> Interestingly though I still use NNTP (News) daily. One community I participate in still makes use of a (private) NNTP server as the forum of choice. Only the lightest amount of moderation is needed, and trolls are swiftly booted.
I really wish that more places would just set up a private NNTP server without any peering as a forum. Do people just use NNTP readers, or is there a web frontend?
> It's an awful shame that GitHub doesn't allow commenting on commit messages.
You actually can comment on a commit itself. I'm in the habit on middle-clicking on the sha1 link of commits in a PR and looking at the commit itself. You can comment on lines in the commit, and there's a text area at the bottom where you can comment on the entire commit itself. I'll then follow up with making a comment on the PR linking the commit (pasting the sha1 link) and saying I made a few comments here.
> It's as if GitHub is being run by people who just don't know how Git is meant to be used.
Github wasn't really designed with code review in mind. A lot of the features they added over the years for review appear to be hacked on rather than fixing fundamental design issues (like being able to comment on commit messages without having to jump through a bunch of hoops).
Review systems like gerrit, phabricator, review board, or even email, do a much better job at exposing individual commits and their associated metadata like the commit message.
I don't think they were suggesting to review the individual commits, rather the (individual) commit messages. Commit messages are text, so you could have a similar line by line click-and-comment review interface as you already have for the code changes.
> I don't think they were suggesting to review the individual commits, rather the (individual) commit messages.
That's a good point.
> Commit messages are text, so you could have a similar line by line click-and-comment review interface as you already have for the code changes.
It would be nice if something like that was available in Github. The closest thing you could do would be to copy the commit title and body and paste it as quoted text in the text area and then comment on it inline.
> A commit is required to have a bug id. The bug tracker has entire discussions of what lead to the commit
Companies do change bug trackers and ticketing systems and those links may no longer work years down the line.
> The bug tracker has entire discussions of what lead to the commit so it's not clear to me that a detailed commit message is a plus when the real detailed info is in the tracker. Yes it's indirect but there's no way I'm going to summarize the entire issue discussion.
But summarizing it can be one of the most valuable things you can do for a maintainer who has to make changes years after you've moved on. For one thing, the problem and discussion is fresh in your mind and you understand the context. In a few minutes, you could summarize the problem, the approach taken to fix it and alternatives that were considered but not used because the chosen solution clearly didn't have an issue/was more efficient, etc.
Even if you didn't want to do that, you could just copy and paste the entire discussion text at the end of the commit message so that even if the bug tracker is no longer in use in the future, the discussion itself was preserved in the commit history and accessible via git log or blame.
> > A commit is required to have a bug id. The bug tracker has entire discussions of what lead to the commit
> Companies do change bug trackers and ticketing systems and those links may no longer work years down the line.
I've experienced this twice, we switched from Bugzilla to FogBugz to Jira in my time. With one relatively small exception in the FogBugz to Jira transition, all past case information was lost.
If you have mobility issues that prevent you from exiting your building easily then you can move somewhere else. We don’t need to make every apartment building in the country more expensive for this extremely specific scenario.
I can go up and down unobstructed stairs without any issues, but I have back problems which keep me from doing heavy lifting and I'm in no condition to jump or climb over a sofa in the middle of a flight of stairs.
The real problem here is expecting people to be able bodied enough to deal with a lack of alternative exits when someone in the same building inevitably is careless enough to start a fire.
> I like how vim is modal, but some Windows shortcuts (like Control-C) just make too much sense to given them up on Linux
Ctrl-C does work in the GUI. That said, one thing I like about Linux is being able to highlight text using the mouse and then pasting it by middle-clicking. I don't have to interact with the keyboard at all to copy and paste text that way.
Except that newer products like Slack and email providers with their conversation view are conflating the two use cases.
Slack tries to implement features of a forum by allowing threaded conversations. Conversation view email removes the nested threads and makes the email thread look more like a chat as opposed to a forum discussion with multiple threads.
Yet, when I'm browsing Facebook, I frequently encouter an issue where the brower tab process starts allocating 5% or more of resident memory (on a 16 GB memory machine). On the other hand, my usenet client worked just fine on my computer with 16 MB of memory at the time without slowing the compter to a crawl due to excessive memory usage.
