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GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

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Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#11

Post by Loic »

ajtaylor wrote: post #10
Loic wrote: post #8

You do not need github to do that. You just need git and any git hosting. Forking is just a clone, you push in your hosting (whatever it is) and ask the guy on the other end to pull. No centralized control, real distributed development. Linux is developed like that every day. My own forge software http://indefero.net is also developed like that, with forks on github, on other instances of Indefero or just on 'hand ro…

True, you don't need github. But it's killer feature is that provides the initial grease on the rails so that Joe Blow can come along to quickly and easily add a feature or fix a bug. As someone who just this week made some doc contributions to 2 different projects on GH, I can tell you the feeling is addictive. That's why Github is cool.

It is totally true (as I said, I am using github too), but take it as a reminder that git itself provides all the machinery to allow you to fork, share with pull request etc. independently of any provider. You do not need a forge hosting like Indefero or Github or you name it, to use it.

What I really like for example, is that I can pull a project from anywhere, be stuck on a local network with other developers, work on the code with branch/commit/pull in all the directions and then later, push back the results without the fear of losing something in the merge.

Git is great and more of it cannot hurt.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#12

Post by tlrobinson »

Loic wrote: post #8

You do not need github to do that. You just need git and any git hosting. Forking is just a clone, you push in your hosting (whatever it is) and ask the guy on the other end to pull. No centralized control, real distributed development. Linux is developed like that every day. My own forge software http://indefero.net is also developed like that, with forks on github, on other instances of Indefero or just on 'hand ro…

Yes, but git itself does not provide the discoverability, one click forking, or pull requests that makes this workflow so easy and fun.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#14

Post by ev0 »

It's exactly the same reason why I love GitHub. Got this moment when I forked three20 when it first published on github, and contributed a little patch to it for http auth.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#15

Post by fierarul »

parbo wrote: post #13

Or BitBucket if you're a Hg-person.

Actually Github seems to have a much better marketing compared to BitBucket. I would also imagine they are also quite larger.

I'm a Hg-person, but I was just thinking I could move my repositories from my dedicated server to Github (via some git-hg plugin they wrote).

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#16

Post by DrSprout »

steveklabnik wrote: post #4
pook wrote: post #2

We should make a Tiny Fork Day. A day where X people fork, make at least one contribution, and request a pull. Set up a cool site targetting people who are interested in coding, but haven't yet gotten the courage to contribute, and you could have something.

It's almost like a flash mob. I like it.

HN needs to scale up the voting arrows for mobile. That was supposed to be an upvote.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#17

Post by antirez »

Yes, GitHub is wonderful. It makes contributions so trivial that it's worth to pull even the littlest of the modifications. For instance: http://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ca3f830b32a0a8303a5a7...

Instead I think that an impressive amount of energy and work is often wasted because many developers will design & code an important patch before getting in touch with the author of some project. So the author will see a patch that probably makes totally sense but is not what was desirable for some reason (future directions, too bloat, there is a better way to do that).

If it's the kind of project where you can join some IRC channel or drop an email to some mailing list and get in touch with one of the developers, it's really a good idea before starting to code.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#18

Post by AndrejM »

The only thing I don't understand about github is that "hardcore archiving in process..". I mean why do I have to wait a minute before I can start downloading the archive? Isn't it costly if the server has to create an archive every time someone requests a download?

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#19

Post by _glass »

antirez wrote: post #17

Yes, GitHub is wonderful. It makes contributions so trivial that it's worth to pull even the littlest of the modifications. For instance: http://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ca3f830b32a0a8303a5a7... Instead I think that an impressive amount of energy and work is often wasted because many developers will design & code an important patch before getting in touch with the author of some project. So the author will see…

For trivial changes as describe in the article? I tend to disagree. Decentralization saves you this administrative issues, like getting in touch with people in advance, before they can see if you are really interested by actually coding. I think it shows your value of this community if you are contributing in the small at first if it is a larger project.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#20

Post by antirez »

_glass wrote: post #19
antirez wrote: post #17

Yes, GitHub is wonderful. It makes contributions so trivial that it's worth to pull even the littlest of the modifications. For instance: http://github.com/antirez/redis/commit/ca3f830b32a0a8303a5a7... Instead I think that an impressive amount of energy and work is often wasted because many developers will design & code an important patch before getting in touch with the author of some project. So the author will see…

For trivial changes as describe in the article? I tend to disagree. Decentralization saves you this administrative issues, like getting in touch with people in advance, before they can see if you are really interested by actually coding. I think it shows your value of this community if you are contributing in the small at first if it is a larger project.

I wrote "... will design & code an important patch ...". For important patches this is required, not for small changes.
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