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

31–40 of 135 posts

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#31

Post by amelius »

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 exactly would a source control system need traction?

It's just a place where you store your git repo.

And as for discoverability: I wouldn't want to give a single party control over that, actually. I'd say let people discover projects through other means, such as HN.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#32

Post by cortesoft »

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 use the ones I find on github, even if the google search shows me projects hosted on other places.

I want to be able to fork, clone, and contribute back without having to create accounts on other VCS sites. I don't want to learn another interface, or have to remember which site had which project. I want to be able to have a single list of 'starred' projects that I am following. I want to only have to learn one system and check in one place.

No matter what, that is just easier as a user. I know there are costs, but those really have to outweigh the benefits to make it worthwhile having multiple providers. I have yet to see a federated system that solves these problems, and the fact that no federated system is as popular as the centralized systems lead me to believe it might be an unsolvable problem.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#33

Post by w0rd-driven »

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…

This also accurately describes what Microsoft purchased with LinkedIn. It still isn't the best platform in terms of what it covered but there's immense value in the community that was purchased. Because I see the pattern now, I'm curious what other communities will get folded into the MS ecosystem as a result in the future.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#34

Post by snowwolf »

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…

Exactly this. I can discover and contribute to many projects (creating issues, submitting pull requests, with discussion) without having to learn 100s of subtly different UX each “distributed” system chooses to implement it.

And I know most other developers can also contribute to my projects in a familiar way.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#35

Post by chatmasta »

amelius wrote: post #27
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’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. But isn't it nice that you can say "issue X has been solved in commit Y"?

Yes it’s nice, and there are dozens of products that allow you to do that. My point is that this is not the main value-add of GitHub, and discussions of “replacing GitHub” that center around re-implementing these features are missing the point. The value-add of GitHub is its community and years of developer mindshare. There is no simple technical solution to replacing that.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#36

Post by twblalock »

neilk wrote: post #22

When you couple services together, you decrease the potential user base. For example, Github issues are underpowered for many people. But at least you can ignore them and use your own service. Many source control systems tried to offer all-in-one platforms but it’s never worked so far. In fact, we don’t even do PRs the way the authors of git intended. For integrations, it might be better to settle on a configuration…

Plus, even if Git did have all of the features people want today, people will continue to think of new features that are not supported by Git and need to be implemented outside of it.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#37

Post by tschellenbach »

I'm perfectly happy with Github. They have a very clear value proposition which they offer at a price point which is only a tiny percentage of the value they create. Great company that has empowered accelerated software innovation across the world. Not sure what's up with this whole company X makes money so must be evil vibe. Most of the people complaining about this have well paid jobs so there's a bit of hypocrisy going on here.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#38

Post by DC-3 »

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)

Fossil is great software and it's worth mentioning that it's written by the creator of SQLite. I'm using it to version-control my dotfiles and it works nicely.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#39

Post by themacguffinman »

Walkman wrote: post #23
sametmax wrote: post #13

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 d…

I feel like everybody is overestimating the cost of self hosting. I run my own instance of GitLab, but the "costly" part was setting it up and making backups. Since then I just "apt-get upgrade" and there is a new version and that's it. Since I set it up, I haven't touched any of the configuration files. The availability guarantees are much easier to keep for a small team than for thousands, so you don't really have…

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.

Re: The single most important criteria when replacing GitHub

#40

Post by devy »

Don't forget GitHub, Microsoft and et al, co-wrote and contribute to libgit2[1], a portable pure-C Git core implementation that's aim for cross platform compatibility.

As the author noted himself, GitHub keeps, source code, user pages/wikis and gists in Git. Other objects like issues, repo relationships, accounts, project details in their own database[2]. To me, that's a fairly standard way of storing data if I were to develop a GitHub system. Even rate limits for APIs are common way of protecting them from API abuse.

Why is all of sudden Joey has criticism?

[1]: https://libgit2.github.com/

[2]: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_Github_survey/

Post reply on HN