5 ms·

Everyone is saying: just work on your local repo. But GitHub is way more than just git. There's bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, etc etc. Mak

by hetman 9y ago

Everyone is saying: just work on your local repo. But GitHub is way more than just git. There's bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, etc etc. Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect and I'm not sure what GitHub offers to mitigate this.

tuxxy 9y ago
They offer a local instance of GitHub actually.
- madeofpalk 9y ago
  Which I can't imagine to be any more reliable than hosted GitHub. But hey, I guess there's the comfort in know that when it goes down it's our fault!
  - gtirloni 9y ago
    Reliability can always be improved... It just costs more.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    The argument is with a self-hosted solution you can choose your "danger times". If you know you have a major deliverable coming up, you can choose not to touch your git server until it's at a somewhat safe moment to do so.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      While it definitely sounds like a good idea, every single time I've seen it applied, the reason was the opposite. It was essentially "we've got so little control over our stuff that we'd rather not touch". Mostly goes along with lack of backups, lack of change management, and lack of automated rebuild procedure. If you have "danger times", then any unplanned disruption in that time will hurt so much more.
      - Klathmon 9y ago
        I agree with you, and I'm generally in favor of having 2 or more ways of doing critical things if possible, just pointing out the response which can have some merit.
  - gvb 9y ago
    Redundancy provides availability more than reliability. The odds of GitHub going down and your local copy/instance simultaneously is very low so availability is high. Reliability is how often GitHub or your local instance goes down.
    - raquo 9y ago
      Your local instance of github and github.com are not redundant / interchangeable. If either of those goes down and you rely on it, the other one is not gonna help you much, so availability is not improved by using a local instance.
  - empath75 9y ago
    There's no ha for github enterprise. Single instance with hot failover.
TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Fossil [0] is a great alternative in some cases. It includes a bug tracker and wiki, and it's much simpler than git. Not that I'd suggest using it for every scenario, but being aware of alternatives is always a good thing. [0] http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
jlebar 9y ago
> Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect At every company I've worked for, internal services have been less reliable than github. Certainly way less reliable than gmail. I get that it's scary, in that it feels like you're giving up control over something important to your business. But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of control.
- Spivak 9y ago
  > But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of control. That's a weird way of phrasing it. When you run your own services and they break you have total control and do have the power to fix it. When you buy SaaS you are relying on someone else. You may very well have more reliability and uptime but you are nonetheless giving up control.
  - jopsen 9y ago
    > When you run your own services and they break you have total control and do have the power to fix it. Sure, but most of the time you just reboot the server or some other temporary hack and kick the problem down the road. The power and skill to fix isn't worth much if you don't have the time.
  - trustfundbaby 9y ago
    That's exactly the point. Sure you have "control" but what good is all that control if it takes you 4 hours to track down the source of a problem and fix it (for example). Github has 100s of engineers (with heavily specialized knowledge that you don't have btw) working to fix any problems, I'd bet on them over myself and (maybe a handful of engineers) everytime ... and I've run my own subversion/git servers before. Some folks just hate the feeling of not knowing what's happening and how long its going to take to fix, vs having direct access to work on problems themselves even though its not necessarily "better" in any sense of the word ... hence the illusion
    - vbernat 9y ago
mirekrusin 9y ago
They offer GitHub enterprise you can setup internally if you want.

by hetman 9y ago

tuxxy 9y ago

They offer a local instance of GitHub actually.

madeofpalk 9y ago
Which I can't imagine to be any more reliable than hosted GitHub. But hey, I guess there's the comfort in know that when it goes down it's our fault!
- gtirloni 9y ago
  Reliability can always be improved... It just costs more.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  The argument is with a self-hosted solution you can choose your "danger times". If you know you have a major deliverable coming up, you can choose not to touch your git server until it's at a somewhat safe moment to do so.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    While it definitely sounds like a good idea, every single time I've seen it applied, the reason was the opposite. It was essentially "we've got so little control over our stuff that we'd rather not touch". Mostly goes along with lack of backups, lack of change management, and lack of automated rebuild procedure. If you have "danger times", then any unplanned disruption in that time will hurt so much more.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      I agree with you, and I'm generally in favor of having 2 or more ways of doing critical things if possible, just pointing out the response which can have some merit.
- gvb 9y ago
  Redundancy provides availability more than reliability. The odds of GitHub going down and your local copy/instance simultaneously is very low so availability is high. Reliability is how often GitHub or your local instance goes down.
  - raquo 9y ago
    Your local instance of github and github.com are not redundant / interchangeable. If either of those goes down and you rely on it, the other one is not gonna help you much, so availability is not improved by using a local instance.
- empath75 9y ago
  There's no ha for github enterprise. Single instance with hot failover.

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago

Fossil [0] is a great alternative in some cases. It includes a bug tracker and wiki, and it's much simpler than git. Not that I'd suggest using it for every scenario, but being aware of alternatives is always a good thing. [0] http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki http://fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

jlebar 9y ago

> Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect At every company I've worked for, internal services have been less reliable than github. Certainly way less reliable than gmail. I get that it's scary, in that it feels like you're giving up control over something important to your business. But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of control.

Spivak 9y ago
> But I'll posit that you never actually had control, only the illusion of control. That's a weird way of phrasing it. When you run your own services and they break you have total control and do have the power to fix it. When you buy SaaS you are relying on someone else. You may very well have more reliability and uptime but you are nonetheless giving up control.
- jopsen 9y ago
  > When you run your own services and they break you have total control and do have the power to fix it. Sure, but most of the time you just reboot the server or some other temporary hack and kick the problem down the road. The power and skill to fix isn't worth much if you don't have the time.
- trustfundbaby 9y ago
  That's exactly the point. Sure you have "control" but what good is all that control if it takes you 4 hours to track down the source of a problem and fix it (for example). Github has 100s of engineers (with heavily specialized knowledge that you don't have btw) working to fix any problems, I'd bet on them over myself and (maybe a handful of engineers) everytime ... and I've run my own subversion/git servers before. Some folks just hate the feeling of not knowing what's happening and how long its going to take to fix, vs having direct access to work on problems themselves even though its not necessarily "better" in any sense of the word ... hence the illusion
  - vbernat 9y ago

mirekrusin 9y ago

They offer GitHub enterprise you can setup internally if you want.