Programming

There are quite a few things I don't like about GitHub, but calling it legacy makes no sense.

I kinda got bored halfway through. From what I gather they're salty that GitHub is switching to react? If that's the issue then the headline is rather misleading isn't it?

Surely legacy software is one that drifts into obscurity through lack of investment which is the polar opposite of GitHub rewriting their entire front end..

My one complaint: Search code in a repo, and then there is no link to return to the repo home. Back, back, back, back...

The only issue they mention is browser page text search not working on rendered file view (blame).

The feels legacy conclusion doesn't make any sense to me.

GitHub is not the only platform implementing virtual scrolling, partial rendering of rendered files. There's a reason they do that: Files can get big, and adding various code highlighting and interactivity costs performance. It's not a local code representation and rendered canvas. It's rendered into a DOM and DOM representation, with markup and attached logic. Which at some point quickly becomes very inefficient or costly.

Not being able to use the browser text search is an unfortunate side effect.

I consider it a worsening modernization/feature addition. That's the opposite of legacy. We're moving forward (in a bad way), not stagnating.

When I click Blame, and then press Ctrl+F, it opens not my browser text search but the in-page in-file search. It works for me. (Not that I always use that search or like it.)

While I agree with the body of the post, the title is just utter bullshit in this context.

With that being said, GitHub is a prime example of Rails in action, warts and all. To many that use Rails it probably is erring towards legacy given some of the technical decisions made regarding frontend within Rails. Rails is one of those rare stacks where it isn't uncommon to see the likes of jQuery powering parts of UI, and parts of the Rails stack trying to make quasi-SPA's. Personal thoughts aside as a former Rails developer, it's long been said that GitHub and Rails have probably been too heavily intertwined.

I can understand why they're moving to React, but the gripe seems mostly with server-side rendering - which you can do within Rails. This just feels more like a feedback piece for a specific area of functionality over saying that GitHub is legacy.

I threw various keywords from that line into the browser’s command+F search box, and nothing came up.

When one clicks command+F while on the git blame, GitHub throws up their own search box. Not rendering everything at once is something a lot of stuff does.

The fact that the dates in the commit log are relative is stupid as shit. I am looking for the commit on March 14th at 3pm, not "last year"

edit: I'm an idiot 😭

edit 2: I just noticed that GitHub's git log does show exact dates, only as headings though, not on each commit.

The other day though, I tried to use the blame view on a large file and ran into an issue I don’t remember seeing before: I just couldn’t find the line of code I was searching for. I threw various keywords from that line into the browser’s command+F search box, and nothing came up. I was stumped until a moment later, while I was idly scrolling the page while doing the search again, and it finally found the line I was looking for. I realized what must have happened.

Oh, I think I hit that too. Obnoxious.

I didn't care that much, though, because normally I'd rather just use a local client (git directly or maybe magit in emacs).

the once-industry-leading status page no longer reports minor availability issues in an even vaguely timely manner;

Can't deal with issue-tracking with a local client, though.

I've used several different forges over my career and github is the worst by far. The navigation is clunky, the search never searches the stuff you want to look at without menu hopping, the recent repos doesn't include half the stuff you made a PR to recently, CI integration kinda sucks compared to gitlab or bitbucket.

I don't think this is an anti-React post, like the other commenters are implying.

This issue would occur when attempting to search any webpage with the web browser's builtin search feature before the content has a chance to load in. This happens if the page requires JavaScript to load, which is the case with React apps.

What does the author mean with "legacy"? I thought that meant "abandoned". Github is nowhere near abandoned. People keep flocking to it and giving it more power.

If it becomes too shitty to use, my guess is that the majority will still stay because of inertia. Regardless of what alternatives exist, the majority stays with the popular.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Honestly I got no problem with GitHub and use it everyday on a large open-source code base and it works like a charm.

Edge does that shit too with JSON... It made me switch to Firefox, so good for me (other than that Firefox has a tendency to enshittify too, but in different ways).

I want to self host instead, but then there's always the "what if a tornado hits my house and I lose my life's work?" fear that keeps me using GitHub...

Edit: thanks for the suggestions, I'll look into them!