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GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

ericharrison.info

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Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#31

Post by dhotson »

AndrejM wrote: post #18

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?

It's because the server has to create a tarball on demand, which can take a while.

So, instead of having your web request unresponsive for a minute while it's processing, they queue up a background task on the server and give you a "hardcore archiving in process.." response immediately.

Then I imagine they do some ajax polling to check when the background task has finished and the archive is ready.

It's a really good technique if you want your web app to be responsive. We do it at work for basically anything that will take more than a second.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#32

Post by mojombo »

AndrejM wrote: post #18

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?

Archives are generated when they are requested and cached for fifteen minutes. This cache length results in an average of 3.5GB of cached archives on disk at any given time. We have to serve a large number of archives for arbitrary revisions, so making you wait a few seconds for a tarball is currently the best tradeoff. It's possible that in the future we will increase the cache TTL (and the size of the cache) so that you are more likely to hit an already generated archive.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#33

Post by grandalf »

masklinn wrote: post #23
fierarul wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Github was also first, I believe. I think many git-persons find there are other services better than Github (in some areas they're interested in if not all of them), but the brain/market share of Github makes it basically a requirement.

I've looked and the only other feature I've seen that may perhaps rival Github is Joel's code review flow.

Would you mind mentioning specific features (other than ones that are part of another dvcs) that you are referring to?

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#34

Post by AndrejM »

mojombo wrote: post #32
AndrejM wrote: post #18

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?

Archives are generated when they are requested and cached for fifteen minutes. This cache length results in an average of 3.5GB of cached archives on disk at any given time. We have to serve a large number of archives for arbitrary revisions, so making you wait a few seconds for a tarball is currently the best tradeoff. It's possible that in the future we will increase the cache TTL (and the size of the cache) so tha…

That explains it. Thanks! (and I won't complain anymore :p)

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#35

Post by dhotson »

It's true, these small patches make me smile the most.

I had a contributor to a project of mine that basically just formatted the README file. I certainly appreciated it.

It's nice knowing you're not coding in a vacuum.

Re: GitHub is the Best Thing Ever

#37

Post by herdrick »

raganwald wrote: post #25
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…

Think of Github as a discoverable user interface for git . It has visible affordances . Github is to Git as OS X is to Unix.

Actually I think GitX (note: you want the Brotherbard fork of it) is that. I haven't learned much about Git from using Github, but GitX is great for that.
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