[HN Gopher] Opengist: Open-source alternative to GitHub Gists
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Opengist: Open-source alternative to GitHub Gists
Author : nalgeon
Score : 107 points
Date : 2024-04-23 18:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| This is awsome bc Github Gist links aren't Cool URL's and break
| on name changes even though repo's don't and Gist's have those
| hash ID's. I don't know that the Styles need be _quite_ so on-
| the-nose, though I am glad to see syntax highlighting is already
| in.
| ashryan wrote:
| I dig this idea. I have the sneaking suspicion that GitHub Gists
| aren't a first-class citizen of the overall GitHub product. I
| tried navigating to mine the other day and found myself ejecting
| to a search engine to find them. And then wondering if they are
| something I can trust to be around in the future.
|
| I use Gists as a way to stash lists publicly. I'm curious what
| use cases for Gists exist beyond the obvious "here's a snippet"
| (which is valuable in and of itself!).
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah, Gists don't feel like they've had much attention in a
| very long time.
|
| I still love them as a product and use them on a daily basis,
| and there's nothing that feels particularly missing from them,
| but they're clearly not something GitHub are investing a lot of
| effort in beyond keeping them working at the moment.
| jjayj wrote:
| I don't use gists. Haven't found a need I guess.
|
| If they work and there's nothing missing, what effort would
| they put into them?
| dewey wrote:
| Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it
| doesn't get a ,,bug fixes and improvements" update shipped
| every month.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Same reason people think a project is abandoned if it
| doesn't get a ,,bug fixed and improvement" update shipped
| every month.
|
| Good point.
|
| Any new product should have $X bugs/month added by the
| current developers so that future developers can indicate
| 'signs of life' by fixing $Y bugs/month![1]
|
| TBH, once a product reaches whatever goal the founders
| set out to achieve, adding features can only make it
| worse, not better. Bugfixes, refinements? Sure. Extra
| features? Can only heighten the learning curve for
| newcomers in the future, even if the incremental learning
| curve added is small.
|
| [1] With suitable values for $X and $Y so that a project
| can show slow and steady improvement in reliability,
| until the inevitable rewrite 12 months later.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't it easier just to adjust the wording or typos in
| the comments so that it looks like activity without
| troubling yourself with actual changes to give the same
| look?
| jjayj wrote:
| You could probably just release the same commit again
| with a different number.
| groestl wrote:
| > adding features can only make it worse, not better.
|
| There are exceptions, but software is usually part of a
| system, a social system. Successful software changes its
| environment, and in turn, the environment demands change
| from the software, which diligent maintainers attend to.
|
| It follows that, in the general case, "no change in a
| long time" is a pretty good indicator that the software
| is either unsuccessful or abandoned. As I said, there are
| exceptions (gists might be one of them).
| ashryan wrote:
| I see what you mean here. I tend to agree that Gists
| seems relatively feature-complete (at least for my basic
| use case; I can't speak for others).
|
| For my part, I'm reacting to Gists' place in the overall
| GitHub UX. Maybe it's just me, but it feels heavily
| implied that Gists aren't part of the golden path.
| doakes wrote:
| Val town has a cool idea of making gists runnable:
| https://www.val.town/
| sdesol wrote:
| At first I was like this interesting but I don't see this as
| more than a hobby project. Then I did some more reading and
| it turns out they recently raised 5.5M (seed round). I guess
| if they can become the next place for people to dump code for
| ML, I can see how they were able to raise.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Looks like they only support typescript, so ML is a stretch
| as of now. Sad, I was excited haha
| bosch_mind wrote:
| Check out Cloudflare Workers. Supports Python and has AI
| integrations
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I don't know. These things make for very impressive demos
| and can raise a lot of interest, but the devil is always in
| the details.
|
| I've worked on a project like that before. Very simple
| editor, you put your code in, and it gives you an API
| endpoint. Wanna make a change? Just edit, hit save and it's
| live. It was a great hit in all demos. Everybody loved it.
| Then developers actually started using it, and questions
| like "how do I do dependency management?", "How do I split
| my code into multiple files?", "How do I build my code?",
| "What about Java/C#/Go/Python/etc?", "How do I debug my
| code?", "How do I use source control?", "How do I integrate
| it into my CI/CD?", "Can I deploy a container?", "How do I
| manage multiple contributors and projects and access and
| dev/stage/prod?" Come up.
|
| You can see how they skirt around some of these questions.
| "Modern JavaScript" as in just import from npm or urls so
| they don't have to worry about dependency management and
| putting lots of code in 1 file. Or writing a custom blob
| library to deal with storage. But the minute you need
| anything that needs a standard file system, network
| features, or anything any developer would expect to have,
| you run into a very steep cliff. You end up slowly needing
| to implement an IDE, a source control, a CI/CD system, a
| deployment pipeline, an offline experience, a monitoring
| story, and many things that are better implemented by many
| other products already.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Cloudflare Workers comes to mind.
|
| They have the same service in a way: HTTP endpoint,
| email, cron, etc. You can edit your code on the same
| site, although I think that's much lower on their
| "features" list as compared to val.
|
| Their answer to some of the questions you frame is simply
| "you dont".
|
| No filesystem, use R2. No source control, bring your own.
| No containers, use wasm.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Sort of, but even Cloudflare workers went from a file
| editor to hosting an IDE-like environment (vscode) for
| your worker, and allows you to deploy worker "projects"
| directly from local/CI environments. Most Cloudflare
| Workers deployments I've seen were for custom proxies, or
| API transformation layers but nothing more complicated
| due to all the limitations, and it seems that's exactly
| what couldflare wants them to be used for, for now at
| least.
|
| Not to mention that Cloudflare, despite their impressive
| services and scale, makes no profits. They don't publish
| details for Workers in particular, but I wouldn't be
| surprised if it's nothing but a blip in their overall
| negative income. They are also a public company so they
| are not beholden to VC influence per se or pressure to
| make profit on a short time scale. Their stock isn't
| doing well as a result. I personally have the sense that
| Cloudflare is playing a very long game and their board
| are ok with it. But I don't know if val.town or any
| small-time VC funded startup is playing the same 20/30
| year game on becoming the de facto backbone of the
| internet the way Cloudflare is.
| Axsuul wrote:
| Thanks for building this! Any plans on supporting anonymous
| gists?
| riley_dog wrote:
| I've been hosting an instance of OpenGist for a while now. It's
| been extremely solid. Kudos to the dev!
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| I think this is awesome, but I do not see the use case: Why would
| anybody register on my site to publish his or her gists? I would
| love to get my gists from Github published under my site, but for
| this case I would prefer a static site generator (hugo, jekyll)
| with a good theme for gists.
| jskherman wrote:
| Now this had me curious. Is there someone out there who has
| actually created a theme/template website for a static site
| generator like Hugo, Zola, or Jekyll where you could use both
| the usual markdown and the actual code files themselves? It
| seems fairly doable based off the templating engines available.
|
| On the other hand, Docker seems to be a bit overkill for
| something one could use a static site for instead if it's
| supposed to be self-hosted. It's even better security-wise.
| Otherwise, I wonder if one could upload a gist and have it run
| on the server through some unknown exploit.
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Yes, this is what I meant. After the post above I looked for
| gist themes for the obvious candidates (jekyll, hugo,
| mkdocs), but could not find one.
| dcsan wrote:
| if the fediverse supports posting with markdown and code syntax
| highlighting, what is the benefit of a standalone gist thing? -
| Perhaps the ability to edit/clone and update? - the anonymous
| dumps use case (which this doesn't support yet)
| zilti wrote:
| I guess one neat feature is that every gist is actually also a
| git repository, but that's about it...
| aprilnya wrote:
| I don't think I would use fedi for this because it would pop up
| in the timelines of everyone who follows me
| INTPenis wrote:
| This goes for both Gitlab Snippets and Github gists, but I never
| really wanted it to be backed by git.
|
| In the beginning I saw it as just a convenient pastebin service
| associated with the git service, for single files and quick
| sharing.
|
| It seems overkill to create a repo. When people make gists that
| are like 2-3 files they should just make a repo.
| kjksf wrote:
| Might as well plug my adjacent tool:
| https://tools.arslexis.io/gisteditor/
|
| It's a better interface for editing / creating GitHub gists.
|
| Login with GitHub, get a list of gists, get a full blown
| CodeMirror-based editor. Preview for markdown files.
|
| And it's open-source:
| https://github.com/kjk/tools.arslexis.io/tree/main/frontend/...
|
| Built mostly with Svelte 4 and a tiny bit of Go backend.
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