Item — HN Reader

> If my competitors keep making stupid decisions then making SourceHut successful will be pretty easy

I know it is early days for SourceHut but this sounds realistic on some conditions. Due to the closed-source nature of Github + MS and this magnificent own goal from GitLab which disqualifies its claim to supporting "free and open source" projects, it should be only "easy" for SourceHut to be sustainable and supporting free software ethics as long as it resists VC funding and is self-funded with paid support.

Without more convincing features and a matching similar interface rivaling GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket it may go otherwise, but it already has some of essential features already and I hope this true free-software alternative succeeds.

This is as close as it gets to creating a service that truly supports free-software with paid support.

2 comments

> If my competitors keep making stupid decisions then making SourceHut successful will be pretty easy

Randy Bush had a favorite phrase: "I encourage my competitors to behave this way"

It will probably never have anywhere near feature parity with GitLab or GitHub in the browser. Part of it's goals are to remain simple and minimize JavaScript usage. Which is noble in it's own right IMO. But it's straight up impossible to do a lot of what Git{Hub,Lab} do without JS.

> But it's straight up impossible to do a lot of what Git{Hub,Lab} do without JS.

Like infinite incremental loading that randomly stops working and also breaks browser's built-in search functionality because the thing you want to find is not loaded yet until you scroll down? Yeah, I'm glad they can't do that BS.

Making a good service isn't only about what you can technically do. I'd say it's much more about what you choose to do with whatever tech you have at hand. My experience with GitLag is that it's slow and the UI is generally clumsy (I have to use Google so often to find my way around), and you run into antifeatures like infinite scrolling and this: https://i.imgur.com/Qmtec2b.png

Sadly I think all these sites (SourceHut, Github, Gitlab..) have things to learn from cvsweb. That is, if one could ever convince them to prioritize convenience over prettiness. That is, probably never.

@clarry, thanks for your comment. It keeps us on our toes.

I'm a Frontend Engineering Manager at GitLab for specifically the area of Create, which is where your screenshot falls under.

We do value convenience and good experience. We're in the final steps of preparing a significant improvement to the Repository Browser [1]. We steered away from things like virtual scrolling exactly for the reason you mention: it breaks the browser's built-in search functionality.

We're currently putting the repository refactor up to feature completeness with a plan to make this as fast and useful of an experience as possible on a modern browser. Navigating between folders is much swifter than if we didn't use any JavaScript at all, just to name one of the benefits. Another benefit of using JS here is the fuzzy file finder (press t on any folder and it pops up). All in the sake of convenience. We hope you'll appreciate the efforts we've put into these details.

Feel free to drop your thoughts on the Epic or creating new issues. Tag @andr3 on them and I'll follow up. We're listening.

[1] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/159

Regarding that screenshot of GitLab:

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/linux/tree/master/arch/arm/boot/...

Thank you for posting that. Actually I checked it out and contemplated including that very link in my original post, but I wasn't sure if your service was facing the same hug of death that presumably hit your Mastodon. :)

SourceHut is on different infrastructure than my personal Mastodon instance, it can take a lot more heat :)

> And Drew DeVault is kind of an asshole

This sentence was totally uncalled for.

His software is fantastic and he's an exceptional engineer. But I also personally know people that were turned off of Sourcehut because of the way he interacts with the community in some cases. When your project is a one man (now two) show, that kind of thing matters a lot.

>His software is fantastic and he's an exceptional engineer.

At the end of the day that's all that really matters. Look at Linus's many rants. People who get mad at him usually tried to assert their <insert special status here> as a reason for why their code/ideas get rejected. Reality is, most of the code just isn't up to quality standards and maintainers don't have the time to hold your hand and explain why it isn't.

>But I also personally know people that were turned off of Sourcehut because of the way he interacts with the community in some cases.

He made someone mad in one of my channels because he cracked a 10+ year old IRC joke and that person didn't get it. So now of course they are going to boycott everything he does and smear him as a misogynist.

> When your project is a one man (now two) show, that kind of thing matters a lot.

No, this means you can tell people to pound sand and not have to deal with HR and politics. It's the exact opposite of what you think.

We have real problems in the world, like bigger than a bad joke or a rejection letter. We should absolutely shame/ridicule businesses that have revenue models but then choose to open these shady channels on the side (like this telemetry). We should be suspect of VC firms that take <insert brutal regime here>'s money.

None of these statements are what I'd expect from a company. A product is more than the engineering that goes into it, so good engineer or not, if they suck at the rest of it then it doesn't matter. Linus is an exception to the rule, not the rule and lol at comparing people to him.

Maybe stop making misogynistic jokes? Doesn't matter how old they are, not even sure why the age of the joke is relevant.

Lastly, telling people to pound sand has to be one of the worst business strategies I've heard of.

I don't know.

On one hand, I agree that people being less-than-super-kind might be off putting, on the other hand I'm kinda tired about this age's push to always be super condescending about pretty much anything.

Some people have a tough/tough personality, get over it.

C'mon with this gossipy rumor-mongering.

Here, let me fix that for you:

"And I think Drew DeVault is kind of an asshole."

Calling someone an asshole is inherently opinionated. No need to add "think" to the sentence.

lol

I disagree, but I don't have time to elaborate this morning. FWIW:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-prime

Cheers.