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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

#71

Post by Walkman »

themacguffinman wrote: post #39
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…

You're ignoring the cost for community projects where the community now needs to invest in learning and using your own self-hosted repo, which may or may not have a good UX. This is a barrier to entry.

I agree with this, but the cost is centralization and single point of failure.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#72

Post by [deleted] »

shawn wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#74

Post by snowwolf »

shawn wrote: post #45
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Linus is that you?

[1] in case you don’t get the reference.

But in all seriousness this is a terrible attitude to have. One of the things I enjoy about being a developer is the community and collaboration and this type of thinking is the antithesis of that.

I’d much rather have centralised tools and a distributed/diverse development community than decentralised tools and isolationist community.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-56546...

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#75

Post by jelder »

BillinghamJ wrote: post #47

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 t…

Came here to say this. That wikis and gist are backed by git is very useful. Trying to wedge issues etc into a git model would be an engineering disaster; these are clearly problems best solved with a database.

There may be valid criticisms about MS GitHub, but this isn't one of them.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#76

Post by verigit »

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…

If you are only interested in the version control part and you are a Mac user, you can give EasyGit (https://easygit.me) a try. It stores your repos privately on iCloud and it doesn't use any 3rd party servers or analytics. In fact its sandbox doesn't allow any outgoing network connections, apart from talking to iCloud.

Disclaimer: This is my app and btw I'm running a WWDC promotion and you can download it for free till Friday: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easygit/id1228242832?mt=12

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#77

Post by macromaniac »

sametmax wrote: post #62
erichurkman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that why GitLab (and others) publish things like AMIs where config is easy and takes 10 minutes? https://about.gitlab.com/aws/

Aaaah, the infamous "10 minutes" sale pitch. I think it's getting 10 minutes years old to this day.

It doesnt take long to set up iirc, the problem when I used gitlab was it was resource intensive. It somehow takes a 10$mo instance when it should be able to run as a side process on a 2.50$mo server imo. 10$mo was the same pricing as github so it didn't make sense to use.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#78

Post by yrashk »

icebraining wrote: post #42
crossman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I thought so, too and developed SIT (https://sit.fyi). An interesting thought that I had initially helped me make it even more future-proof: Git is likely not here forever, it'll probably get replaced with something else in due time. So I designed SIT to be both merge-conflict-free and SCM-independent by relying just on additive sets of files.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#79

Post by trexen »

"out of the trap we now find ourselves in."

The anti Microsoft panic about GitHub feels childish and pedantic.

Perhaps if there was some evidence post acquisition of Microsoft trying to do unpalatable things then there might be room to complain.

But just to knee jerk advocate leaving GitHub because you are a Microsoft hater lacks credibility and comes across as whining and silly.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#80

Post by IncRnd »

danmg wrote: post #65

People keep implying that Microsoft is somehow going to break git and somehow use it to destroy people who want to give away their code. You can just change your remotes and push to a different server. The protocol was designed to be distributed and prevent a single point of failure. Also, Microsoft and people who develop on Microsoft tools realise that there are network effects of being able to share code. This was…

> What they were after was Electron, since that's a very popular way of writing desktop applications currently.

Would you mind explaining that? Microsoft doesn't need to purchase Electron for $7.5B of stock in order to write an Electron app. They already write Electron apps, one of which is used by many people who read HN.

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