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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

#121

Post by grey_earthling »

simplyinfinity wrote: post #112
grey_earthling wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do social good Maybe, but maybe I disagree with how they treat their female employees, or maybe I don't like that they financially support some political thing or whatever. Capitalism doesn't work without real competition. I shouldn't be obliged to do business with this one particular company if I want to develop Free Software. My point isn't that GitHub is evil; it's that each person should be free to decide…

Correct, capitalism isn't inherently evil, competitions is healthy. That's why we have github, bitbucket, sourceforge,gitlab,gitea,phabricator, and probably few more projects like this. however imagine if we had thousands and the open source community was give or take evenly distributed between them. that would simply be nightmare. discoverability will be pretty low, contributions will be even lower and the community…

Why would discoverability be low? Search engines exist.

Why would contributions be low? Presumably we'd have a common way to contribute from your own federated instance.

There are thousands of websites (maybe even more!) and it's possible to discover them and comment/upload/whatever. Would it be better if they all moved to Medium, Wordpress.com and Facebook?

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#122

Post by zrobotics »

yani wrote: post #68
Shank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 havent found a code yet that I will only keep locally in a git repo. Can you give an example of such type of code?

I don't know about other debs, but I have a decently large directory of python scripts that are kinda 'single-use', such as scripts to reformat a json that is screwed up in some oddball way. I used git for version control, and save them on the off chance they'll be useful someday for cut n paste, but there is no need for storing something I may never use again remotely. In fact, the only reason they aren't deleted is the space saved wouldn't be worth it when archive disks are so cheap. If my house burns down or the NAT is stolen, that code is the last thing that will be on my mind.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#123

Post by mmt »

simplyinfinity wrote: post #112
grey_earthling wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they do social good Maybe, but maybe I disagree with how they treat their female employees, or maybe I don't like that they financially support some political thing or whatever. Capitalism doesn't work without real competition. I shouldn't be obliged to do business with this one particular company if I want to develop Free Software. My point isn't that GitHub is evil; it's that each person should be free to decide…

Correct, capitalism isn't inherently evil, competitions is healthy. That's why we have github, bitbucket, sourceforge,gitlab,gitea,phabricator, and probably few more projects like this. however imagine if we had thousands and the open source community was give or take evenly distributed between them. that would simply be nightmare. discoverability will be pretty low, contributions will be even lower and the community…

> imagine if we had thousands

First you spoke of 50, then 500 (web sites), now thousands (yet you only managed to name 6).. this is starting to resemble reductio ad absurdum.

You haven't really made a convincing argument for why we might have excessive variety, such as an unusually low barrier to entry compared with other open source tools.

Moreover, I'm pretty sure your arguments could also be used in favor of federation, rather than centralization.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#124

Post by jefurii »

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…

> Right now, if I am looking for a code library, I pretty much only use the ones I find on github, even if the google search shows me projects hosted on other places.

I don't know what ecosystem you're working with, but I typically find code libraries for my projects using the Python Package Index (PyPI). A lot of packages on PyPI are located at GitHub but by no means all. pip can install packages from other sources that PyPI or GitHub. It's not that difficult.

Regarding creating accounts, yes it's a speedbump to have to create multiple accounts but using a good password manager with autologin features can take away a lot of that pain.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#125

Post by mmt »

Walkman wrote: post #70
MBCook wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often do you test your backups? How many places (physical) do they exist? How often are they taken? What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? How often do you patch? Do you test them first? How do you keep up with security updates from other software on the machine(s). How is your security team in general? Do they monitor for stolen credentials? Do pen-tests? Watch for network scans and attacks? Look f…

> What’s your server’s uptime? Is it highly available? Who cares about uptime, when you use a server alone or with a small team? It can be down for 10 hours and you would not even notice. You don't understand what you need. > How often do you patch? I patch the machine multiple times a week with some "apt update && apt upgrade" which takes literally less then a couple of minutes a week. > Do you test them first? I do…

I'm not sure what to call this counterpoint to the more general mantra of "cloud is cheaper and easier than rolling your own!" (with an implied "always" in the middle).

Maybe the ineconomy of scale? Except it's not really about scale but about customization, so maybe the "economy of customization".

> You don't understand what you need.

Unfortunately, I think this statement is more often true than not, and it's much easier to go with what's popular right now than to form that understanding.

Of course, there's some merit to that strategy if one is new, but I can't believe that many people are that new.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#126

Post by Tijdreiziger »

aassddffasdf wrote: post #92
Shank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not just host them somewhere private repos are free of charge? (i.e. GitLab, Bitbucket)

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#127

Post by Shank »

aassddffasdf wrote: post #92
Shank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are a lot more eyes on those repositories than you think. Things like misplaced API tokens are vacuumed up nearly instantly. You'd be much, much better off hosting private stuff on GitLab or BitBucket.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#128

Post by Shank »

Nadya wrote: post #105
Shank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>If I just need a git repository, I store it locally. Git is a DVCS for a reason -- most single person projects don't need a remote anyway. I use a remote as an easier-to-maintain-and-test backup than trying to maintain a mirrored local repository on another drive.

> I use a remote as an easier-to-maintain-and-test backup than trying to maintain a mirrored local repository on another drive.

You should really consider getting a good backup solution, like Tarsnap or Backblaze, to follow from the "two is one and one is none" principle of backups. That is, if you haven't already.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#129

Post by Shank »

seabrookmx wrote: post #64
Shank wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Appreciate all the hard work! TShock is great :)

Thanks! It's a community effort, though, and I only deserve a small fraction of the credit. I'll pass along your message to my team.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#130

Post by sametmax »

Walkman wrote: post #71
themacguffinman wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure. No free lunch. It's just important to understand the nature and size of the costs, so that you can make the trade off adapted to your context.
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