Do they mention why the new search still doesn't provide sorting options? I found them very useful in the previous version.
First of all, the old system didn't really implement sorting for "recently changed" files. It implemented sorting for "recently indexed" documents. This was a decent proxy when we only rebuilt the index every two years. But as I discuss in the talk, we rebuild the index all the time now, so it would be pretty worthless as a sorting option. Another reason is due to the content deduplication I also discussed in the talk. When a blob is shared between repositories, what time do you store? Finally, it's complicated because of how Git works. If we did implement this, we'd like it to reflect when the path changed in the branch, which is what people mean by "when did this file last change". But Git doesn't have an efficient way to retrieve that information, so we'd have to build a system to keep track of it.
In short, it's hard to do right and easy to abuse. :-(
An alert on recently indexed content that matches keyword subscriptions, ala google alerts, would be an excellent alternative for that use-case.
I get this, but why break things if you don’t want to fix them? That’s great that you want to work on other things, but that feature was useful and existed for years and people depended on it. I pay for GitHub and you’re taking away features.
Not you personally, but this attitude is frustrating for me.
As a user, I don’t agree that the new features you implemented are better than the ones you took away.
It’s your choice, of course, but I don’t like this shift in dev mindset where really basic features that have been around since Unix time and are essential to programmers aren’t implemented because they are too hard.
Thanks for engaging in this thread and glad you’re working on this. But hoping since you’re involved in the development that you might be able to shift things a little toward “the good way.”