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

Before GitHub

lucumr.pocoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 255 posts

Re: Before GitHub

#211

Post by echelon »

Chaosvex wrote: post #166
3form wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name If I remember correctly, it was also one of the few places sticking to the now-standard passing of the parameters via path rather than the '?' URL query part. It might not seem like much now, but then the ease and simple beauty of having just github.com/user/repo - not only for web access but also cloning - was definitely some freshness fact…

Definitely not. That's been a thing for at least as long as mod_rewrite has existed (and I'm sure there's prior art). It was common long before GitHub.

GitHub was one of the first popular places to

1. not use query params for key entities in the URL

2. to stick user identifiers at the root path! totally unheard of to occupy such an important path at that point!

Taken together, this was entirely novel. Next to nobody did this. Twitter was the one other notable example, and that's literally all I can think of.

The URL bar was so different back then. It wasn't search by default. The average tech savviness of internet users was higher. People cared about URLs despite the fact most websites had garbage cgi-bin query string slop. Lots of folks had personal domain names. People typed URLs and shared them a lot - so this was a big deal, because they were memorable, unlike the other slop URLs at the time.

To give more character - HN's urls would have been considered exceptionally nice back then. The average URL was way worse and was littered with hundreds of query parameters.

A great deal of websites put your session token in the query params. PHP had first class ways of spending "sessions" to all urls. Essentially a cookie. It was disgusting.

GitHub revolutionized urls as a product. Even today, not many companies followed suit.

They're still the gold standard.

Re: Before GitHub

#212

Post by ahaferburg »

ragelink wrote: post #91
wps wrote: post #21

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…

Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…

For the name: Use something with amber in the name.

Re: Before GitHub

#213

Post by ahaferburg »

edf13 wrote: post #139

My first was this monster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe

A uni prof of mine insisted on hosting the work group's SourceSafe repo on his laptop. You could not commit changes when he was out of the building.

Re: Before GitHub

#214

Post by tomnipotent »

Lammy wrote: post #98
tomnipotent wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something more like a GitTorrent Still dependent on centralized trackers. Same story with every useful package manager, there's always a middleman.

BitTorrent has supported trackerless torrents for twenty entire years :p https://github.com/sparkslabs/kamaelia/blob/master/Sketches/...

Torrent doesn't magically find peers, even with DHT the torrent files have seed nodes baked in. A middelman required for both the centralized trackers and trackerless torrents.

Re: Before GitHub

#215

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I came from Perforce.

I always found Git to be liberating. I did use a self-hosted BitBucket server, for a while, but now use GitHub.

GitHub gave us pull requests, and a cloud-hosted repo that is managed by others.

I'm quite capable of managing my own repos, but I'm not as good at it as the GH people. If you think their uptime is bad, hold my ginger ale.

But I also don't work on very confidential stuff (anymore). I don't really care if my code gets indexed.

Re: Before GitHub

#216

Post by sjia »

I used ClearCase and Perforce too. Great for controlled environments, but not really built for open collaboration or community growth

Re: Before GitHub

#217

Post by [deleted] »

Izkata wrote: post #207
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because the more visible people are, the stronger they have a pull on others. It’s not so much about person A vs person B but about what likelihood am I attributing to an individual or project to pull others along. For me projects moving off GitHub prior to Zig didn’t have that yet and even Zig itself didn’t feel that meaningful to me. But you might think about it differently.

Their own example is an example of this. I've heard the name Fabrice Bellard but don't know who he is and don't know why I'd care, but Guido is a well-known name among python users and does hold weight. Looking up what Bellard is known for, I kind of expect this to be true of more people than not.

[deleted]

Re: Before GitHub

#218

Post by ioands »

Izkata wrote: post #207
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because the more visible people are, the stronger they have a pull on others. It’s not so much about person A vs person B but about what likelihood am I attributing to an individual or project to pull others along. For me projects moving off GitHub prior to Zig didn’t have that yet and even Zig itself didn’t feel that meaningful to me. But you might think about it differently.

Their own example is an example of this. I've heard the name Fabrice Bellard but don't know who he is and don't know why I'd care, but Guido is a well-known name among python users and does hold weight. Looking up what Bellard is known for, I kind of expect this to be true of more people than not.

You don't care about the man, myth, and excellence himself who has created FFmpeg and QEMU, two of the most influential pieces of software ever made?

Re: Before GitHub

#219

Post by graemep »

gandreani wrote: post #192
graemep wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fossil is very easy to self host. If you already have a web server it needs maybe 10 or 15 lines of server config. If you want to avoid start up you need something to autostart/restart the server process. If you point it at a directory you can add a new repo simply by adding a Fossil file to the directory. You can even run it on shared hosting as a CGI (never done it myself). The only thing that took some setup was s…

And backups. Sqlite makes it easier but no backup process is easy. You always have to backup and restore at least once to have the confidence to rely on it. It's another (big) point towards paying someone else to host it.

Its less of a worry given ts distributed.

Re: Before GitHub

#220

Post by Karrot_Kream »

sourcegrift wrote: post #112
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git. I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred…

You might like pijul if you like darcs

Yeah I've played around with pijul over the years but it's still not at a maturity level that I would like and at this point I'm not sure how the actual work behind patch theory is progressing.
Post reply on HN