit. This has to be the easiest kind of improvement imaginable, but they have never bothered.
danielsamuelsover 9 years ago
I know they&#x27;ve only recently released new permissions for organisations, but they&#x27;re still extremely lacking. As far as I can see, there&#x27;s no way of setting permissions at a group level.<p>As an example of how this would be used, we have a Github team within our organisation which is used for non-technical people to post bugs. These people have no reason to be able to see or push code to the repository, they only need to be able to create issues. This applies to every repository in the organisation. As far as I can see, and without manually adding every single repository to the team, there&#x27;s no way of setting global permissions permissions for a team. This seems like a major oversight to me.
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Jyaifover 9 years ago
I suspect they are focusing on developing their enterprise offering.<p>Anyway, I found that <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feathub.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feathub.com&#x2F;</a> addressed my frustration about the absence of a voting system.
kkoch986over 9 years ago
I would just love if they could add target _blank on all the links in comments and issues. I&#x27;m constantly navigating away from the issue to view links in question and then realizing the tab with the issue is gone.
kiloreuxover 9 years ago
My experience with Github support is terrible, if not one of the worst, I once had an issue and contacted their support and it took them 1 month to respond to me (literally) I was really surprised by that.
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shmerlover 9 years ago
It&#x27;s also annoying that Github sometimes is missing some basic features like attachments to bug reports and comments for instsance. All mature bug trackers have such feature.
itomatoover 9 years ago
Why do you want GitHub to solve the (very) specific problems of issue and defect tracking?<p>They make a facility available as a nicety, but if your project has legitimate Global impact, you should be looking at (or bootstrapping) a counterpart.<p>Don&#x27;t have the revenue for JIRA? Apply for the Free license.<p>Don&#x27;t have the stomach for Bugzilla? Turn out a Node&#x2F;Go alternative.<p>Don&#x27;t have the business alignment with Clearquest or Rally? Lower your expectations to suit your Free (as in beer) SCM tool.
jarjouraover 9 years ago
There&#x27;s a lot of great feature requests for issues at the bottom of the document. Not sure why the document highlights only 3 things above the signatures.<p>Yet, I 100% agree with them. I do not understand why Github issues are so basic. The only feature I feel was added in all of 2015 was making the logging of every metadata change extremely verbose (read: maybe too noisy now?!).<p>&quot;Person assigned to the issue&quot;<p>&quot;Person added label&quot;<p>&quot;Person removed label&quot;
justplayover 9 years ago
I personally experiencing this issue. i wrote about this in 2014, you can check here <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paritosh.passion8.co.in&#x2F;post&#x2F;96619506751&#x2F;dear-github-its-time-to-put-karma-in-user" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paritosh.passion8.co.in&#x2F;post&#x2F;96619506751&#x2F;dear-github-...</a> although i am addressing the problem in different way but the issue is same.
technionover 9 years ago
<p><pre><code> Don’t make it so easy to submit bad PRs </code></pre> I recurrently refer to this[0] PR, and the subsequent discussion, as the reason why, if any project of mine gets any bigger - it will not be accepting Github pull requests.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;technion&#x2F;maia_mailguard&#x2F;pull&#x2F;42" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;technion&#x2F;maia_mailguard&#x2F;pull&#x2F;42</a>
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pekkover 9 years ago
GitHub also does not allow deletion of bullshit issues.
ajsharpover 9 years ago
I get that these are super frustrating issues for these people (<i>cough</i> guys) that maintain these repos, but there&#x27;s something telling about it that it&#x27;s all JS people. That last cute lil paragraph really sums it up for me:<p>&gt; Hopefully none of these are a surprise to you as we’ve told you them before. We’ve waited years now for progress on any of them. If GitHub were open source itself, we would be implementing these things ourselves as a community—we’re very good at that!<p>LOL. I can&#x27;t tell if this is &quot;go-fuck-yourself&quot;-level passive aggression, or mindless hopefulness that there might actually be a universe in which Github (or a company like it, with hundreds of millions of dollars of venture funding) could be open source. If I worked at Github, my first thought after reading this would be &quot;mmmmm yeeeeaaaaaaa y&#x27;can g&#x27;fuck yr&#x27;self&quot;, while the second thought would be &quot;yea, you&#x27;re not wrong&quot;. Generally, passive aggression gets you nowhere when you&#x27;re asking for something from someone&#x2F;something who owes you nothing (I know, I know, they &quot;owe&quot; their customers <i>everything</i>).<p>The Node&#x2F;React&#x2F;JS community is hilariously entitled, petulant and childish. The tone of this whole letter is so god damned millennial, it&#x27;s mind-boggling, because they&#x27;re not wrong about anything they&#x27;re asking for. But it&#x27;s <i>how</i> they ask for it that leaves a dry, acid-y taste in your mouth.
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dabernathy89over 9 years ago
People often ask why WordPress doesn&#x27;t use Github for its primary development (they do have official read-only mirrors there), and it&#x27;s not just because they already had an SVN-based system in place when Github came to be. It&#x27;s because the tooling they already had was more sophisticated, especially regarding issues.
cbrover 9 years ago
<p><pre><code> We’d like issues to gain a first-class voting system, and for content-less comments like “+1” or “:+1:” or “me too” to trigger a warning and instructions on how to use the voting mechanism. </code></pre> Why bother users with a warning? Turn it into a vote, and then highlight the vote icon so you can see what happened.
vjeuxover 9 years ago
A proposal for a better way to deal with github issues: a discussion tab. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;44" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;issues&#x2F;44</a>
danpalmerover 9 years ago
I&#x27;d settle for just a fix to the (minor) data-loss bug that I reported nearly a year ago, and which still crops up once a month or so.<p>That, and something for code review. Pull Requests are terrible for code review, and it wouldn&#x27;t take that much to make them so much better.
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billconanover 9 years ago
One annoying issue I found with github is that it doesn&#x27;t provide a discussion board. a lot of times, I have a question to ask, it doesn&#x27;t mean I found a bug or anything needs progress tracking, but I have to go through the &quot;github issues&quot;.
qaqover 9 years ago
To what degree a company has to not give a f$#% when maintainers of largest projects on a platform can&#x27;t get any feedback (compounded by a fact that some of those maintainers are very prominent employees of largest github paying customers)
kmfrkover 9 years ago
Being a maintainer on a project with some minor community on GitHub is such a garbage experience.<p>It’s pretty neat as a general user, but at least you get the impression with BitBucket that they prioritize productivity and project management. And the task system hasn&#x27;t received any significant updates since their inception - which is a shame, because tasks are an awesome invention, they just have to be implemented awfully with issues.<p>I also remember that we recently had to move the entire decision-making process to Slack instead where I suggested we just use the emoji voting system to make our decisions with.<p>What really gets to me is how <i>adamantly</i> GitHub has ignored all the people who&#x27;ve gone on about this forever. Last time they seemed to care marginally was when jacobian finally managed to twist their arm and get them to implement the Close Issue feature, because one repo issue was a radioactive pit of abuse and invective.
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nikolayover 9 years ago
GitHub does certain things very well, other - not so much. I really think the best way to get them to focus is to start contributing massively to GitLab.<p>Anyway, implementing just voting won&#x27;t be a such a good idea in the time of Emoji Reactions!
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Zikesover 9 years ago
Issue spam (in the literal sense) definitely needs addressed as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CYI31g1UQAUXQbs.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;CYI31g1UQAUXQbs.png</a>
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peterfpfover 9 years ago
This resonated so much with me<p>PS, it was moved to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github</a>
jessaustinover 9 years ago
Please update the link to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dear-github&#x2F;dear-github</a>
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yingboover 9 years ago
Funny. It&#x27;s like &quot;Hi, you are rich. We like you. You should onate your money&quot;.<p>There are tradeoffs, so pick services you like.
petkeover 9 years ago
I guess I don&#x27;t know how to use githib. You can send bug reports on a project. But how do you send questions or ask for advice?
alexchamberlainover 9 years ago
Totally agree with what has been said. However, I find it interesting that most of the signatories displayed were for JS projects.
edemover 9 years ago
gog.com has a great mechanic for this which might work here called a community wishlist [1] where people can submit games whey wish to see and people can vote on it and eventually they get things done when possible.<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gog.com&#x2F;wishlist" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gog.com&#x2F;wishlist</a>
ChuckMcMover 9 years ago
I am interested in understanding how much recurring revenue Github is receiving for hosting these projects.
bl4ckdu5tover 9 years ago
I&#x27;ve never seen any issues spammed with +1s like the TravisCI request for Bitbucket support
lifeisstillgoodover 9 years ago
Can anyone post a précis&#x2F;examples - apparently I do not have rights to see any spreadsheets at all.
thewhitetulipover 9 years ago
we maybe need a feature of hotness of a bug, &quot;affects me too&quot;, that&#x27;ll prioritize issues out of a bucket load of issues, plus on github you first raise an issue then it is sorted into feature request or bug, can be made better
jp_scover 9 years ago
Classic JavaScripters reaction: throw more tooling at it
dangover 9 years ago
Url changed from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;14X72QaDT9g6bnWr0lopDYidajTSzMn8WrwsSLFSr-FU&#x2F;preview?ts=5698049d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;14X72QaDT9g6bnWr0lopDYida...</a>, which points to this.
johnlbevan2over 9 years ago
NB: Duplicate post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10904693" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10904693</a>
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spellbootsover 9 years ago
:+1:
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wanstrocityover 9 years ago
Chris Wanstrocity is an inept leader, social activists roam the halls in self glory about their contributions to the world while Kakul spends money on retreats and hires senior product people who have zero open source or dev ops experience. This company needs intensive care with new leadership asap or they will be doomed, Gitlab is salivating right now.
xpaulbettsxover 9 years ago
While I applaud the initiative, it&#x27;s also a pretty strong indictment of the JavaScript &#x2F; node.js community that there is not even a <i>single</i> non-male OSS maintainer on this list of important JS projects.<p>What is being done in the JS community by those who lead it to make progress on this and who is leading that charge? If the answer is &quot;Nobody&quot;, why is that true?
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