I loved A (Partial) Defense of Debian by John Goerzen. “We recognize the value of something that just works, that is so stable that things like unattended-upgrades are safe and reliable.” I did not appreciate this for many years. But now I’m back to using Debian for my servers and that’s exactly why. The years on my laptop have taught me this.
And I still love ❤ Slackware. 🙂
The only reason I’m using PureOS on my laptop is that it came pre-installed and hasn’t failed me, yet. It’s basically a repackaging of Debian, with changes.
I do acknowledge the beauty of a web based workflow, but my aesthetics actually point me the other way, the way John Goerzen defends, based on local git, local review tools, local email clients. Perhaps these days it’s harder to set these up locally? This is something I have noticed at the office, for example: many developers don’t like to use `git` directly. They try to never go to the command line, preferring to use the Eclipse git plugin EGit instead. I am torn. On Windows, using `git` and and `magit` inside Emacs is slow. I only drop to the command line when I’m confused and need to make sure I know what’s going on. And we use GitLab to review code using merge requests. So yes, I understand the lure and the convenience of using an all-in-one website.
I still want to like the old school workflow using local tools and email.
Github constantly forces me to their website. I can’t very well work on bug reports, etc. without a strong Internet connection. And it’s designed to push people into using their tools and their interface, which is inferior in a lot of ways to a local interface – but then the process to pull down someone else’s set of patches involves a lot of typing and clicking, much more that would be involved from a simple git format-patch. In short, I don’t have my shortcut keys, my environment, etc. for reviewing things – the roadblocks are there to make me use theirs. – John Goerzen
I know this is true, and yet I’ve also enjoyed contributing code to projects hosted on GitHub and GitLab and other “software forges”. It’s smooth sailing if you’re all-in or all-out. Crossing over is what breaks your workflow.
#Administration #Programming
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Glad to find more people making the point. Github was tolerable but the long term effects are starting to show.
– orbifx 2019-03-18 15:07 UTC