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The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

joeyh.name

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Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#41

Post by sametmax »

Walkman wrote: post #23
sametmax wrote: post #13

Even if I ended up migrating from github, I would still look for a centralized instance. Why ? The price for one migration in a few years is not a big deal compare to self hosting, which is a human resource hog for small entities. I have more important things to do than to deal with deploy, configure, maintain, document, secure, and test my own instance. I really don't want to admin one more server just for that. I d…

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

Don't you forget a little something ?

Buying the server, reading the docs, setting it up, buying an URL domain, binding it to the server, getting the backup server, setting it up, testing that everything works, training the team on the new UI, documenting the whole things for when you are not available or it's not your job anymore, blocking one team of 5 devs from working for 2 hours (or a man day of work) because something went wrong just once...

It's not just resources you spend on useless things. It's resources you take __from__ useful things.

Or worst, you are in a company. Now you have to REQUEST a server, ask a sysadmin to set it up, the security team to approve your software, the budget to validate the payment and the blessing of your network authorities.

Then, you change job/client/whatever. What do you do ? Do it again ?

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#42

Post by icebraining »

crossman wrote: post #28
RyanCavanaugh wrote: post #8

This seems like a conflation. Your repo issues could be stored in a SQLite database, or a flat list of JSON files, or a git repo, or a giant text file, any of which your host might or might not give you direct access to. The thing to consider (if portability is your primary concern) isn't the underlying storage format, it's whether or not you have a straightforward way to move it between providers.

Couldn't agree more. It seems naive to think that source control would be a good system for the kind of operations performed in issue tracking

Issue tracking is all about managing changes to objects (issues) made over time by multiple people from different machines. Seems like a perfect case for VCS to me.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#43

Post by MBCook »

Walkman wrote: post #23
sametmax wrote: post #13

Even if I ended up migrating from github, I would still look for a centralized instance. Why ? The price for one migration in a few years is not a big deal compare to self hosting, which is a human resource hog for small entities. I have more important things to do than to deal with deploy, configure, maintain, document, secure, and test my own instance. I really don't want to admin one more server just for that. I d…

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

How often do you test your backups? How many places (physical) do they exist? How often are they taken?

What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? How often do you patch? Do you test them first? How do you keep up with security updates from other software on the machine(s).

How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look for weird traffic patterns?

Do you have redundant network links? Backup generators? Do you test them? Sure your datacenter SAYS they have them, but remember when Intuit went down for 2 days a few years ago? I bet they had told their bosses they had generator backups.

Is someone always on call? What are they experts in? How do you get support?

GitHub provides a TON of stuff above a cheap VPS or EC2 instance. And that’s not including the network effects of having so many projects in the same site.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#44

Post by icebraining »

gowld wrote: post #17
joeyh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single git repositories do not need to scale to a million issues or comments. It've used git as a database very productively, at well beyond that scale. https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/databranches/

that says > NOSQL database which is an important limitation.

Why is it an important limitation in this case?

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#45

Post by shawn »

cortesoft wrote: post #32
chatmasta wrote: post #21

I’ve always thought of version control systems and issue trackers as separate products. GitHub just happens to implement them both in one place. As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. A far better solution would be to keep them decoupled, but easily pluggable and extendable. In fact, this is basically the status quo with any i…

I feel like the HN community fails repeatedly to really grok this concept. They focus on the negatives of having a single dominant player for a service (with worries about monopolistic practices and stagnation), but completely ignore WHY these single providers become dominant. There are HUGE network-effect benefits to having a single dominant provider. Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only…

It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.

(Sorry to put it harshly, but it's felt like we're all getting a bit spoiled. Especially compared to the old days.)

For better or worse, you are the product if you use a centralized, free service. And the only thing keeping those dominant players dominant is the blind loyalty we seem to give freely.

It's all about that convenience! I get that. But morals have their place, and in the coming months the world will show whether they care at all about centralization.

It's probably important to stay nervous about centralization. If we let our guards down, we could find ourselves on the short end of an upsetting stick. History has shown time and again that when companies have no incentive to compete, they tend not to try. The reason Facebook can be so free with your data is that there is no way to compete with them. With github, at least there's a way.

Honestly, the biggest thing holding back Github competitors is that they won't just make their service look identical to Github. Gitlab looks strange every time I run across a repo. Instead everyone wants to be different, and usually it's not better.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#47

Post by BillinghamJ »

This isn't entirely true. GitHub's wikis and the gist system are both backed by git - because it makes sense for those.

It wouldn't make so much sense for issues, pull requests, etc. If they were backed that way, they'd very likely be rather slow to query (as GitHub doesn't keep the latest data in a "checked out" state).

Not to mention the fact that you can just ask them for a data export and they'll provide it all to you happily in JSON format.

This post doesn't really have much reality backing its criticisms.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#48

Post by hueving »

MBCook wrote: post #43
Walkman wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

How often do you test your backups? How many places (physical) do they exist? How often are they taken? What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? How often do you patch? Do you test them first? How do you keep up with security updates from other software on the machine(s). How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look f…

Yet github has still had outages from being the target of nation-state attacks. The bigger the service, the worse the enemies.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#50

Post by ghettoimp »

amelius wrote: post #31
jcadam wrote: post #3

One would think setting up a non-profit organization (a la Wikipedia) to host a Github-like service for open source projects would be a good idea (I'd work on such a project). But without capital to expend on marketing/outreach, I'm not sure such a thing would gain much traction.

Why exactly would a source control system need traction? It's just a place where you store your git repo. And as for discoverability: I wouldn't want to give a single party control over that, actually. I'd say let people discover projects through other means, such as HN.

> It's just a place where you store your git repo.

But Github is so much more than that. It's a public forum to discuss and prioritize issues, a social network to start projects with friends, an automatic portfolio of sorts for your resume, and a really well managed, nicely integrated, reliable service.

This is all, I think, a function of its scale and the traction it's gotten.

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