Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

joeyh.name

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 135 posts

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#11

Post by bobcallme »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

This reminds me Fossil SCM. The bug tracking and wiki are part of the distributed version control system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software)

I used it for a while and it was great. Sadly too many people refused to use it because "...it's not git!" :(

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#12

Post by sytse »

Storing things like issues in git is possible. But it makes it harder to make functionality on top like upvotes and issue boards. Not impossible for sure but it slows down development. And it would only help with portably if rate limits are the problem. So far GitHub rate limits for logged in users are decent, we migrated 200k projects in 48 hours. Even when you store issues in repos the format would likely differ between different tools. If the format differs it is just as easy to write an importer that uses the API.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#13

Post by sametmax »

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 don't want to play cat and mouse with spiders, brute forcers or DDOS events.

And I do want a huge visibility and community around the tool I use. And my users may not want to create yet another account to open a bug ticket.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#15

Post by gowld »

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 is a nonprofit better than a commercial vendor? It's still subject to the whims of the leadership. It's especially ironic with Git, which has portability as a core feature, so hosting can be on as many hosts as possible, and it's simple to move the "master" as desired.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#16

Post by gowld »

nwah1 wrote: post #2

This reminds me Fossil SCM. The bug tracking and wiki are part of the distributed version control system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_(software)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trac has that functionality but integrates with popular VCSes instead of rolling its own.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#17

Post by gowld »

joeyh wrote: post #10
nartz wrote: post #5

Interesting thought exercise, but must disagree - git is VERY FAR from a database replacement (especially at scale). Maybe some git-like interface on top of a database is more what you want...

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.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#18

Post by numbsafari »

jnbiche wrote: post #9

While I'm sympathetic to the mindset behind this post (ie, by wary of git centralization), I think that (for example) issue storage is an orthogonal issue from issue format. With a standardized issue format, it could be stored in a database or git, and as long as the service had an open export function, it would require no lock-in. Also, as some have pointed out here, storing highly relational data like issues and co…

Agreed.

This reminds me of people in the healthcare space who advocate for blockchain as some magical way of resolving integration issues.

The absence of a robust, well adopted and supported format, is the greater reason for integration issues.

Changing the storage and distribution format might bring certain benefits, but it doesn’t solve the core problem.

Post reply on HN