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Justyna yesterday I was complaining about GitHub monoculture in the context of Atlassian sunsetting Mercurial. Outages like this are normal, but the problem is

Justyna yesterday I was complaining about GitHub monoculture in the context of Atlassian sunsetting Mercurial. Outages like this are normal, but the problem is lack of good competitors.

arghwhat 7y ago
There are quite a decent list of competitors, all of which have similar or sometimes better offerings. There are also plenty of fully free and open source solutions, should you want to do things yourself. The Github monopoly is driven by its users.
- mschuetz 7y ago
  I tried gitlab but I hated the web interface. It was lacking in so many departments. Any other alternatives to github to try?
  - unixhero 7y ago
    What was lacking? The GUI on Gitlab is phenomenal imo.
    - hkitdog 7y ago
      On gitlab,repository and code searching function should be improved loll
      - penagwin 7y ago
        Same could be said for github. I regularly literally copy and paste a variable name from a file on Github itself - paste it into the search, and it finds 0 results. HOW COULD YOU FIND NOTHING?! Not even the file I copied it from? A simple grep search would've had no issue and would've been faster!
        arghwhat 7y ago
        Yeah, I always end up having to clone the repo to grep.
  - danskyr711 7y ago
    Bitbucket is pretty good
    - stevekemp 7y ago
      Bitbucket suffers from all the usual problems of an Atlassian-product: A badly designed user-interface, and frequent stability/downtime problems.
      - mschuster91 7y ago
        Problem 1 with Atlassian is they're using Java. Problem 2 with Atlassian is that their portfolio is entirely made up out of stuff they bought up over years, with wildly different coding and UI/UX standards/history.
  - rnicholus 7y ago
    This. The UI is quite primitive compared to GitHub IMHO. That and Gitlab is littered with half-implemented or poorly implemented workflows. The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through.
    - emilycook 7y ago
      Hi, GitLab employee, is there anything else (besides the MR workflow) specifically that you think we should improve? UI-wise or whatever else you've noticed
    - xtracto 7y ago
      > The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through. Uh, I've been using this for quite some time in GitLab and never found it lacking. Curious what do you find missing there?
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    - sr.ht (OSS, managed, self-hosting) - Gitlab (sorta OSS, managed, self-hosting) - Gitea (OSS, self-hosting) - Gogs (OSS, self-hosting) - Bitbucket (managed) - Azure Repos (managed) - Google Cloud Repositories (managed) To be honest, Gitlab has come a long way. And things like search that people point out doesn't work well on Github either, where code search is super broken and often skips results or find nothing where a git grep would drown you in results.
consolenaut 7y ago
I think you're right about a general move towards a Git monoculture (as opposed to a GitHub one), but there are dozens of great Git repo hosting/collaboration companies - GitLab, Bitbucket & SourceForge to name a few of the bigger ones
nickpsecurity 7y ago
The problem is bad design and/or integration of components. VMS clusters over leased lines went years without outages. Record was 17 years at a rail yard. They also did rolling upgrades across both different OS versions and CPU architectures. The methods are public if any competitors want to match or exceed them: https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04622808 https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na... These modern cloud services using Linux ecosystem are doing rolling outages instead. I'm amazed people keep making them dependencies. Maybe their local systems using similar technology went down more often. Maybe this is an improvement. I'd still put mine on an OpenBSD or OpenVMS cluster if it was business-critical with lots of money on the line. I want it staying up, up, up. :)
- mugsie 7y ago
  Modern apps are designed to deal with part of them being down - it is the core upgrade strategy. VMS clusters were (and modern equivalents are) awesome, but they have a different speed of innovation / development. It is a trade off - perfect uptime, but that new feature could take a year, or 99.9% uptime, but it can be written and deployed tomorrow.
  - nickpsecurity 7y ago
    Their development velocity might have been due to their management or internal culture. You can get most of those results faster and on a budget. The best evidence was the startup behind FoundationDB continually improving their product in highly-competitive space while doing QA like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc Generally, on top of code reviews, one can get high return with minimal labor and hardware with a combo of Design-by-Contract, contract/spec/property-based testing, low-F.P. static analysis, and fuzzing with contracts in as runtime checks. That's my default recommendation. In Github's case, they also might have access to both closed and open tools that Microsoft Research makes. MSR is awesome if you've never checked them out. Two examples applicable to system reliability and security: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ironclad/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ironclad/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/p-safe-asynchronous-event-driven-programming/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/p-safe-... Plus some of their other tools in various states of usability: https://rise4fun.com/ https://rise4fun.com/

Justyna yesterday I was complaining about GitHub monoculture in the context of Atlassian sunsetting Mercurial. Outages like this are normal, but the problem is lack of good competitors.

arghwhat 7y ago

There are quite a decent list of competitors, all of which have similar or sometimes better offerings. There are also plenty of fully free and open source solutions, should you want to do things yourself. The Github monopoly is driven by its users.

mschuetz 7y ago
I tried gitlab but I hated the web interface. It was lacking in so many departments. Any other alternatives to github to try?
- unixhero 7y ago
  What was lacking? The GUI on Gitlab is phenomenal imo.
  - hkitdog 7y ago
    On gitlab,repository and code searching function should be improved loll
    - penagwin 7y ago
      Same could be said for github. I regularly literally copy and paste a variable name from a file on Github itself - paste it into the search, and it finds 0 results. HOW COULD YOU FIND NOTHING?! Not even the file I copied it from? A simple grep search would've had no issue and would've been faster!
      - arghwhat 7y ago
        Yeah, I always end up having to clone the repo to grep.
- danskyr711 7y ago
  Bitbucket is pretty good
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    Bitbucket suffers from all the usual problems of an Atlassian-product: A badly designed user-interface, and frequent stability/downtime problems.
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      Problem 1 with Atlassian is they're using Java. Problem 2 with Atlassian is that their portfolio is entirely made up out of stuff they bought up over years, with wildly different coding and UI/UX standards/history.
- rnicholus 7y ago
  This. The UI is quite primitive compared to GitHub IMHO. That and Gitlab is littered with half-implemented or poorly implemented workflows. The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through.
  - emilycook 7y ago
    Hi, GitLab employee, is there anything else (besides the MR workflow) specifically that you think we should improve? UI-wise or whatever else you've noticed
  - xtracto 7y ago
    > The MR workflow to support code reviews was never really thought through. Uh, I've been using this for quite some time in GitLab and never found it lacking. Curious what do you find missing there?
- arghwhat 7y ago
  - sr.ht (OSS, managed, self-hosting) - Gitlab (sorta OSS, managed, self-hosting) - Gitea (OSS, self-hosting) - Gogs (OSS, self-hosting) - Bitbucket (managed) - Azure Repos (managed) - Google Cloud Repositories (managed) To be honest, Gitlab has come a long way. And things like search that people point out doesn't work well on Github either, where code search is super broken and often skips results or find nothing where a git grep would drown you in results.

consolenaut 7y ago

I think you're right about a general move towards a Git monoculture (as opposed to a GitHub one), but there are dozens of great Git repo hosting/collaboration companies - GitLab, Bitbucket & SourceForge to name a few of the bigger ones

nickpsecurity 7y ago

The problem is bad design and/or integration of components. VMS clusters over leased lines went years without outages. Record was 17 years at a rail yard. They also did rolling upgrades across both different OS versions and CPU architectures. The methods are public if any competitors want to match or exceed them: https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04622808 https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na... These modern cloud services using Linux ecosystem are doing rolling outages instead. I'm amazed people keep making them dependencies. Maybe their local systems using similar technology went down more often. Maybe this is an improvement. I'd still put mine on an OpenBSD or OpenVMS cluster if it was business-critical with lots of money on the line. I want it staying up, up, up. :)

mugsie 7y ago
Modern apps are designed to deal with part of them being down - it is the core upgrade strategy. VMS clusters were (and modern equivalents are) awesome, but they have a different speed of innovation / development. It is a trade off - perfect uptime, but that new feature could take a year, or 99.9% uptime, but it can be written and deployed tomorrow.
- nickpsecurity 7y ago
  Their development velocity might have been due to their management or internal culture. You can get most of those results faster and on a budget. The best evidence was the startup behind FoundationDB continually improving their product in highly-competitive space while doing QA like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc Generally, on top of code reviews, one can get high return with minimal labor and hardware with a combo of Design-by-Contract, contract/spec/property-based testing, low-F.P. static analysis, and fuzzing with contracts in as runtime checks. That's my default recommendation. In Github's case, they also might have access to both closed and open tools that Microsoft Research makes. MSR is awesome if you've never checked them out. Two examples applicable to system reliability and security: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ironclad/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/ironclad/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/p-safe-asynchronous-event-driven-programming/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/p-safe-... Plus some of their other tools in various states of usability: https://rise4fun.com/ https://rise4fun.com/