GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#91

Post by sdesol » Sun, Mar 20, 2016, 10:49 PM UTC

ryan-c wrote: post #57

sdesol wrote: post #41

This seems like a good time to advertise my search engine for GitHub and Bitbucket. You can learn a little more about it at http://gitsense.github.io And as the screen shot below shows, you don't need to be logged in, to search a repository. http://imgur.com/W1Qx59h To make the long story short, you can install our indexing engine on low cost platforms like $10 VPS plans from DigitalOcean/Vultr or on dated hardware l…

How much of github do you index? I was just raging this morning about how annoying it is that github ignores symbols when searching.

Right now we are indexing about 5,000 repos. We'll probably stop at 50,000 since we index an order of a magnitude more than GitHub does per repo. Our objective isn't really to index as many repos as possible, but rather we are focused on making it insanely easy for others to index what ever repos they want.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#92

Post by Rondom » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 12:18 AM UTC

r0muald wrote: post #18

danmaz74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, a trend towards self hosted solutions will only make finding projects to explore harder.

Or create the demand for an index/curation platform/search engine, which would be something quite interesting, I think.

"Back in the old days" we had Freshmeat...

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#93

Post by mchahn » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 4:37 AM UTC

Who uses github without being logged in? Why would you use it without being logged in? When I saw the front-page in the wayback machine I realized I hadn't seen the front-page in years. It certainly wasn't that fancy when I signed up.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#94

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 7:14 AM UTC

true_religion wrote: post #85

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, there is lock-in for non-owners of projects: You cannot submit pull requests to pull from git repositories hosted elsewhere and without signing in. Which also is an incentive to use it for other things, once you have an account that you need in order to contribute. Secondly, they do have proprietary features, embrace, extend, extinguish style.

Was this possible with any previously popular solution? The only thing I can think of is patches via email, but that's just using no repository at all.

I don't follow ... patches via HTTP is a repository, patches via email is not?!

But apart from sending changes via email (which is actually a very good way to go for small(ish) changes--actually, it is so good, the Linux kernel developers use exactly that: git can generate emails that are both human-readable, so you can easily review and comment on patches, but also can be imported automatically into a repository by the recipient), you can just send pull requests via email? You simply put into an email the URI of your git repository, wherever it is hosted, and the recipient can pull from it. That is the power of an open distributed system like the internet.

And to spin this a bit further: Actual "hosting" isn't even necessary technically. Especially once we get rid of IPv4 and NAT, it should be trivial to spin up a git server instance on your workstation (or maybe your smartphone, as that probably is online 24/7) so people can pull from there. Whether that is practical? It well might be--but my point is more to show what is technically possible.

And yes, all of that was possible with a "previously popular solution"--git existed before github, obviously, and its popularity is what caused github. Also, all of that applies just the same for other distributed SCMs, of course.

Re: GitHub doesn't show search field unless you sign in

#95

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC » Mon, Mar 21, 2016, 7:23 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #84

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, first, there is lock-in for non-owners of projects: You cannot submit pull requests to pull from git repositories hosted elsewhere and without signing in. Which also is an incentive to use it for other things, once you have an account that you need in order to contribute. Secondly, they do have proprietary features, embrace, extend, extinguish style.

Unless they convert repos to a proprietary format that requires a Github client to use, don't allow git cloning or pushing, and are trying to add Github-only features to git itself, then I think "embrace, extend, extinguish" is a bit overblown.

That's not how it works. Microsoft didn't add Windows-only features to Netscape either. It added them to IE. And then lured people into using those in order to make them dependent on these proprietary features and in order to decrease interoperability of websites using those extensions with other browsers.