Nobody is watching the repository, including me

Hi Ralph,

Git itself is the version-control tool, with synchronization functionality. GitHub uses Git, but you can also use Git independently or with other hosting platforms that support it.

The GitHub account and being part of the organization are, to me, quite important. I don't really see another simple way to structure the people around the project. Being part of the organization lets us know that you are one of the people involved in and taking care of the project. But you don't need to use Git.

About Git, if you ever want to learn more about it:

One nice thing is that LLMs know Git very well. You can basically ask an LLM to pull or push changes, and even ask it to handle many Git administrative tasks for you.

In our wiki, there is a Git/GitHub setup guide explaining how to create your own working environment. You can experiment independently there and, if you want, later propose your changes to the Xymon repository.

I think Git as a version-control tool is almost a must-have if you also want to experiment with LLMs. An LLM will often propose changes that seem good initially, but you can easily end up going in the wrong direction. Git keeps the history of all versions of your work locally. It can be used for code, but also for documentation and other files.

So if you suddenly realize that an LLM has messed up your document or code, Git makes it easy to go back and recover a known good version.

And your involvement is very valuable to us.

Cheers,
Bruno

No worries!  I don't use Git for anything.  I created that userid years ago because something I was looking at required it.

Ralph Mitchell

On Sat, Sep 19, 2026 at 9:35 AM Bruno Manzoni via Xymon <xymon@xymon.com> wrote:

Hi Roland,

Sorry for the flood. I think there is a legitimate need to be able to follow what changes in a repository.

From what I understand from GitHub, some notification use cases can be covered with subscriptions, but there isn't much fine-grained control. It seems possible to use Actions workflows to provide something similar with more control.

User behavior could also be constrained to some extent, but not too strictly, so we can keep supporting evolving tools, AI-assisted development, and novice contributors. For now, we have the Xymon wiki repository, which explains how to set up Git and related tools, and a CONTRIBUTING.md in each repository: 

Bruno

Le 18.09.2026 à 16:22, Roland Rosenfeld a écrit :

Hi Bruno!

On Fri, 18 Sep 2026, Bruno Manzoni via Xymon wrote:

  Being a collaborator notifies you of nothing: on GitHub, rights and
  notifications are unrelated. What subscribes you is the Watch button,
  and on xymon-monitoring/xymon nobody was using it, myself included. So
  when Scot opened #521, #522 and #523 last week, GitHub announced them
  to no one. Three clicks fix that, at the top right of

    https://github.com/xymon-monitoring/xymon

  Watch -> Custom -> Pull requests. No membership needed, the repository
  is public. And if you want to join the organisation, just let us know.

I had this enabled at the beginning but disabled it, when your AI
started acting every minute, since my mailbox was flooded.

I didn't find an option to only watch for newly created issues or PRs
(in contrast to watching every communication/update/push).
So now I have to manually look for new PRs/issues and subscribe those,
that I want to follow.

Do you know a better (custom) watch setup?  If I subscribe on "issues"
or "pull requests", I get a mail for every update in all issues/PRs
and this are that many if the AI is actively working, that I delete
the mails unread, which isn't better than not subscribing...
Maybe I should try to subscribe issues again...

Greetings
Roland

xymon@xymon.com
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