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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

#91

Post by amelius »

ghettoimp wrote: post #50
amelius wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Still doesn't explain why projects should be all in one place, as opposed to spread over the internet.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#92

Post by aassddffasdf »

Shank wrote: post #55
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…

I find that this network effect really makes me want to improve my projects, too. I've worked for hours on README files, making sure I had my licenses in check, and crafting the short repo description to be informative and useful for this reason [0]. If it's on GitHub, I feel like it needs to be presentation ready. Not everyone feels this way, but I do. If I just need a git repository, I store it locally. Git is a DV…

I intentionally leave some of my projects in a super-raw state as a way to obfuscate their true intended purpose; utilizing a public [but obscured] repo as a quasi-private one. :)

I realize not everyone feels this way, but I do.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#93

Post by chatmasta »

shaded-enmity wrote: post #69
chatmasta wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it’s nice, and there are dozens of products that allow you to do that. My point is that this is not the main value-add of GitHub, and discussions of “replacing GitHub” that center around re-implementing these features are missing the point. The value-add of GitHub is its community and years of developer mindshare. There is no simple technical solution to replacing that.

You seem to focus on step 2, e.g. having community and mindshare, while completely ignoring why all the people got there in there in the first place and why it gained such momentum, the step 1.

Step 1 for a category defining product will never be the same as step 1 for a future competitor to that product. What worked for GitHub as step 1 will never work as step 1 for any service that replaces GitHub, because GitHub’s very existence changes the environment that allowed their step 1 to enable step 2.

This is the luxury of first-mover advantage. GitHub only had to implement “good enough” features to attract a community. Any competitor that usurps GitHub will not only need to implement the right features, but also figure out how to move the community from GitHub to the new platform.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#95

Post by stealthmodeclan »

macromaniac wrote: post #77
sametmax wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which place sells server for 2.50?

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#96

Post by yrashk »

Rjevski wrote: post #46

If anyone has a good idea for a format/protocol to store issues & pull requests in Git itself, I'm all ears. There is a reason why every single product uses a separate database for those.

I've worked on this in SIT project (https://sit.fyi). While the core is generalized, the very first module available for it is issue tracking and I've been using it for a few months now. It enabled some scenarios previously difficult/impossible to achieve -- for example, merge requests can contain updates to issues as well, allowing one to make non-trivial updates to issues once their patch is merged in (for example, open a dozen of new issues [todo list for improving the new feature], leave comments, etc.)

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#97

Post by KaiserPro »

The massive rush to migrate from github is childish at best.

To put that in context, I lived through MS's various attempts to kill off competitors (Yes, I paid for netscape.)

I've worked with LDAP/kerberos and cursed the weird schema changes that are AD.

But that was > 15 years ago. I'd gladly pay for AD, even more if its a linux based infra. (Hmmmmm kerberos)

Github was loosing cash, had a toxic culture (Abuse of power, side effects of sexism, and then hiring people for being agitators instead of coders.) Microsoft has the money, time and power to improve the product, fire the arseholes and make sure that github is in some sort of shape in the long run.

Just look at the alternatives: atlassian, or worse still oracle/IBM.

So sure, migrate to gitlab, Its a good product, when its working. Github has many faults, but reliability isn't one of them.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#98

Post by gregknicholson »

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…

> I have yet to see a federated system that solves these problems, and the fact that no federated system is as popular as the centralized systems lead me to believe it might be an unsolvable problem.

A dominant siloed service is precisely what stops a federated network from emerging. This is why I'm very pleased that Microsoft has bought GitHub, because it's apparently jolted a lot of people into realising that GitHub is a single dominant provider.

I think GitHub became dominant the same way Twitter and Gmail did. Techy early adopters ignored the fact that it was proprietary, because it was a nice service among many options; but this growth and the network effect led to an effective monopoly:

1. Neat tech demo, siloed but harmlessly tiny

2. Techy early adopters start to rely on it because it's genuinely useful

3. Network effect brings in the masses

4. Scalability problems: interoperability is still desired, but less urgent than fail whales

5. Investors invest; money pays for scaling up and fixing fail whales

6. Investors get itchy at loss-making, want a return on their investment

Now you have the masses using your service, and any competitors are ghost towns. Investors want money and your most valuable asset is your user base. Interoperability would make it easier to lose your users, so lock-in becomes essential to your business strategy.

If enough people jump into the silo before federation works, federation will never be added. Avoid supporting proprietary networks.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#99

Post by macromaniac »

stealthmodeclan wrote: post #95
macromaniac wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which place sells server for 2.50?

There are a few but I use vultr
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