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Give up GitHub: The time has come

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Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#81

Post by BeetleB »

swader999 wrote: post #64
prepend wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

Does a typical enterprise need a distributed source control system? It makes a lot of sense for open source. Doesn't the uptake in Github which centralizes this distributed system kind of invalidate its main tenant? I haven't been a hundred percent sure the overhead was ever worth it at most other types of paid gigs over the years. Adding complexity without value is a mistake imo. Maybe it's my own fault I haven't se…

The (side?) benefit of a DVCS is that you commit locally. So I can do all my fun experiments on my team's codebase on my laptop - it doesn't pollute the number of branches on the server, etc.

Indeed, even when forced to use SVN, I would simply check out the SVN trunk, create a Mercurial repository in that "working" directory, and then clone from their whenever I did any development (one clone per feature). I would then push back to the main Mercurial repository, and push that to the SVN server.

Other than that - true. No real DVCS benefit compared to SVN. I would imagine most of the nicer Git features that people use have, or could have, analogs in SVN.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#82

Post by Nemo157 »

joshstrange wrote: post #54
pabs3 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab is mentioned on the advocacy page https://giveupgithub.org/ . GitLab is an open-core business, which means there is a permissively licensed FOSS version and a proprietary version. The gitlab.com website uses the proprietary version. In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. They have swayed a lot of ostensibly FOSS, copyleft-leaning and privacy/sec…

> In addition many features of GitLab don't work at all or work much less well if you turn off JavaScript. I feel like the venn diagram of people who complain about JS being required and of people who have never had to code up a web /app/ that users expect rich interactions without a page-reload is just a circle.

JS being required for the interactive features would be fine. My personal problem is that I end up on some random gitlab instance to just take a look at the source or issues for some library, and get a blank white page. For the read-only public view there should be no need for any JS.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#83

Post by worble »

parentheses wrote: post #43

GitHub is a business and currently provides free storage and a pretty nice interface to it. It’s easy to say “our rights are being stripped away” but the view that businesses should operate like non profits or government services with the common good in mind is ludicrous!

Why is it ludicrous?

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#84

Post by mistrial9 »

prepend wrote: post #56
BeetleB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years ago, while interviewing internally, I asked the team what VC they use. It was Team Foundation's proprietary VC (and not a DVCS). I mentioned to them that even MS recommends Git for Team Foundation's usage. "Well of course, MS invented Git!" Wrong on so many levels: 1. Conflating Github with Git. 2. They bought it, not invented/founded it. 3. Most importantly, MS's recommendation to use Git for TF existed long…

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

I would say "friction" is the right word and "dumb" is not the right word here. Centuries ago (in Internet time) there was a culture among server devs that anyone who could not or would not, learn and correctly execute 100 things in the shell that today are obscure and obsolete, was "too dumb" and "not professional" . Evolution and intelligence have moved along since then, and others crusted over and embedded the minimal practices needed.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#85

Post by BeetleB »

prepend wrote: post #56
BeetleB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years ago, while interviewing internally, I asked the team what VC they use. It was Team Foundation's proprietary VC (and not a DVCS). I mentioned to them that even MS recommends Git for Team Foundation's usage. "Well of course, MS invented Git!" Wrong on so many levels: 1. Conflating Github with Git. 2. They bought it, not invented/founded it. 3. Most importantly, MS's recommendation to use Git for TF existed long…

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

To be fair, most people who find it complex do so because Git has a very crappy UI. You don't need to understand the internals to use Mercurial, and I would imagine that's true for most other DVCS's. In that sense, I sympathize with them.

I'm pretty sure half of the teams that find Git too complex wouldn't find Mercurial to be complex. But they haven't heard of Mercurial.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#86

Post by dcz_self »

NoGravitas wrote: post #63
cybrox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people can send me pull requests by email. Great, you already lost half of them.

Generally the ones I don't mind losing. If anyone can't figure out how to send a git pull request or patchset by email, I'm happy for them to email me with questions on how to, which I will answer as best I can.

I can figure out how to send you a patch set via email (see my Linux kernel contributions), but if I can avoid doing that, sure as heck I will. Your project must be really important to me, or I have to get paid.

As for the reason, it's simple: the process of submitting patches sucks. I wrote about it: https://dcz_self.gitlab.io/posts/git-botch-email

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#87

Post by sigg3 »

spencerchubb wrote: post #69
itslennysfault wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to teach a coding bootcamp. I had over 100 students over about 2 years, and ran into this constantly despite my best effort to explain that git != github from day one. We even did an exercise where we just used git locally first and then later (on a different day) showed how you can push to github. It didn't seem to matter. People just decided that git = github and couldn't let go of that.

git --> github porn --> pornhub best explanation of github for noobs

bat --> bathub

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#88

Post by brundolf »

prepend wrote: post #56
BeetleB wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 years ago, while interviewing internally, I asked the team what VC they use. It was Team Foundation's proprietary VC (and not a DVCS). I mentioned to them that even MS recommends Git for Team Foundation's usage. "Well of course, MS invented Git!" Wrong on so many levels: 1. Conflating Github with Git. 2. They bought it, not invented/founded it. 3. Most importantly, MS's recommendation to use Git for TF existed long…

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

I say this as a senior dev with 8+ years of experience working with git: git is nightmarishly complex. Highly stateful, insanely large CLI surface, huge amounts of terminology/concepts relative to the complexity of what you're actually trying to do with it. I've learned to navigate its waters over the years, fully appreciate the difference between git and GitHub, etc etc, and I don't blame anybody for being scared away by its complexity.

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#89

Post by remram »

cybrox wrote: post #60
prepend wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> refusal to use Git[1] due to its complexity I kind of like this friction. If a software developer finds git too complex, that’s an important signal that I should minimize my exposure to them. I’d never work in a team that dumb, and I wouldn’t want any dependencies on their code. Of course there are other reasons not to use git, but complexity is not one.

Working with git can become extremely complex if your workflow is bad. Not git's fault, though.

Git is a very malleable tool, you can use branches for many purposes, do all kinds of complex merges (e.g. subtree, etc). I think it can be made to fit most workflows.

The main issue is repository size, which is hard to get from bad workflows alone, with the exception of insistence on tracking large binary files in Git (rather than LFS, DVC, etc).

Re: Give up GitHub: The time has come

#90

Post by cratermoon »

kertoip_1 wrote: post #21
lvncelot wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many a junior just never initialized a repository, and 'git clone' is what they've used to "get a repository". So I would forgive them for thinking that a remote is needed for having a repository on their drive.

IMO the issue here is just that people think of git as it was something like SVN where you need to have some kind of external server to host project. Which isn't surprising as most of the time (when you cooperate with others) you do exactly that: push changes to one server. Idea of decentralization and independent copies of repositories may not be easy to grasp for newbe, because it's really technical concept.

How many people know that you can just run `git daemon`[1] to share your local repo (very insecurely, mind you) to anyone that can reach your machine? No central server needed.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-The-Protoco...

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