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Unpopular question: if this is the case, why put it on github? There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, without the communit

by pmlnr 6y ago

Unpopular question: if this is the case, why put it on github? There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, without the community/social aspect of github. [^1]: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,_and_tools#Web_Interfaces https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Interfaces,_frontends,...

jabbany 6y ago
(1) Running your own web service costs money (hosting fees) and time (setup, patching security issues). Often quite significant amounts of both, making it unattractive for small FOSS projects. Github provides a free and managed service. (2) The maintainer _wants_ the community/social aspects like Issues and Discussions. They just don't want code contributions. Of course, one can run their own bug tracker and forum... but... see (1). (3) GitHub has been branding itself as more and more of a package manager too (and in many areas it has become the de-facto one). Placing things on Github v.s. self hosting can also be seen as an SEO/advertising move for an FOSS project.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  On that list, there are projects like https://github.com/Hypercubed/git2html https://github.com/Hypercubed/git2html . It makes a set of static files, which could be uploaded to any static hosting provider, including github pages.
  - jabbany 6y ago
    This kind of stuff takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort to setup and _automate_. Plus at the end of the day you still need to host the repo itself somewhere (not just the web UI), which means you will need a hosted place you can write to via Git's push mechanisms... It's not impossible but finding free managed hosting for this seems nontrivial too.
jgilias 6y ago
I don't see why the question should be unpopular. It's valid. I think because having a project on github aids discoverability. Also, the project mentions that they would stop accepting pull requests, not that there would be no interaction with users whatsoever. Quite the contrary, it is stated that the author is thankful for bug reports and feature requests. Having the issue tracker is still of importance then.
jasode 6y ago
>There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, I didn't study your cited list extensively but it looks like a list of tools instead of free repo hosting. E.g. Gitweb and WebGitNet are not analogous to "github.com". Most devs are not interested in self-hosting a git repo so looking at a list of web frontends for git isn't solving the problem. >, without the community/social aspect of github. There are at least 3 categories of social interactions on github: + Issues - PRs + Discussions ... and for the repo of this particular thread, the developer is still using +Issues and +Discussions. He just wants to opt out of PRs for the reasons stated in README.md.
- bityard 6y ago
  > Most devs are not interested in self-hosting a git repo I mean, the _old_ way of sharing source code was to upload it to an FTP mirror, and then once the Internet got "modern," a personal website. GitHub is not the only way to get a project on the Internet, it's just the most popular way at the moment.
  - jabbany 6y ago
    The _old_ way costs money :) which actually limited the FOSS community to people who can either afford hosting or have access to some kind of free hosting through their job/school. The fact GitHub itself has become one of the easiest ways to setup a personal website says a lot about the availability of good, free, managed static hosting without ads.
sltkr 6y ago
Github is free, easy to use, and reliable. Lots of developers use it for private repositories, which obviously don't benefit from community contributions. It's easier than setting up your own server. Putting the code on Github also makes the project easier to discover and makes the source code easy to navigate. Finally, note that the author of this post still welcomes bug reports and feature requests.
- cies 6y ago
  Talking about the PR tab, that page is hella unreliable lately. It hides being unreliable by putting some page load progress bar on top of the page. That progress stalls at 95%. Then you need to click again to retry. On bad days it breaks >50% of the time. Seriously, that progress bar is hiding the read problem here: some timeout of a 50X error or something. We --GH users-- are devs! We know that your hiding this, it's not very respectful I think. Oh, and, we pay for GH.
robinhood 6y ago
It’s not about a lack of other options. It’s about discoverability of your work, and authority. Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google. Also, the fact that the code is hosted on Github is, for me personally, a good indication that the code is probably valid. I have never, so far, pulled a package which source code was not on Github.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > It’s about discoverability of your work, and authority. The discoverability I admit. Authority is debatable. > Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google. Really? Every single time I compare search inside github vs outside (google, ddg, anything), the difference is massive towards more and better results from github itself.
  - robinhood 6y ago
    I’m not talking about the search inside Github, but indexing your work on the search engines. All my code, through a search on Google, appears on the top results, thanks to the fact that Github has great metadata around my code to let the search engines eat them.
gbrown_ 6y ago
Perhaps you wish to have both your collaborative and your presentational works on the same (in this case near de facto) hosting provider.
mumblemumble 6y ago
I'm reminded a little bit of an experience I once had trying to give away a graphing calculator I didn't need anymore. I posted it on Freecycle, and found someone who was interested within a day or so. But, in communicating with them, it turned out they didn't just want a free calculator. They wanted me to drive an hour out of town to drop it off at their house, and to spend time teaching them how to use it, and to share my phone number so that they could call me if they had any questions. And, when I tried to set some boundaries and say, "Look, I'm just giving away a calculator, that is all," they started getting abusive. When I put stuff up on GitHub, it's like that. I'm just trying to share some code. I'm really not interested in doing much beyond that, and I'm definitely not interested in people assuming that, just because I've decided to share some code, I'm also giving away product and project management services, or training, or anything like that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- rkangel 6y ago
  I'm constantly amazed by the examples on /r/choosingbeggars. We need to be careful during sweeping conclusions from it due to selection bias, but the number of people giving things away who have clearly learned to put "I will not deliver it to you" etc. on their posts does paint a picture.
- ballenf 6y ago
  If you look at giving away stuff as a transaction, it might make more sense. You get to feel better about not creating waste and helping someone else -- if that was worth nothing to you, you'd throw it away. They get a calculator at the expense of having to deal with a human, coordinate details and potentially troubleshoot a device that may not be in perfect condition. In that sense you've reached a market price for the transaction. The person on the other end is just trying to negotiate a better deal for themselves after you thought the agreement was already done. Being aggressive can be very effective because avoiding conflict is also pretty valuable for a lot of people. The fundamental issue seems twofold: 1) that a more fragmented society results in more transactional thinking versus feeling like we're all on the same team. 2) we're in an increasingly disposable society where the cost of second hand goods can be higher than new items, depending on how valuable your time is (again, if the calculator malfunctioned they might spend a few hours troubleshooting at greater opportunity cost than the price of a new one).
valand 6y ago
I would put my stuff in github too even though I'm skipping the social feature because it is simple and familiar and it is legal to do so
rkangel 6y ago
> There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, without the community/social aspect of github. Github provides a number of things: Git hosting Collaboration with your team Community collaboration CI Issue tracking It is reasonable to still want most of these and not want one.
alkonaut 6y ago
1. You migh thave N projects where a few want contributions and a few don't. You don't want several sites to manage them. 2. The code part of github (a git tree on a webpage) isn't even the key functionality. It's PR's, CI. You may accept feature requests and bug requests but still not want PR's. 3. Having collaborative development with a small team of e.g. 2 people means internal pull requests, reviews, discussions etc are important (and could still be useful to see or contribute to by external users), so taking away PR's isn't the same as going under ground with the project. 4. GitHub is a well known site, people will find your project there.

by pmlnr 6y ago

jabbany 6y ago

(1) Running your own web service costs money (hosting fees) and time (setup, patching security issues). Often quite significant amounts of both, making it unattractive for small FOSS projects. Github provides a free and managed service. (2) The maintainer _wants_ the community/social aspects like Issues and Discussions. They just don't want code contributions. Of course, one can run their own bug tracker and forum... but... see (1). (3) GitHub has been branding itself as more and more of a package manager too (and in many areas it has become the de-facto one). Placing things on Github v.s. self hosting can also be seen as an SEO/advertising move for an FOSS project.

pmlnr 6y ago
On that list, there are projects like https://github.com/Hypercubed/git2html https://github.com/Hypercubed/git2html . It makes a set of static files, which could be uploaded to any static hosting provider, including github pages.
- jabbany 6y ago
  This kind of stuff takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort to setup and _automate_. Plus at the end of the day you still need to host the repo itself somewhere (not just the web UI), which means you will need a hosted place you can write to via Git's push mechanisms... It's not impossible but finding free managed hosting for this seems nontrivial too.

jgilias 6y ago

I don't see why the question should be unpopular. It's valid. I think because having a project on github aids discoverability. Also, the project mentions that they would stop accepting pull requests, not that there would be no interaction with users whatsoever. Quite the contrary, it is stated that the author is thankful for bug reports and feature requests. Having the issue tracker is still of importance then.

jasode 6y ago

>There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, I didn't study your cited list extensively but it looks like a list of tools instead of free repo hosting. E.g. Gitweb and WebGitNet are not analogous to "github.com". Most devs are not interested in self-hosting a git repo so looking at a list of web frontends for git isn't solving the problem. >, without the community/social aspect of github. There are at least 3 categories of social interactions on github: + Issues - PRs + Discussions ... and for the repo of this particular thread, the developer is still using +Issues and +Discussions. He just wants to opt out of PRs for the reasons stated in README.md.

bityard 6y ago
> Most devs are not interested in self-hosting a git repo I mean, the _old_ way of sharing source code was to upload it to an FTP mirror, and then once the Internet got "modern," a personal website. GitHub is not the only way to get a project on the Internet, it's just the most popular way at the moment.
- jabbany 6y ago
  The _old_ way costs money :) which actually limited the FOSS community to people who can either afford hosting or have access to some kind of free hosting through their job/school. The fact GitHub itself has become one of the easiest ways to setup a personal website says a lot about the availability of good, free, managed static hosting without ads.

sltkr 6y ago

Github is free, easy to use, and reliable. Lots of developers use it for private repositories, which obviously don't benefit from community contributions. It's easier than setting up your own server. Putting the code on Github also makes the project easier to discover and makes the source code easy to navigate. Finally, note that the author of this post still welcomes bug reports and feature requests.

cies 6y ago
Talking about the PR tab, that page is hella unreliable lately. It hides being unreliable by putting some page load progress bar on top of the page. That progress stalls at 95%. Then you need to click again to retry. On bad days it breaks >50% of the time. Seriously, that progress bar is hiding the read problem here: some timeout of a 50X error or something. We --GH users-- are devs! We know that your hiding this, it's not very respectful I think. Oh, and, we pay for GH.

robinhood 6y ago

It’s not about a lack of other options. It’s about discoverability of your work, and authority. Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google. Also, the fact that the code is hosted on Github is, for me personally, a good indication that the code is probably valid. I have never, so far, pulled a package which source code was not on Github.

pmlnr 6y ago
> It’s about discoverability of your work, and authority. The discoverability I admit. Authority is debatable. > Github does a great job of indexing your content on Google. Really? Every single time I compare search inside github vs outside (google, ddg, anything), the difference is massive towards more and better results from github itself.
- robinhood 6y ago
  I’m not talking about the search inside Github, but indexing your work on the search engines. All my code, through a search on Google, appears on the top results, thanks to the fact that Github has great metadata around my code to let the search engines eat them.

gbrown_ 6y ago

Perhaps you wish to have both your collaborative and your presentational works on the same (in this case near de facto) hosting provider.

mumblemumble 6y ago

I'm reminded a little bit of an experience I once had trying to give away a graphing calculator I didn't need anymore. I posted it on Freecycle, and found someone who was interested within a day or so. But, in communicating with them, it turned out they didn't just want a free calculator. They wanted me to drive an hour out of town to drop it off at their house, and to spend time teaching them how to use it, and to share my phone number so that they could call me if they had any questions. And, when I tried to set some boundaries and say, "Look, I'm just giving away a calculator, that is all," they started getting abusive. When I put stuff up on GitHub, it's like that. I'm just trying to share some code. I'm really not interested in doing much beyond that, and I'm definitely not interested in people assuming that, just because I've decided to share some code, I'm also giving away product and project management services, or training, or anything like that.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
rkangel 6y ago
I'm constantly amazed by the examples on /r/choosingbeggars. We need to be careful during sweeping conclusions from it due to selection bias, but the number of people giving things away who have clearly learned to put "I will not deliver it to you" etc. on their posts does paint a picture.
ballenf 6y ago
If you look at giving away stuff as a transaction, it might make more sense. You get to feel better about not creating waste and helping someone else -- if that was worth nothing to you, you'd throw it away. They get a calculator at the expense of having to deal with a human, coordinate details and potentially troubleshoot a device that may not be in perfect condition. In that sense you've reached a market price for the transaction. The person on the other end is just trying to negotiate a better deal for themselves after you thought the agreement was already done. Being aggressive can be very effective because avoiding conflict is also pretty valuable for a lot of people. The fundamental issue seems twofold: 1) that a more fragmented society results in more transactional thinking versus feeling like we're all on the same team. 2) we're in an increasingly disposable society where the cost of second hand goods can be higher than new items, depending on how valuable your time is (again, if the calculator malfunctioned they might spend a few hours troubleshooting at greater opportunity cost than the price of a new one).

valand 6y ago

I would put my stuff in github too even though I'm skipping the social feature because it is simple and familiar and it is legal to do so

rkangel 6y ago

> There are countless web frontends[^1] to expose a git tree on the internet, without the community/social aspect of github. Github provides a number of things: Git hosting Collaboration with your team Community collaboration CI Issue tracking It is reasonable to still want most of these and not want one.

alkonaut 6y ago

1. You migh thave N projects where a few want contributions and a few don't. You don't want several sites to manage them. 2. The code part of github (a git tree on a webpage) isn't even the key functionality. It's PR's, CI. You may accept feature requests and bug requests but still not want PR's. 3. Having collaborative development with a small team of e.g. 2 people means internal pull requests, reviews, discussions etc are important (and could still be useful to see or contribute to by external users), so taking away PR's isn't the same as going under ground with the project. 4. GitHub is a well known site, people will find your project there.