Earlier today, now that Rogallo has matured a fair bit, I thought I'd update the banner image and, in doing so, refresh the "social preview" for the repository. This is easy enough, and something I've done plenty of times with plenty of projects. You just go into the general settings and upload a new image.
So, I faffed in Pixelmator Pro for a short while, got the new banner going, and then uploaded it. Weirdly, it didn't preview. I was just left with a blank rectangle.
I tried a couple more times... nothing. I then tested the repository itself with an online "social card" checking tool and, unsurprisingly, an image was set but it was a broken image.
Initially, I was entertaining the idea that I'd somehow done something silly, but really it's something hard to get wrong. A little bit of searching shows that it's not just me, with not one but two reports showing up.
It's things like this that bother me most when using GitHub (or any other large service). Sure, the big outages are bad, but with them you know they're being actively worked on, they're something that's going to be getting constant attention until they're resolved. Moreover, those sorts of issues generally suggest a scale problem1. These little bugs, though, suggest a lack of attention to detail, a lack of proper testing, a lack of care about the product as a whole.
It's not even the first time in the last couple of weeks that I've run into something like this. The other day I wanted to convert an issue into a discussion -- a feature I've used so many times before. This time... nope. Just didn't work. I forget exactly at what point it failed; I think the dialog popped up and then disappeared. Whatever the now-forgotten detail of the failure, the issue was that a long-standing, reliable feature just stopped working.
Again: big outages can be annoying, but in those cases I tend to just go off and do something else, either at my keyboard or, shockingly, away from it. By the time I get back into the office it'll be sorted. These little things... who knows when they'll be fixed?
Perhaps this bit-rot is a result of the panicked fixes to those big-bang problems?
Yes, of their own design. But still... ↩