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GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

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Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#101

Post by throwuxiytayq »

taminka wrote: post #55
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.

might be a silly question, but isn't macos relatively easily virtualisable? i understand it's not done commercially bc of licensing issues, but is there a piece of software where you just get a vps or two and virtualise all of your build targets yourself, so your ci bill is just the vps bill?

Virtualizing macOS on non-Apple hardware is illegal. That, and in between the costs of hardware (even assuming I breach their licence and go non-Apple) and the costs of electricity, this quickly becomes a sizeable time and cash investment.

VPS bills accumulate. I must have saved hundreds or thousands of dollars by not hosting this myself over the years.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#102

Post by jolaflow »

taminka wrote: post #34

99% of commits on a project come from 1% of contributors, so the main issue w/ migrating to an alternative isn't the networking effect of github, rather that you can't carry over github specific stuff (prs/issues) i personally like how radicle.xyz managed that, where they manage issues/prs/user identities as git objects, so your entire project is self contained as git repository

As for issue tracking, there are also other git-native alternatives out there. Epiq is entirely git-backed, vendor agnostic and persists state as a versioned log in your repo.

Im its creator, for full disclosure.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#103

Post by progval »

dijit wrote: post #72
inigyou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Codeberg recently made HN very angry by banning vibecoded projects. It's opinionated. GitHub isn't.

Github is opinionated. I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request. They also worked very hard to change the default branch name for everyone, eventually compromising. Github definitely has opinions, they might align with yours, for now.

> I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request.

Do you have more details about that?

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#104

Post by Gander5739 »

t1234s wrote: post #15
cedws wrote: post #13

Running a git forge is easy, I find the social coding/network effect the stickiest part of GitHub. I want my code to be discoverable, and I want to discover others' code. I wanted to leave GitHub but I'm still stuck there. What it would take for me to finally leave is some kind of federation of the social features, so I can port my stars over, see what others are working on, etc.

In the end GitHub will be a dating site

Github for lesbians: https://xkcd.com/624/

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#105

Post by throwuxiytayq »

tombert wrote: post #33
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re free, too. If your project is public, you can spin up dozens (hundreds?) of jobs (10 or so of which will run in parallel) on every push and Microsoft casually pays for it. I’d love to move off GH but I would have to significantly reduce my CI usage (before you ask - already more optimized than anything you usually see) or pay quite a lot for my hobby projects.

Genuine question: Have you considered moving to your own server? I ran Forejo for a bit, but I made the mistake of trying to use Jenkins for CI, which is very annoying for someone who really doesn't doesn't enjoy devops work.

I have - both considered it and actually did it for a while.

A few years, one hack, and a couple of apartment changes later, my server is behind on maintenance and lying somewhere waiting for me to set it up and update it. Meanwhile, my free action workflows just keep working. On a good day, at least - Microsoft’s SLA is like one 9 and it’s on the wrong side of the comma.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#106

Post by dijit »

progval wrote: post #103
dijit wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github is opinionated. I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request. They also worked very hard to change the default branch name for everyone, eventually compromising. Github definitely has opinions, they might align with yours, for now.

> I recall some time in 2016 when they were regex replacing variable names in peoples repositories and pestering them if they didn’t accept the request. Do you have more details about that?

I'm conflating multiple things over 5 years, my memory seems imperfect. Apologies.

What I've mixed together:

1) The "Alex" bot, which was opt-in and seemed to be everywhere. [0]

2) The "inclusive-coding-bot" which was not opt-in and just inserted itself into everything (which came out later). [1]

3) Github disabling a popular repository for using the word "Retard". [2]

Neither of the first two were actually endorsed by github, I just conflated them because of the "WebM for Retards" controversy and because they'd been very public about other inclusive things like not interviewing white people [3] or calling white women "some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women". [4]

[0]: https://github.com/get-alex/alex

[1]: https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

[3]: https://i.insider.com/56b3d2f12e526555008b505e?width=791

[4]: https://www.businessinsider.com/diversity-guru-discusses-whi...

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#107

Post by Brian_K_White »

thataccount wrote: post #84
Brian_K_White wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

git was harder to use (harder to reason about), but it did something cvs/svn didn't do, so, harder or not, it made something possible vs not possible. Did you confuse github with git? Indeed centralized git in Github is hardly any different from svn.

>Did you confuse github with git? Indeed centralized git in Github is hardly any different from svn. I used shorthand since I assumed people here were smart enough to assume that Microsoft buying Git would be understood as Github and not Git. It has proven to be a bad assumption.

You may want to read this comment again and really evaluate it as if you didn't write it. Maybe shop it around. Ask your wife, or better some random people with the names scrubbed so they don't know it's you, to tell you who is the asshole and exactly why. What about the statement exposes the asshole by it's own self-contained internal logic? I know, it doesn't matter what 9 out of 10 say, even if they all say the same thing and point out the same reasons, all that proves is "it has proven to be a bad assumption" that everyone else isn't an idiot eh?

Man that's convenient. Why didn't I ever think of that genius way to resolve everything? Oh right, duh.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#108

Post by tombert »

throwuxiytayq wrote: post #105
tombert wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: Have you considered moving to your own server? I ran Forejo for a bit, but I made the mistake of trying to use Jenkins for CI, which is very annoying for someone who really doesn't doesn't enjoy devops work.

I have - both considered it and actually did it for a while. A few years, one hack, and a couple of apartment changes later, my server is behind on maintenance and lying somewhere waiting for me to set it up and update it. Meanwhile, my free action workflows just keep working. On a good day, at least - Microsoft’s SLA is like one 9 and it’s on the wrong side of the comma.

I have one of those free Oracle cloud instances with 24 gigs of RAM; I've considered hosting there, but for now I just use Sourcehut.

There definitely is value in "it's hosted somewhere that's not my house" though.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#109

Post by thataccount »

tombert wrote: post #89
thataccount wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yes, Git overtook it, but I still don't really understand your point; it's not about Git, it's about a centralized forge. What you aren't understanding is that all software development proceeds first by an underlying philosophy that evolves into other solutions inspired by the software that came before it. Git inspired the way Github works. You are trying to separate the two into distinct entities when they are real…

Sure, but GitHub sort of runs contrary to what Git's philosophy, which is why I'm arguing that "Git" is an irrelevant variable with regards to the problems with Github. Git, as a software version control platform, is supposed to be decentralized. It's designed to mimic the way that kernel development was done, with a lot of separate repos and email being used to merge in diff files. If anything, Github really brings…

>Sure, but GitHub sort of runs contrary to what Git's philosophy, which is why I'm arguing that "Git" is an irrelevant variable with regards to the problems with Github.

Ah, well that makes your position clearer. It does "sort of run contrary" but it also doesn't totally "break" what Git was trying to do. You still have your local copy but your ability to share it is centralized.

The next iteration for SVN MIGHT have been to have some kind of p2p website to share sources since it all ready had a centralized way to share the code. That's usually the way things bounce around. Higher centralization/decentralization/back to centralization. Git kind of arrested that evolutionary curve with a quasi-decentralization and a centralized sharing hybrid.

Re: GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

#110

Post by thataccount »

ValdikSS wrote: post #80
thataccount wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But WHY they glom on to it and not say, Subversion is my point. We can imagine an alternative world in which Subversion mutated into something more like Git. Why doesn't it exist? Because Git came in and everyone decided it was "the answer to all things".

There's a mercurial, a very similar idea built in a very similar times. It was supported by BitBucket until recently.

I've always liked Mercurial--particularly the simplicity of it.
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