Firefox Development Is Moving From Mercurial To Git : linux

[-] TCB13@lemmy.world 95 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

[removed by mod]

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 55 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Could be familiarity? I saw an article go by recently about how projects that aren't on GitHub suffer from lack of contributions. Although that matters more for smaller projects, Mozilla is a beast and could probably pull people off GitHub if it wanted to.

Also if anyone should be trying to build up an alternative to GitHub, it should be Mozilla

[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 33 points 2 years ago

If you are at a skill level, where you can meaningfully contribute to a project like this, registering for an alternative git provider should not be an obstacle

[-] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 35 points 2 years ago

Obstacle? No. Annoyance? Yes.

[-] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 17 points 2 years ago

I agree with this in a lot of cases, but I'm not sure about this case - Mozilla won't be accepting PRs over GitHub from what I can tell.

[-] antrosapien@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 years ago

Git desperately needs something like activity pub. That's how it should have been from the beginning

[-] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago

and it was lol. Git was designed to work using email and plain text patches. No nonsense, no closed platforms. You can still use git that way.

[-] andruid@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

It's super cool that it supports this, heck I've used it when no other options were there (and thank git I could! It made a nightmare into just a little more work instead).

I will say though, it's most of the other software forge features that people normally talk about adding Activity Pub support for (issues tracking, merge requests, tracking forks, CI tooling, handling documentation, etc).

[-] deur@feddit.nl 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Lets just say it's coming... soon :)

[-] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

ForgeJo?

[-] richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one 7 points 2 years ago

The J is lowercase, -ejo is an Esperanto suffix meaning "place".

[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 2 years ago

Agreed. They could've hosted nearly any git forge since they'll keep using bugzilla and other workflows as is.

[-] Gecko@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago

They already use GitHub for a bunch of other projects. See https://github.com/mozilla/ and https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/

[-] bamboo@lemm.ee 5 points 2 years ago

It’s the most widely used platform that the most people are familiar with that they get to use likely for free. Newer projects of theirs are also hosted there. Why would you say it makes no sense?

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

Hosting the public repo? I heard that the GH repo is just a mirror

[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 47 points 2 years ago

Out of all the possible Git choices, they chose one of the worst options. I am very curious about the reasoning for that. Could have been a Mozilla-hosted Gitlab instance, or something else like Gitea

[-] bassomitron@lemmy.world 19 points 2 years ago

Why do you say GitHub is the worst choice, out of curiosity?

[-] dinckelman@lemmy.world 30 points 2 years ago

Especially lately, incredibly poor performance, and constant outages. Plus if you're an owner of a private repository, I don't want them to train their asshole AI based on my code, without my knowledge

[-] Thorned_Rose@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago

And Micro$oft

[-] moon_matter@kbin.social 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

At least when it comes to Git I'm not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren't using it and it's not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.

[-] Hexadecimalkink@lemmy.ml 34 points 2 years ago

Would have been amazing if they federated with Forgejo and supported federated git like they're doing with mastodon.

[-] kixik@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Mozilla being Mozilla, I'd guess. They should have gone sel-hosted with sourcehut, or at least gitlab. Or if not self-hosted, the choice should have been at the least gitlab or better, given it allows to chose DCO over CLA. But perhaps not everyone cares... I remember when gitlab introduced DCO, and how that helped debian and gnome to migrate to gitlab. After allowing DCO, other projects migrated as well.

I'm not that fan of gitlab, and I'd prefer sourcehut for open source projects, but if wanting something closer to github, then gitlab might be the answer. But Mozilla is a corp, maybe they don't care much about these things, and as a corp, perhaps they were looking for CLA sort of contribution any ways...

[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 2 years ago

I also think gitlab hosted by Mozilla Foundation would have been a better solution than github.

Mozilla Corporation is owned by the Mozilla Foundation, so their incentives aren't that of a corporation but a non-profit.

[-] andruid@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

I would love to see the Mozzilla foundation double down on ActivityPub and host a Forgejo instance or work with Codeberg for hosting.

I wonder how much Github being the primary place for FOSS source code limits people around the world from joining the movement.

[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 years ago

I'd also like to see an open platform for their source code, but Github is undeniably the preferred platform for most developers, so I understand Mozilla's decision.

So long as only the source code is hosted on Github I don't think it limits people to contribute. Bugs and features are still tracked with the existing tools.

[-] uis@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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

Whyyyyy? Why github?

[-] kogasa@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Reviewing PRs costs money/time

[-] uis@lemmy.world 12 points 2 years ago

Edit: added "Why github?"

[-] kogasa@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

Fair point. I would say on a personal level that GitHub actions is quite nice to use, especially with the marketplace. But I'd be surprised if switching version controls also entailed a CI/CD change for Mozilla, so I can't think of a good reason.

[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 years ago

Wtf is wrong with gitlab...

[-] ExLisper@linux.community 10 points 2 years ago

Nothing, it works fine.

[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Then why didn't Firefox use their power to support a git that's not owned by Microsoft?

[-] ExLisper@linux.community 8 points 2 years ago

I don't know. Because they are not angry with Microsoft anymore and github better fits their workflow?

[-] Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space 12 points 2 years ago

I wonder if the same is going to be true of Thunderbird. Thunderbird actually requires you use Mercurial to contribute at all, rather than managing both git and Mercurial.

That being said...it's kind of odd to me how swiftly Mozilla of all companies/orgs is to embrace a code forge hosted by Microsoft for their main software. Surreal, even.

[-] bamboo@lemm.ee 11 points 2 years ago

It’s rather bold of many of the commenters in this thread to assume they know the needs of Mozilla and their developers rather than those people themselves. GitHub makes complete sense, even if it doesn’t live up to some people’s desires for free software purity.

[-] aport@programming.dev 10 points 2 years ago

I'm amazed people are still using Mercurial. I worked on a few hg projects about a decade ago and it wasn't a very good experience. It was easy for people who used subversion, but if you were even halfway familiar with git you just missed a lot of functionality.

[-] doink@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

This is great. Honestly it is the best option.

[-] csolisr@communities.azkware.net 3 points 2 years ago

I wonder if they'll consider Codeberg as their future Git host of choice. GitHub is less than ideal in terms of digital sovereignty, GitLab also has some questionable leadership. Codeberg seems like the most solid alternative to these so far.

[-] soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id 3 points 2 years ago

Dang, I was really hoping that they would stop using bugzilla and switch to something like GitHub/GitLab/Gitea issues instead. Perhaps also put things like feature requests there as well and have one place to contribute to Firefox

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