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Comment by felixgallo | Hacker News Reader

These are great, but they're bugfixes. You'd finish them in the first few months. Then what are you going to do? Stare at an aquarium all day? Here's what I would build if I worked at github:

* Github CI - simple CI for every language, integrating with:

* Github Artifacts - repository for versioned deployable build packages (binaries, tar.gz files, ios builds, android builds...), integrating with:

* Github Deploy - deploy tooling for deploying runnable artifacts or artifact combinations to either your own infrastructure, or to aws/azure/google, or:

* Github Cloud - instances/containers as a service

and the 'fork' button would be a pulldown that would include the options 'fork', 'fork and test', 'fork, test and deploy'. Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career.

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You'd finish them in the first few months.

I bet you could work on small polish issues like this for a lifetime and never finish. There's always something to improve.

Non of the items in the author's list is a bugfix. They all are enhancements. A bugfix would fix a bug, which means something would not work as it is supposed to, fail, and that is not the case here.

Arguing semantics, maybe. But I think it is important to distinguish here. Polishing issues or enhancements or whatever you call it are things that do not need to be adressed, but they can. But bugs needs to be fixed. Choosing between what to do now is choosing between maintenance work and feature enhancement work, plumbing and UX.

I think it would be great if Github would hire and let him build these things, does not matter if he finishes in a month.

Of all the things I wish Github had, a mailing list service would be really amazing, and the kind of thing that wouldn't be done in the first few months. Sourceforge offers atrocious mailman-based email, larger foss projects on github suffer :(

What appeals to you about mailing lists?

If it's reporting issues, discussion solutions, and reviewing patches, there are Issues and Pull Requests.

If it's for general discussions about the "future of the project" or bigger-picture topics, I'd use Discourse. It's a really nice way to organize discussions that are one step removed from code-related issues.

If it's for things where you need quick or real time feedback, there's IRC, Gitter, and Slack, all great options for messaging/chat.

> If it's for general discussions about the "future of the project" or bigger-picture topics, I'd use Discourse. It's a really nice way to organize discussions that are one step removed from code-related issues.

This is what is appealing and Github offering a builtin-to-github solution for it, with linking to Github accounts, autoformatting etc (like in issues) and so on. There is so much potential.

Why can't you just have those discussions in issues? Create a "future of the project" label.

Because then users can't simply send an email to create a new topic to talk about...

So that's the one blocker? Creating an issue via email?

No, the blocker is setting up mailing lists with a forum-like interface (cf. discourse), but integrated to github (uses the github account) and without actually having to do the setup. Also, without polluting issues.

Actually opening issues via email would be nice to. Trac isn't perfect, but I remember email2trac[1] quite fondly. Combined with email notifications on change, it made it easy to forward bug/error-reports to a trac instance, and automatically create an issue. Or just let support@ go straight to trac.

I still think having an email interface (as in: in addition to a REST API) is very useful. Having a web interface as well isn't bad either.

[1] https://oss.trac.surfsara.nl/email2trac

Good project-specific labels to GH issues solves the "polluting" problem. The label/tag system is nicely flexible.

It sounds like what you really want is nested threads and top quoting and/or interstitial quote/response features?

(Arguably what you really need is commonly called a conference.)

You can do that via API, so it's pretty trivial to set up using an integrator like Zapier or tray.io.

Too bad you can't open a pull request to GitHub.com, no?

That's an interesting idea (one of my big blockers for migrating my projects off SourceForge is what to do with the mailing lists).

The issue UI is a little forum-like but is pretty clunky, and, of course, doesn't interact with email very well. Plus you need people to manually tag each issue with 'discussion'.

Are there any UI tweaks that could simplify this? For example, a way to provide a 'new issue' link with default labels?

(Also, is there a good way to import data as issues? I have a tonne of mbox archives that need to go somewhere.)

Isn't this a bit like saying: if it's for issue tracking, there's Bugzilla/trac/issuetracker/phabric, or if you need a wiki there's moinmon/mediawiki, or if you need a blog there's ghost/wordpress ?

More to the point: IRC (out-of-the-box) doesn't do archiving/search. Slack isn't self-host (which isn't an issue with people using github -- but it does introduce another vendor). Using external services forces you to maintain group membership, user-meta-data either in different user-databases, or via some form of federation.

No longer is removing a user/ssh-key from a github project enough to plug a hole in case of a hacked account.

Discourse isn't (that) bad -- but mailinglists are a lot better IMNHO. If you have a half-decent email program, like mutt, or even (al)pine.

At any rate, the ability to work via email (get bugs via email, close bugs via email) leverage what email is good at: off-line+synchronization. Which is one of the things git is good for. You know, distributed work.

Well, re: authentication -- I didn't think to check slack's support for oauth etc... apparently there's 0auth.com:

https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203772216-Using-...

https://auth0.com/docs/identityproviders

Not sure about authorization and group membership, channel authorization etc -- I assume you'll need to manage slack authorization with slack, and github authorization on the github side.

But fair's fair.

[ed: And now you have three providers:

https://auth0.com/pricing ]

Librelist is pretty decent.

What is CI and why do people want it? I looked up the acronym on wikipedia but couldn't figure it out.

Continuous Integration. A good example of that service would be something like http://travis-ci.org or https://jenkins-ci.org. Basically it's a service that runs some predefined task (usually your test suites) at important points: when something is pushed to or merged into master, when a Pull Request is opened, etc...

It also, um, builds your code. Some of us still use compiled languages :P

Continuous Integration (testing)

It stands for continuous integration.

Great minds... I was talking about this the other day with the other engineers at work, after learning about GitHub's most recent monstrous funding round. It seems like CI/a deployment service and something that competes in the crowded PaaS field is the next logical step.

AWS enables us to do some pretty slick things, but OpsWorks is a giant bag of suck that frequently finds a way to drain my time troubleshooting why something crazy or random has happened on the production server--behaviors I never saw in my previous role running a bare-metal LAMP stack for 4 years. A tighter integration between our GitHub repo and a testing/build server... Swoon.

I think I am happy that git hub not doing any of this. If they do everything * they may have affinity towards their stack. * excel on none. * lock in

A github CI would be awesome! I imagine it would get very costly for them though. I love Travis-CI and the easy integration, but it's too expensive for my non-open source projects.

GitHub CI might happen sooner rather than later https://twitter.com/j2h/status/627114183621013504

Anyway, if you want it today consider using our GitLab CI https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/ it is free if you bring your own runner.

All these are nice, but are not must-haves as they can be built outside of GitHub. The show-stopper for me is granular permissions - coming from the Gitolite [0] world, where I can permission even branches and do all kinds of checks and balances on the server, GitHub is a joke for a not-so-large enterprise! Another thing is the Wiki - why pages are based on Git and the Wiki is not?!

[0] http://gitolite.com/

I can't tell if there was a satirical subtext about aggressive expansion in this post, what with "Now that's a nice little 3-4 year career."

Exactly my thoughts.

After exploring Visual Studio Online (its free for 5 users), I am still not able to digest why there isn't a build and deploy system in GitHub.

There were great demos at Microsoft's BUILD15 for Automated Build and Release Management which demonstrates these features.

Maybe a more apt title would be "Things I would fix if I worked at GitHub". :)

GitHub CI and artifacts are great ideas. Owning the chain of Dev - test - deploy would be a superb move, one worth paying for!

These are great, but they're bugfixes. You'd finish them in the first few months. Then what are you going to do? Stare at an aquarium all day?

Bugfixes are not feature enhancements.

Also this makes you sound like a pleasant person to work with.....a real go getter.

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