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Python moves to GitHub
- eugenekolo2 11y agoGitHub's reign over public open source programming is a bit terrifying. But, it's been mostly benevolent so far, but I do find it troubling to trust a private company to keep dev's in mind, and not profit.
- hollerith 11y agoThe good news is that it is straightforward to make a copy of much of the important public data on GH.
- rvense 11y agoEven the issue tracking?
- hk__2 11y agoThe API lets you access all that.
- akerl_ 11y agoTheir API exposes issue data, and there are a handful of 3rd party API-based tools designed to back up / extract it. Also, for anybody not already aware (I didn't know this for a long time): GitHub repo wikis are themselves git repos that use Gollum
- josegonzalez 11y agoI've already written a standalone tool to do exactly this: https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup https://github.com/josegonzalez/python-github-backup
- saurik 11y agoSomeone will probably point out that data can be exported, but that is frankly irrelevant given that the URLs for your project are now embedded around the entire world to a domain name you don't control (github.com), and which your goal should be to "outlive". There is tons of historical content sitting on SourceForge and Google Code that has links all over the Internet pointed at, and it is a major issue that you can't migrate and take these links with you; if github.com offered "bring your own domain" as a feature for some moderate cost, it would be much more viable as a platform for people who care about the longevity of their projects.
- tracker1 11y agoYou can use your own domain for GH pages... which many sites do use for their documentation.
- jacquesm 11y agoIt goes a lot further than that. Github quite literally becomes the hub of the projects it hosts. Without the hub the spokes will have to reconnect and many of the glue bits will be lost in the process and some of those bits are very important. A public home is a very important thing to an open source project.
- tw04 11y agoI'm not sure why it's a problem though. If they decide to go down that path, it's not that hard to move off. They don't have the lock-in that would scare me like having terabytes of data in an oracle database.
- cm3 11y agoThe problem is with people's mindset that everything has to be on github. Large projects that dare to use self-hosted more fitting infrastructure like Phabricator tend to be punished socially.
- akerl_ 11y agoI suspect what you're seeing as social punishment is people preferring the UX GitHub offers. That's just user choice in action
- yeukhon 11y agoNot really, the inconvenience of having to register another account (which often means another set of password) is quite a big deal for entry.
- cm3 11y agoUsually you can log in with your github account.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fucking_tragedy 11y agoThis. Github's UX is nice, but so is BitBucket's and other competitors'.
- akerl_ 11y agoI'd consider "single sign on that connects me to tons of projects' repos to be great UX. Personally, it (and the centralized API) are big reasons I use GitHub to interact with projects whenever possible
- jmount 11y agoI agree. I like GitHub (and I pay for their service). But man if they wake up one day and decide to go the SourceForge route (or demand ransom to not do so) it is going to be a pain to redirect stuff.
- lfam 11y agoIt's absurd that so many open-source and / or free software projects are happy to host their public-facing development infrastructure with a private company running proprietary software.
- AndyKelley 11y agoWhy?
- chei0aiV 11y agohttp://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html
- manigandham 11y agoWhat's the alternative? Everyone running their own little proprietary stacks with none of the features or community or ease of use?
- lfam 11y agoWhy would a free software project leave GitHub just to run a proprietary "stack"? You could try one of the self-hostable free software alternatives listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_hosting_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...
- manigandham 11y agoself-hostable and free doesn't mean they're not proprietary. and my comment was more about the fact that github is just git (which is completely open) with some extra features. like the other comments have said, it's not really a big risk.
- lfam 11y agoI don't mean free as in price. I mean free as in freedom, and I mean proprietary as in non-free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_software
- golergka 11y agoThankfully, setting up a git mirror on alternative hosting platform and update it automatically is almost trivial. Of course, you have issues and discussions that are tried to Github's platform, but we don't have any universally accepted format for it except email anyway.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- xiaoma 11y agoespecially given some of their behavior in the last couple of years...
- GhotiFish 11y agowell I don't know if I agree with that. I haven't seen an instance where their behavior has been amoral. I have seen instances where they have been cowards, regarding DMCA's and acquiescing to threats, but that is a minor sin. I don't expect every organization to fight every fight worth fighting.
- godzillabrennus 11y agoEveryone is moving to GitHub these days. Why doesn't Gitlab.com get more love? Isn't their whole stack open source?
- ericjang 11y agoGitlab is really nice, but the user experience isn't quite as slick as Github's. Understandable, since Github has a lot more engineers behind their infrastructure. I think Gitlab's current user base is for developers/startups who want VC backups for their private codebases. I'd probably use Gitlab if I were developing a private project that I didn't plan on releasing. Github, by design, is friendly towards people who want their code to be open to the world and encourage exploration of interesting projects. It's a great for sharing research code, and many big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, Disney, Pixar) already put their stuff there. It's highly unlikely these big fishes will move to Gitlab anytime soon.
- _wmd 11y agoDefinite +1 on the italicization of 'quite'.. GitHub's UX advantage over Gitlab is marginal at best, at least as far as their web client is concerned. The desktop experience is pretty nice, but we've otherwise got SourceTree for non-developers who need a decent UI. Gitlab is the first piece of open source I've seen in probably a decade where I haven't a single bad word to say for it, their attention to detail is superb, starting with the installation process. I'm usually by default a critic of pretty much anything I encounter (aka. "typical HN comment author") but I find myself advocating Gitlab constantly
- yeukhon 11y agoI will cut the BS and give you my thought: simply because few people are interested in maintaining GitLab. If I were in the dev's position, I would have more time to focus on improving build pipeline, like adding some cool bot.
- bastawhiz 11y agoI have three personal reasons for preferring Github to Gitlab. I'm not going to talk about the community edition of Gitlab, since Github Enterprise is a separate topic and frankly I think most individual developers couldn't be bothered to download, run, and maintain their own Gitlab instance (as evidenced by the fact that Github.com is so damn popular). 1. Gitlab themselves admit that Gitlab.com is bad[1]. Making a cloud-based software development platform is hard, and Github has some of the best engineers working on scaling the service. Gitlab doesn't have nearly as many resources. 2. The community is thin[2]. Almost all of the largest projects on Gitlab.com are Gitlab. Gitlab CE is maintained by only a handful of people. Go through the list of top contributors on Gitlab.com and you'll find that they have almost zero "personal projects" hosted there. If the developers of the service don't even use it, why should I? 3. The UX of Gitlab is honestly quite poor. At best, it's a clone of Github's UI. At worst, it has way too much scrolling thanks to inconveniently placed whitespace, poor performance, a confusing information architecture, and oodles of low-contrast text. I personally find getting around Gitlab to be tiring and confusing. Here's an easy example: from the Contributors tab of a project [3], how can I see more about a contributor? You just can't. There's lots of little papercuts like this scattered across Gitlab. Not to say Github is without papercuts, but it certainly has far fewer. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ [2] https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore [3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/graphs/master
- anarcat 11y agothis is pretty significant; so far the only git presence of Python was a "semi-official readonly mirror" on github: https://github.com/python/cpython https://github.com/python/cpython now does this mean that Python will completely switch away from Mercurial? this was one of the major projects still using hg what does this mean for mercurial's global adoption vs git? also, i don't understand why the free software aspect of gitlab wasn't an important argument in the decision... that seems like a key element of the difference between the two platforms.
- yawaramin 11y agoWell, Facebook is probably the single largest corporate user of Hg in terms of repo size and investment into the tool. In terms of influencing global adoption, they probably pull more weight in the community than Python did.
- jordigh 11y agoThis is true, since most of the hg devs are affiliated to Facebook, including lead dev mpm.
- pbreit 11y agoThat's what I'm wondering, too. Mercurial (which I prefer) seems to still have pretty decent usage in the Python world. And Bitbucket still pretty Mercurial.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jordigh 11y agoYes. It means Python is no longer using Mercurial. We knew this was a done deal a several weeks ago. Mozilla, Octave, and Hedgewars are a few remaining projects that still use hg. For them, I will continue to improve, promote, and use Mercurial. Their reasoning for using Github have nothing to do with the technical merits of git or hg or with the freedom of the software or platform. They want more contributions and they figure using the popular platform is the way to obtain them.
- inglor 11y agoIf I were them I'd move issue tracking to GH too _in addition_ to the current tracker. Having GH issues that are familiar to developers lowers the barrier for feature requests and bug reports which is a huge deal for a language.
- nanoojaboo 11y ago"Guido prefers GitHub"
- jacquesm 11y agoIf there ever was a company that became 'too big to fail' it is github. A major security breach at github would have earth shaking consequences and if they ever went out of business it would take a long time before the rift was healed.
- runn1ng 11y agoI think that the fail of Amazon and their AWS would have far worse consequences. Half of the internet would stop working (the half that's not using Google's and Microsoft's services, anyway).
- richerlariviere 11y agoI'm not scared of Github. If they take bad decisions for the community, we will tell them. But I have to agree that the worst is the lack of competitors.
- crosa 11y ago(3). Guido prefers Github ~deal with it~ Seriously, I like the idea. It will give visibility for who contribute and might bring some new contributors.
- fforflo 11y agoIt looks like the vote was not "unanimous" https://mail.python.org/pipermail/core-workflow/2016-January/000346.html https://mail.python.org/pipermail/core-workflow/2016-January...
- stephendicato 11y agoGitHub is popular. More people will come in contact with the development of Python by Python being on GitHub. That's a significant benefit to any open source project; one that I believe outweighs the concerns of a private company valuing business over developer ideals.
- xdinomode 11y agoSo is github the Google of code?
- ksec 11y agoOn the other side, Ruby refuse to move to Github, but are actively trying and hoping to attract more contributors.