About GitHub issues (not always showing email replies)

[Qian Yun]

There were several times that GitHub does not display email replies
from Waldek. This is already causing headaches for me and I think
this situation is bad for the collaboration of the FriCAS project.

First, I understand that, for privacy reasons or other reasons,
an email based workflow can be preferred over a web based one.

I can think of 2 solutions right now:

1. It seems that Waldek is using one email account for googlegroups
and another email account for GitHub replies. I guess you are
managing the 2 email accounts in a single email client locally.
If so, I wonder if it is possible/convenient to send the reply
to googlegroups/GitHub issues through 2 email accounts simultaneously.

2. Setup some GitHub Actions script to forward every GitHub issue
comments to fricas-devel. Then when the issue is resolved, we can
sync the status back to GitHub.

- Qian

[Waldek Hebisch]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 09:17:06AM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
> There were several times that GitHub does not display email replies
> from Waldek. This is already causing headaches for me and I think
> this situation is bad for the collaboration of the FriCAS project.
>
> First, I understand that, for privacy reasons or other reasons,
> an email based workflow can be preferred over a web based one.
>
> I can think of 2 solutions right now:
>
> 1. It seems that Waldek is using one email account for googlegroups
> and another email account for GitHub replies. I guess you are
> managing the 2 email accounts in a single email client locally.
> If so, I wonder if it is possible/convenient to send the reply
> to googlegroups/GitHub issues through 2 email accounts simultaneously.

ATM the accounts are on two different machines. As popular
saying goes doing what you propose is SMOP (small matter of
programming), but I would prefer to spent my programming time
on FriCAS and not on mail software. And also see below...

> 2. Setup some GitHub Actions script to forward every GitHub issue
> comments to fricas-devel. Then when the issue is resolved, we can
> sync the status back to GitHub.

Primary reason that I directed Github messages to separate
address is that Github can be quite spammy, there is a lot
of trivial messsages. Duplicating messages would add to
the problem.

I must admit that my prefered information flow would be
as follows:
- issues in Github issue tracker. But if there is need
for discussion it should be in mailing list
- in general discussions (including proposed changes)
in mailing list
- changes as patches (diff files)

I understand that third point (patches) is disliked by
other people here, but up to now I did not figure out
how to merge Github pull request using _only_ git commands.
Since I unable to use git commands ATM handling merging
pull requests is extremally inconvenient for me.

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Dima Pasechnik]

what exactly is not working here for you?

GitHub PRs git branches are just, well, git branches, so producing and pushing a merged branch is possible with git commands only.

Marking the PR as resolved, on the other hand, seems tricky, if at all possible. There are command line tools for this, so a browser is not needed, ( e.g. tig, see  https://jonas.github.io/tig/ )

but one would need to authenticate to GitHub once.

Since I unable to use git commands ATM handling merging
pull requests is extremally inconvenient for me.

--
                              Waldek Hebisch

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[Qian Yun]

On 7/23/22 21:46, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 09:17:06AM +0800, Qian Yun wrote:
>> There were several times that GitHub does not display email replies
>> from Waldek. This is already causing headaches for me and I think
>> this situation is bad for the collaboration of the FriCAS project.
>>
>> First, I understand that, for privacy reasons or other reasons,
>> an email based workflow can be preferred over a web based one.
>>
>> I can think of 2 solutions right now:
>>
>> 1. It seems that Waldek is using one email account for googlegroups
>> and another email account for GitHub replies. I guess you are
>> managing the 2 email accounts in a single email client locally.
>> If so, I wonder if it is possible/convenient to send the reply
>> to googlegroups/GitHub issues through 2 email accounts simultaneously.
>
> ATM the accounts are on two different machines. As popular
> saying goes doing what you propose is SMOP (small matter of
> programming), but I would prefer to spent my programming time
> on FriCAS and not on mail software. And also see below...

Just saying objectively (no judging), your dislike to use GitHub
web interface is in someway, is similar to Tim Daly's insistence
on the usage of literature programming. (Not saying whether it is
good or bad, just 99% people don't do things like that.) This choice
is easier for you, but it might not be the best for the community and
thus not best for the future of FriCAS.

>> 2. Setup some GitHub Actions script to forward every GitHub issue
>> comments to fricas-devel. Then when the issue is resolved, we can
>> sync the status back to GitHub.
>
> Primary reason that I directed Github messages to separate
> address is that Github can be quite spammy, there is a lot
> of trivial messsages. Duplicating messages would add to
> the problem.
>
> I must admit that my prefered information flow would be
> as follows:
> - issues in Github issue tracker. But if there is need
> for discussion it should be in mailing list
> - in general discussions (including proposed changes)
> in mailing list
> - changes as patches (diff files)
>
> I understand that third point (patches) is disliked by
> other people here, but up to now I did not figure out
> how to merge Github pull request using _only_ git commands.
> Since I unable to use git commands ATM handling merging
> pull requests is extremally inconvenient for me.
>

Although I do not use it myself, you can operate GitHub in command line:
https://cli.github.com/

Also, in the future, I'll try to post patches to maillist then.

- Qian

[Qian Yun]

Just saw a recent article that somewhat is related to this topic:
(in the spirit of "email vs web")

Leaving python-dev behind https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/

Quotes:

Discourse is an open-source web forum project that says it aims to
"reimagine what a modern Internet discussion forum should be today,
in a world of ubiquitous smartphones, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter"

That led to some predictable grumbling about Discourse and the problems
with following a web-based forum in comparison to a mailing list. That
divide comes up whenever changes of this sort are announced or
discussed, but newer developers generally seem to be uninterested in
learning the "joys" of participating on mailing lists. In part, that is
because the relevance of email as a communication mechanism has fallen
almost completely off the radar for many.

While there were posts with the usual negative opinions of web forums
versus email, they were fairly muted. To an extent, it would seem that
there is a generational change going on in the Python community; the
older developers are either adapting, perhaps via mailing-list mode, or
kind of just bowing out.

For those of us who cut our teeth on threaded, text-only, bottom-posted
discussions, it is completely mind-boggling that Kids These Days (tm) do
not see the advantages of such ... discourse—but that seems to be the
way of things.

- Qian

[Waldek Hebisch]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 04:02:42PM +0200, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jul 2022, 15:46 Waldek Hebisch, <de...@fricas.math.uni.wroc.pl>
> wrote:
>
> > I must admit that my prefered information flow would be
> > as follows:
> > - issues in Github issue tracker. But if there is need
> > for discussion it should be in mailing list
> > - in general discussions (including proposed changes)
> > in mailing list
> > - changes as patches (diff files)
> >
> > I understand that third point (patches) is disliked by
> > other people here, but up to now I did not figure out
> > how to merge Github pull request using _only_ git commands.
> >
>
> what exactly is not working here for you?
> GitHub PRs git branches are just, well, git branches, so producing and
> pushing a merged branch is possible with git commands only.

First problem is to have good address for this branch. IIRC
I found info how to fetch this branch, but I was not able to
do what I needed apparently due to permission problems.

Part of problem seem to be that Github associates permissions
with address that one uses and that they disabled password
authentication. That breaks old instructions. And I did
not find up-to date instructions (actually since old
instructions that I found did not work I did not copy them
so I have no instruction new or old).

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Dima Pasechnik]

Do you mean to say that you cannot have ssh authentication with
GitHub's git server?
(well, yes, if you don't have a GitHub account then you can't upload
an ssh key, indeed...)

>
> --
> Waldek Hebisch
>
> --
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[Waldek Hebisch]

I have. But doing

git clone https://github.com/fricas/fricas

gives read-only copy. IIRC has to do use

g...@github.com:fricas/fricas

At least for some operations using https address
leads to password prompt that does not work.
For best "security" error messages are non-informative,
so it was not clear what is wrong. My first suspicion
was that instruction was wrong (there is a _lot_ of
wrong stuff on the net). But later I realised
another thing did not work with https address, so
probably I used https address and merge did not
work due to https address.

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Qian Yun]

I think the correct way for GitHub access is to use PAT:

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/creating-a-personal-access-token

You have to login to web pages and generate a PAT, then
use it instead of password for the https address.

- Qian

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 1:42 AM Waldek Hebisch

Are you saying that

git clone g...@github.com:fricas/fricas

does not work for you, despite having an ssh key uploaded?
This is most probably due to the key being too short, or in an
outdated compromosed format.
An ed25519 key, or a suffiecienly long rsa key (at least 3000 bit?) should work.

>
> At least for some operations using https address
> leads to password prompt that does not work.

For a password-besed access you nowdays need a 2FA set up.

> For best "security" error messages are non-informative,
> so it was not clear what is wrong. My first suspicion
> was that instruction was wrong (there is a _lot_ of
> wrong stuff on the net). But later I realised
> another thing did not work with https address, so
> probably I used https address and merge did not
> work due to https address.
>
> --
> Waldek Hebisch
>

> --
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[Dima Pasechnik]

On Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 2:11 AM Qian Yun <oldk...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think the correct way for GitHub access is to use PAT:
>
> https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/creating-a-personal-access-token
>
> You have to login to web pages and generate a PAT, then
> use it instead of password for the https address.

well, yes, that's a way to circumvent 2FA, but certainly this is an
overkill for merely using git

(it's needed for operations beyond that, i.e. for using GitHub's APIs)

>
> - Qian
>
> On 7/26/22 07:42, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 26, 2022 at 12:54:33AM +0200, Dima Pasechnik wrote:
> >>
> >> Do you mean to say that you cannot have ssh authentication with
> >> GitHub's git server?
> >> (well, yes, if you don't have a GitHub account then you can't upload
> >> an ssh key, indeed...)
> >
> > I have. But doing
> >
> > git clone https://github.com/fricas/fricas
> >
> > gives read-only copy. IIRC has to do use
> >
> > g...@github.com:fricas/fricas
> >
> > At least for some operations using https address
> > leads to password prompt that does not work.
> > For best "security" error messages are non-informative,
> > so it was not clear what is wrong. My first suspicion
> > was that instruction was wrong (there is a _lot_ of
> > wrong stuff on the net). But later I realised
> > another thing did not work with https address, so
> > probably I used https address and merge did not
> > work due to https address.
> >
>

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[Waldek Hebisch]

That one works. But the is still question what address should
I use to fetch branch corresponding to pull request?

--
Waldek Hebisch

[Qian Yun]

IIUC, there are two ways according to
https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/collaborating-with-pull-requests/reviewing-changes-in-pull-requests/checking-out-pull-requests-locally

1. Use github-cli. Pretty big package, written in go.
I never used it.

2. "Fetch the reference to the pull request based on its ID number,
creating a new branch in the process."

````
$ git fetch origin pull/ID/head:BRANCHNAME
````

For example:

````
git fetch origin pull/100/head:pr-100
````

Creates a local branch "pr-100" that references
https://github.com/fricas/fricas/pull/100

- Qian

[Ralf Hemmecke]

Hi Waldek,

The following is similar to what Qian suggested, but using ssh.

Create an ssh key and upload the ~/.ssh/github.pub to your github account.

ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -f $HOME/.ssh/github -C YOURNAME@github

Put the following into your ~/.ssh/config file

------------------------------------
# Access my github repositories.
Host github
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github
HostName github.com
User git
------------------------------------

Get you personal FriCAS repository (that "remote" is called "origin" by
default.)

git clone github:hemmecke/fricas.git

Add the official FriCAS repo as "upstream"

git remote add upstream github:fricas/fricas.git

Both "origin" and "upstream" are writable, because you use ssh.

Get the pull request branch.
For example, to get https://github.com/fricas/fricas/pull/73 into your
local repository do the following.

git fetch upstream pull/73/head:pr-73

Now merge the pull request if you want

git merge pr-73

Push it to your own repo (if you like).

git push origin master

Push the new master to the official fricas repo.

git push upstream master



Ralf

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 8:04 PM Ralf Hemmecke <ra...@hemmecke.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Waldek,
>
> The following is similar to what Qian suggested, but using ssh.
>
> Create an ssh key and upload the ~/.ssh/github.pub to your github account.
>
> ssh-keygen -t ecdsa -f $HOME/.ssh/github -C YOURNAME@github

IMHO the today advice is: don't use ecdsa, use ed25519

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