20 ms·

Leaving Github

229 points by srl 14y ago

ricardobeat 14y ago
I thought this was about an employee leaving GitHub and thought "oh shit, there goes their winning streak"! On the actual post: what prevents one from using `git am` locally and then pushing the changes to GitHub?
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Likewise and I thought from the first line ("I’ve done it, I’ve ditched github") it was going to be a scathing tear down of how their flexible management is going to be the death of the company. What a let down!
  - dfc 14y ago
    Yeah, that sucks I was really hoping to read an ex-githubber airing their dirty laundry complete with ad hominems and vitriolic gossip. wtf?
- msbarnett 14y ago
  > On the actual post: what prevents one from using `git am` locally and then pushing the changes to GitHub? Absolutely nothing. His entire 'Github vs Git' thesis is a false dichotomy.
  - dfc 14y ago
    "false dichotomy" How can you commit to the linux kernel using github's interface? I have not seen a button for `git send-email`.
    - quaunaut 14y ago
      Forgive me, I'm not nearly as familiar with the system as others, but couldn't you just clone the repo on your own system, then send that command from your own bash? It isn't using Github, yes, but then again that system setup doesn't seem like it's using Github either.
      - dfc 14y ago
        I think the point of the linked story is that you can use github seamlessly to collaborate with other GH projects but you have to use your local git installation for interacting with non-gh projects.
        lotyrin 14y ago
        You have to use your own local git for doing anything non-trivial. Github does not intend to replace your CLI, it intends to augment it. Reimplementing send-email/am would be a waste of their effort toward their true goal.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - ceol 14y ago
      Apparently this isn't obvious, but when you push your repo to Github, you aren't actually handing complete control of it over to them. You can still `git send-email` from your CLI.
    - mh- 14y ago
      I'm not sure I understand the basis for your conclusion.. There's a lot of git operations you can't do with the Github web interface. How do you do a non-ff merge? A rebase? You use the git cli.
      - dfc 14y ago
        I think that is the thesis of the linked story. I did not write the linked story nor am I in complete agreement with the author. But I think that the thesis is that there is the github way and then there is the git cli way. To use the author's analogy to gmail, what actions do you drop to the shell to complete instead of using gmail's interface.
        msbarnett 14y ago
        > But I think the thesis is there is the github way and then there is the goit cli way. Which is, again, a false dichotomy. Github is a remote repo. In git you always also have your own local repo, and things like 'git am' and 'git send-email' (and 'git rebase --interactive', and 'git bisect', and any other non-trivial use of git) are operations that you would always want to be performing locally before pushing it out to a remote repository. That there's no interface to perform these things on Github doesn't mean that Github is trying to engage in vendor lock-in, it's just a reflection of the reality of the fact that you should be doing that stuff to your local private repo, with your local client.
        mh- 14y ago
        I think the difference is that gmail wasn't the first simplification (web-based or otherwise) of email. Remember when people used to sign (and/or encrypt) their emails with PGP/GPG? I'm not aware of a way to do that in gmail in any realistic sense. I do remember, however, many early webmail clients barely supporting even small attachments. Some didn't support multipart. Eventually, as webmail providers improved, the userbase decided the trade-off of losing the low-level access for the usability advances was worthwhile. I think email is an apt analogy. GitHub is the first highly-successful incarnation of its kind. There are already credible competitors (albeit with much smaller user counts), and there will be more. GH has made a business decision on what features they spend time on. Other competitors will arrive at different decisions. Developers, along with popular open source projects, will go to the providers that support their needs.
    - handelaar 14y ago
      Perhaps the github people decided -- since in order to have a `git send-email` button you must first have actually committed a repo from your own machine, and that your CLI/local client has the facililty already -- that the feature being moaned about here was... what's the word?... optional.
  - srl 14y ago
    In theory, nothing. In practice, most github users don't know how to use `git am`, and won't accept contributions but through github pull requests (or at least will get very annoyed). In general, open-source projects place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately, for better or worse. Emailing patches around works very well, and modern VCSes have splendid support for it. If you want to contribute to a project on github, you need to abandon that.
    - mh- 14y ago
      >place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately appropriately according to the standards of that project. if using GH pull requests was such a barrier to entry, contributors wouldn't and you'd see an exodus from using them. I haven't seen this.
    - msbarnett 14y ago
      > In general, open-source projects place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately, for better or worse. Emailing patches around works very well, and modern VCSes have splendid support for it. If you want to contribute to a project on github, you need to abandon that. Rather: if you want to contribute to a project on github, and that project does not accept emailed patches for contributions, you need to abandon that. If the project didn't accept pull requests, you'd need to abandon pull requests. This has absolutely nothing to do with Github, and everything to do with the preferences of the project maintainers and the reality that if you want to contribute to something, it's up to you to conform to its standards, not it to conform to your preferences. Pull requests are popular with project maintainers simply because they're a very low-friction way to accept contributions.
      - dasil003 14y ago
        Also, if you email the maintainers a patch and an explanation about why you don't use Github and humbly ask them if they'd accept the patch, I think there's a good likelihood they will if the patch is good.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
losethos 14y ago
no gpl code -- I wrote all of it, individual file file compression, different language, has binary pictures in source code files, no networking in LoseThos, I like doing global string find-and-replaces, I work alone, I'm in a CIA prison, not ASCII. #5 is cursor position for IDE, #31 is shift-space so I can do spaces-to-tabs on source code, Allows 128-255 so includes pi character.
DiabloD3 14y ago
Actually, why isn't there a git extension for github tasks? Theres no reason why I shouldn't be able to do git send-github gitusername <branch> and have it pop up a commit editor to type the pull request text, etc.
- bkbleikamp 14y ago
  https://github.com/defunkt/hub https://github.com/defunkt/hub
  - bryanlarsen 14y ago
    But that's not an extension. It could easily be. The fact that it isn't, and Defunkt's suggestion to alias hub to git nicely illustrates the original author's point.
  - DiabloD3 14y ago
    Its not an extension, but close enough. I cannot upvote you enough.
dtorres 14y ago
That title is misleading... I expected blood! About the post itself: I personally use github as a git host of public code only, other than viewing code (which does a great job at, IMO) and hosting I have no other use for it. All the other things I do them with the cli.
FlukeATX 14y ago
I see this guy's point, and I understand it's not unique (we've seen Linus' thoughts on Github's Pull Requests), but personally I don't see it as a big deal. Pull Requests are very simple to use and in my experience, do what they are meant to very well. I recently made my first contribution to an existing open source project, and it was an interesting experience. One of the things I always wondered was, how do I go from "Ok, I have a bug fix / new feature" to "Great, it's part of the software now!". For this particular project it was as simple as forking the Github repository, making my changes, and sending a pull request- done. I could leave that Github repo on my account to easily show off my contribution to friends or potential employers, or delete it if I felt it was clutter. I didn't have to learn how `git am` or `git send-email` work or making a patch and sending it to a development list or anything like that. And if someone wants to contribute to a project of mine on Github, but they don't want to use Github's system, that's cool too. If you're willing to help me out, I'll gladly learn how to take your contribution and get it into my project.
- taligent 14y ago
  Same with me. I recently made my first contribution to an open source project using Github. There is no way I would have done the same if I had to deal with patches, emails, arguing with other developers or some other process that wasn't as simple as a few clicks. I honestly believe Github is the best thing to happen to OSS in a long time.
xxiao 14y ago
bitbucket works great for me for all clients. gitlab is also a good option.
storborg 14y ago
This doesn't make sense. You can use Github purely as a git remote, and nothing else--just as you can use Gmail as an IMAP host, and nothing else.
- srl 14y ago
  > You can use Github purely as a git remote, and nothing else And then you start receiving pull requests. Github, purely as a git remote, adds no value over self-hosting, and is significantly slower. (Seriously - try self-hosting and notice how different 'git push' feels. It surprised the hell out of me.)
  - nowarninglabel 14y ago
    You don't receive pull requests if your repo is private. So where is the value you are asking? Well for one, we don't worry about the server git is on going down. But more importantly, we are exposed to a lot of tools usable via the site that are hard to replicate on the command line. For instance, they have a great "view changes" feature for comparison between repos, this help sort out why master was ahead of development by some commits the other day. I could go on (stats, ease of sending links to diff to non-technical people that just want to see a text change was made, etc.) but go take a look yourself. That's not to say that git is for you, but your premise that github offers no value as a git remote is false.
    - oinksoft 14y ago
      Well for one, we don't worry about the server git is on going down github has been down for far longer in the past four years than the server where I keep my repositories, which has only been offline for maintenance reboot. This is my main reason actually for not wanting to put anything commercial on github; the performance benefits are just gravy on top of that. they have a great "view changes" feature for comparison between repos, this help sort out why master was ahead of development by some commits the other day It sounds like you're referring to branches, not repositories. `git diff` handles this very well for me and is far more flexible. Even on an open source project I host on github, I'm going to use `git diff` to perform this operation. ease of sending links to diff to non-technical people that just want to see a text change was made, etc. gitweb handles this fine if I need it to, though.
jlarocco 14y ago
I was under the impression that GitHub stuff is orthogonal to git. In other words, GitHub pull requests don't make the existing git functionality go away and there's nothing stopping anybody from using whichever one they want. If you don't like GitHub pull requests just don't use them. Am I mistaken?
- lotyrin 14y ago
  You could easily use a send-email/am workflow with a github repo. It'd be identical to using your own git remote. It would also be possible for github to add a yourproject@github.com that accepts a send-email formatted patch mail and creates pull-requests. The only reason these don't happen is because nobody really wants that. The first one is immediately and completely possible, but you'd get harrassed by all the people that want the pull request UX. The second would require effort on the part of github in order to please an audience of nearly zero. Edit: Honestly I think you'd get just as much grief from the people who want pull requests when using a private repo ("Why not just use Github"), except maybe that they don't know your project exists. It's up to you if you want to care, regardless of where your remote is.
- mh- 14y ago
  >Am I mistaken? no. as others have pointed out in the last few minutes, GH is perfectly capable of being a standard git remote. I've only found two limitations to hosting on GitHub: * Can't use real git hooks. understandable in the shared environment, but an annoyance and it's worth mentioning. * Can't prevent force pushes; no fine-grain permissions- grant read or read-write to a repo. The permission gripe has a solution in GitHub Enterprise, but I don't use it and can't speak to its usability.
  - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
    > Can't use real git hooks. understandable in the shared environment, but an annoyance and it's worth mentioning. It's also worth mentioning that the selection of hooks available pretty much trumps any standard git hooks that I've ever dealt with. And if you really need some custom functionality to fire, you can set up a custom webhook URL that points to your own server somewhere.
akent 14y ago
You can still get the full git diff out of a pull request by appending .diff to the pull request URL on github. Even better, you can get output similar to git send-email by appending .patch. Likewise there's nothing stopping you applying an emailed patch in your local copy and then pushing to github. This post seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.
- jpeterson 14y ago
  Yea. At the end of the day, it's still a git repo that you're dealing with. This post is a lot of hot air.
  - _pferreir_ 14y ago
    Yes, but he's kind of right - they could do better.
    - tinco 14y ago
      I wholeheartedly disagree. This is like complaining about the mars mission saying that their pictures are not HD enough and they could do better. No they couldn't and they would if they could. Well since I'm already downvoted I'll just finish this rant. Comments like this frustrate me, why would you just assume something could be done better just because it is easy to do? Everyone read how Github works, it's a collective of programmers that assign themselves tasks, anyone at github could for themselves decide to implement this feature. No one did, obviously they've got something better to do! Don't tell me every employee at github is an evil corporate overlord that wants to vendor lock the world into github. They make the best source control repository in the world, and you should unequivocally laud them for that. Frankly if you don't, I think you're a bit of a retard, so that brings me to the linked article. It makes no sense at all. Github does nothing fundamentally wrong, and it is not incompatible with how he or anyone else uses software. If a project requires you to submit a pull request via github, how is that different from a project requiring you to submit a bug through mozilla? It's just not. If you think you and your patch are so important you shouldn't be bothered with pull requests, why don't you just fork and put it on a repository somewhere else? As if e-mailing patches to people is somehow more effective at getting them to merge code. As if git am is somehow a fundamental property of git, instead of just some feature Torvalds hacked onto it. I would like to rant about more invalid points he makes about github being a 'reimplementation' of git, but he doesn't make any other points.
mbleigh 14y ago
GitHub is closed source, but has open APIs to interact with every aspect of the system. It would be completely possible to create an email dropbox for git send-email that would create pull requests from an email. The reason that such a thing doesn't exist is that nearly everyone loves the crap out of GH pull requests. If you don't like pull requests, you can use GitHub as nothing but a git remote. If you use https://github.com/defunkt/hub https://github.com/defunkt/hub, you don't even ever have to visit the GitHub website once you've signed up. GitHub does enhance and doesn't replace git. You're proclaiming an "embrace, extend, extinguish" when the fact is that nothing on GitHub is incompatible in any way with git off of GitHub. If one day GitHub were to torch their servers and disappear, all I'd have to do is git push to another remote and we're back in business. I'd lose my issues, but git doesn't exactly ship with an issue tracker.
geofft 14y ago
I agree wholeheartedly with disliking their pull-request interface (the encouragement to use a non-mailed-patch workflow plus the fact that push notifications don't include diffs means that diffs never land in my inbox, which is unfortunate), and disliking the popular equivalence of Github with git. That said, "They do not improve or contribute to git itself" is simply untrue. Many of the most active git contributors are Github employees. The git website itself was designed by Github people and is hosted by Github; the Pro Git book is written by an employee.
mh- 14y ago
"services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value." I can't tell if the author is being hyperbolic or is just out of touch with reality. "A couple nights ago, I needed to set up gitweb (a story for another post), and learned that no, nginx did not support CGI, and fcgiwrap was a little annoying to get working on OpenBSD. I whipped up a quick 80-liner in go to serve a single CGI script, and then told nginx to reverse proxy." (from previous blog entry) oh.
- reidrac 14y ago
  gitweb can use fastcgi out of the box (first Google result: http://sixohthree.com/1402/running-gitweb-in-fastcgi-mode http://sixohthree.com/1402/running-gitweb-in-fastcgi-mode). Although I may agree with your comment, it sounds a little bit like an ad hominem argument. He may be wrong in other posts but can be completely right in the post we're discussing here.
  - srl 14y ago
    Apparently you and I have very different definitions of "out of the box". The link you give explicitly requires installing and configuring a fastcgi wrapper script distinct from gitweb.
    - reidrac 14y ago
      FastCGI is supported by gitweb, you need to install the dependencies and use a command line flag + env variable (that I think it's required by the module that implements the FastCGI bits). That's not a wrapper. Read the INSTALL file: http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git?a=blob_plain;f=gitweb/INSTALL http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git?a=blob_plain;f=gitweb/INSTAL... (Requirements, "optional Perl modules") EDIT: ate a word.
  - sanderjd 14y ago
    It is not ad-hominem, he is using proof from a different source than the original article to show that the author is just flat wrong about services like Github providing no value. In this case, the minimum amount of value Github was adding was the cost of however much time it took the article to mess around with Nginx and then write his Go script. Multiplied across the entire population of people using Git (keeping in mind that many of them probably aren't capable of solving the gitweb problem), that is already a sizable value-add.
sc68cal 14y ago
Github is not like that. The github engineers quite clearly see github as a product built on git (the technology) rather than a product operating within git (the protocol). They do not improve or contribute to git itself GitHub has a number of employees that contribute to libgit2 (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2), and the language bindings for a number of languages. I think that is a serious contribution to the Git ecosystem. full disclosure: I replaced GitSharp with LibGit2Sharp (the C# bindings to libgit2) in Git-Tfs
ftwinnovations 14y ago
I see where the author is coming from with his arguments, but I'll bet 10 bucks his project won't be seeing any pull requests moving forward. Github did not supplant git, it created the market for git. If it weren't for github, we'd all still be using SVN (yes yes and mercurial and blah blah other minor league players).
- oinksoft 14y ago
  I have little doubt that a great many of the programmers here adopted DVCS long before commercial web frontends became popular. You have it backwards: Github has git to thank, and not the other way around.
  - mh- 14y ago
    I won't speculate on HN's userbase, but that I'm confident GitHub is responsible for a much of git's gains both in the wider open-source community and within startups.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Er, both are true. Github is fundamentally a "value added" on top of git. It obviously owes a huge amount to git's fundamentally good design, and especially in the beginning, to a pre-existing git community (which jumped at a somewhat slicker way to set up git repos and interact with other git users). But OTOH, github's slick layer on top of git really helped push git into areas that might have been a harder sell otherwise. [and that's what's amazing about git these days: not that it's popular amongst hackers (duh!) but that it has become popular amongst more conservative corporations and less technically inclined users.] They help each other. Win-win.
    - benatkin 14y ago
      Let me spell it out for you: git would exist if not for github. The inverse is not true.
      - 14y ago
sthatipamala 14y ago
Github is not loyal to the Git way of life. They reinvent or add sugar to parts of Git that do not appeal to amateur developers. For example, Github for Mac hides the Git workflow with semantics that are similar to Dropbox and SVN. They have also switched the default authentication from SSH-based to username and password based. This is very intelligent on their part. Less scary = more developers = solidified Github as THE code repo of the Internet.
- primatology 14y ago
  Increasing the accessibility of Git isn't treason. Quite the opposite: Git is now used by far more developers. That's a win for the "Git way of life." And the original, "expert" workflow is still available for those who want it.
  - sthatipamala 14y ago
    Never said otherwise. As I said, Github is very intelligent to lower the barrier to entry.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    > That's a win for the "Git way of life." No it isn't. That's a win for the GitHub workflow. People learn how to use git locally, if they aren't using the mac or windows client. They don't learn how to collaborate the standard way, though.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  I HATE the auth switch. Entering username and password is very irritating.
  - technoweenie 14y ago
    For people that have never setup SSH, HTTPS auth is very simple. The latest Git supports credential cachers so you don't have to type the password in each time. I also personally love that the same GitHub URL works in the browser and through the Git CLI. If you click the "SSH" button on GitHub repositories, it'll remember your preference.
molecule 14y ago
This is quite an audacious article, considering that the author's web-interface to his destination git repo is not set up properly: http://git.bytbox.net/ http://git.bytbox.net/ <base href="http://localhost:8081:8081" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="static/gitweb.css"/> <link rel="alternate" title="bytbox.net Git projects list" href="?a=project_index" type="text/plain; charset=utf-8" /> <link rel="alternate" title="bytbox.net Git projects feeds" href="?a=opml" type="text/x-opml" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="static/git-favicon.png" type="image/png" />
- anaran 14y ago
  Yep, it's still broken. <base href="http://git.bytbox.net/ http://git.bytbox.net/ /> fixes that page, but pages reached from there are still suffering the some bad base href.
hunvreus 14y ago
The real added value from Github is not Git support per se. It is the knowledge that you won't need to do what the author is about to do; maintain one more service by yourself. It's not that it is a particularly daunting task, so isn't maintaining your own mail server, mailing list, NAS, blog... But it piles up, and at the end of the day you're probably better off not wasting your time supporting things that other people can do well enough (and probably cheaper).
- thedeuce 14y ago
  This; I totally agree. Many people don't get it though...
azakai 14y ago
Valid complaint. I felt this exact way when I first started using github 2 years ago, and I almost didn't use it because of that. But everyone is on github. It won. Even if the article makes 100% valid points, that won't change anytime soon, and until then, I'll be on github. And despite the problems mentioned, it is still an awesome free service.
ozataman 14y ago
Not that I'm against compatibility or that I'm in love with Github, but what about having one place where you track most/all of your OSS project of interest? Integrated issue tracker? Ability to collaboratively work with people across the planet with line by line comments? The value of having entire communities completely familiar with a common platform to collaborate on? Github can and should further improve its relevance while becoming increasingly compatible and just right. But I fail to see how whipping up a self operated server replaces all of that. I don't even want to mention backups, security updates, power interruptions...
MetaCosm 14y ago
If you are leaving github and self-hosting, check out http://gitlabhq.com/ http://gitlabhq.com/ -- still has some rough edges, but getting better fast. Fine grained permissions as well.
olalonde 14y ago
> As far as marketing goes, git has effectively become git, just as search became google. I think this should be: > As far as marketing goes, git has effectively become github, just as search became google.
bryanlarsen 14y ago
I also get that "silo" feeling from git's pull requests, but for a different reason. That great big "merge & close request" button seems nice and handy, but if you press it, you're doing it wrong. You should probably be merging it locally, running your automated tests and some manual sanity checks, and then pushing it to github. What github should do is have a button that pops up a dialog containing some commands you can cut and paste to the command line to do just that. My flow looks something like this: - click around to find the author's repository URL - git remote add it - git fetch that remote - copy the author's issue branch name from the pull request page - git merge that - run the automated tests, and check functionality - then either git push or delete my own master branch and then check it out as a tracking branch from origin/master That last step is probably suboptimal, but it doesn't happen often and I know how to do it that way. It illustrates my point, though: why doesn't github tell me how to do it?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  I recently had a PR I needed to take and improve. Getting the repo URL to pull it was surprisingly difficult.
- substack 14y ago
  I've complained about this before too, but if you click the "i" with a circle around it in the bar that says "this pull request can be automatically merged" you get a nice box with all the git commands to do a local fetch and merge. I think this functionality should be less hidden away but it is there and quite useful.
- oellegaard 14y ago
  You should check out Travis-CI. If setup, it will comment with the test results on your pull requests, e.g.: https://github.com/KristianOellegaard/django-hvad/pull/69#issuecomment-6982957 https://github.com/KristianOellegaard/django-hvad/pull/69#is...
- takluyver 14y ago
  For IPython, we now merge most pull requests by clicking the green button. It's convenient, and it automatically links the merge to the PR, so you can find the discussion associated with the changes. For testing, we have a script (test_pr.py) that merges and tests the changes, posting the result to a comment on the PR.
smagch 14y ago
related HN discussion : Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876
gbog 14y ago
I just discovered the git note command. To add to the article github could have used that for their commit comments, or do they?
wldlyinaccurate 14y ago
To be honest, the only reason I am still using GitHub is because it's by far the easiest way for me to show my work to potential employers.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
I agreed with most of the article, but the last paragraph is really silly: "ultimately, services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value."
bconway 14y ago
OP isn't the only one who feels this way: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github...
eschulte 14y ago
I've been using github side by side with self-hosted git repositories for years and I've yet to notice github doing anything to my git repositories which makes them harder to use outside github. Am I missing something, or is this article just FUD?
- dwc 14y ago
  The article is a bit mixed. The valid complaint of pull requests v. send-email is fairly important. The rest of the complaints aren't well thought out, and seem to be pure whinging.
methodin 14y ago
Can someone explain to me why these articles are so popular here? They are always subjective, reflect a single viewpoint and are typically decorated rants - yet for some reason they constantly appear. Why?
- zhov 14y ago
  Because this website is awful and full of drama queens.
  - asparagui 14y ago
    LEAVE HACKERNEWS ALONE!
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  He's got a valid complaint mixed in with emotion and opinion. The valid complaint means you can't dismiss it out of hand, but the emotion and opinion mean that the comments get out hand.
  - mwfunk 14y ago
    No, he's got a complaint, verifying the "valid" part requires digging into what he wrote and really thinking about it. The emotion and opinion part makes readers not want to do that. But yeah, it doesn't help the comments either. :(
donnfelker 14y ago
IM assuming this rant is about public open source repos that allow users to submit pull requests. Reason I say that is because I've used git for years with numerous teamsall of which used a bit repo. We had no issues you speak of. We never logged into the WebUI to do anything other than admin of adding users or keys.
gingerlime 14y ago
How is pull-requests in github different from e.g. tasks in gmail? If you use the gmail task feature, I believe you are unable to access it via IMAP or from your mail client either. Or perhaps the filter options in gmail too? (can you sync these easily with procmail?). I don't use it much, but some of the google-plus integration might also go beyond simple email... I think there must be other examples of unique features that gmail offers over email. That being said, if I continue to look at the email as an analogy, look at what's happening with facebook. They removed the subject line, gave people facebook.com address, built their own messenger app, all seems to work quite well, with many of my friends stopping to use email and rely solely on facebook messages. Sure, it sends you an email, but effectively obscures your email address from your friends... I think this is worrying, and I can understand at least some of the sentiment of the author about github implementing a feature that people like, use and depend on, but one that is essentially incompatible or draws away from git.
jcoder 14y ago
The author makes It sound like Github actively prevents him from using git://github... as a simple remote: > Self-hosting is easy and cheap, I easily collaborate with people who prefer other solutions, and pushes take a quarter of a second.
conorwade 14y ago
Funny post… Github is built on git. Usually whoever is running a project sets up the protocols for contributing. So any confusion over the send-email versus pull-request is a bit over blown. I have watched experienced devs struggle to come to terms with Git. Github makes the transition easier. Then piece by piece they investigate how to use Git properly. Why do these posts show up after major funding happens. Is it because Github is now not the plucky underdog?
ghotli 14y ago
I think of github more in terms of a foundation than a fad. Something that ought to last throughout time and forever.
jcoder 14y ago
I think the author's personal feelings towards Github the company are blinding them to logic: > They do not improve or contribute to git itself (edit: as pointed out on HN, many individual employees at github are git contributors - but none seem to do so under the auspices of github, and the most prolific were contributors well before github came into being) Sure...by hiring prolific Git contributors, and allowing them to continue to work on the product, they display their disdain for raw Git, because they didn't make them use a company account.
AznHisoka 14y ago
Funny, I had no clue git even existed - I thought Github was Git. Honestly, I don't really care if Github follows the git protocol, it makes version control so painless and easy to use. Setting it up manually is tedious and time consuming. So in short, it solves a pain for me. That's all that matters.
binarycrusader 14y ago
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but the fact that github makes it so that I largely don't have to use git is why I use it. Despite my best efforts, every time I try to use git I run away screaming in terror. I've used sccs, cvs, svn, mercurial, and a few other version control systems over my development lifetime and I can just never wrap my head around git. That may be because I spent so many years using Mercurial before git, but I just can't seem to bring myself to enjoy using it. git makes things far more difficult than mercurial (in my opinion) and has encoded it's creators process and workflow into the tool. Tools like github for mac (or the arguably superior tool, SourceTree) make git bearable for me.
- srl 14y ago
  This is, I think, a legitimate reason to use github (although I personally think you'd be much better off really forcing yourself to use and grok git). But it would be better for the rest of us if, despite not using git, github made it look exactly like you were using git. But that's not quite the case - quite a bit of git's functionality is missing (cherry-pick), and other bits are replaced with non-compatible pieces (PRs vs am+send-mail, which provide the exact same functionality, but can't talk to each other). As things are, collaborating with you on a project would require me to use github's interface. Or in reverse, if you wanted to collaborate with me on a project, you'd have to use raw git. If github supported foreign clones and PRs (via send-email and friends), it would seem much less "trapping".
- pgeorgi 14y ago
  Maybe http://hg-git.github.com/ http://hg-git.github.com/ is of interest for you then?
douglee650 14y ago
When asked what VCS they’re using, people reply more often with “github” than simply “git”. sounds like author swims in a specific contained pool that he believes is the only pool around. all the git command line commands still work; why not just use that?
repoman 14y ago
This is why I always use Bitbuekt. As far as I am concerned, I dislike Linus so I won't use git. Well, I still use Linux because it's a great software, but git? Nah. Stick with Mercurial myself. No wonder why Python and Django and Python stick to Bitbucket lol
orefalo 14y ago
Let me guess... you are a LEX & YACC fan!

229 points by srl 14y ago

I thought this was about an employee leaving GitHub and thought "oh shit, there goes their winning streak"! On the actual post: what prevents one from using `git am` locally and then pushing the changes to GitHub?

citricsquid 14y ago
Likewise and I thought from the first line ("I’ve done it, I’ve ditched github") it was going to be a scathing tear down of how their flexible management is going to be the death of the company. What a let down!
- dfc 14y ago
  Yeah, that sucks I was really hoping to read an ex-githubber airing their dirty laundry complete with ad hominems and vitriolic gossip. wtf?
msbarnett 14y ago
> On the actual post: what prevents one from using `git am` locally and then pushing the changes to GitHub? Absolutely nothing. His entire 'Github vs Git' thesis is a false dichotomy.
- dfc 14y ago
  "false dichotomy" How can you commit to the linux kernel using github's interface? I have not seen a button for `git send-email`.
  - quaunaut 14y ago
    Forgive me, I'm not nearly as familiar with the system as others, but couldn't you just clone the repo on your own system, then send that command from your own bash? It isn't using Github, yes, but then again that system setup doesn't seem like it's using Github either.
    - dfc 14y ago
      I think the point of the linked story is that you can use github seamlessly to collaborate with other GH projects but you have to use your local git installation for interacting with non-gh projects.
      - lotyrin 14y ago
        You have to use your own local git for doing anything non-trivial. Github does not intend to replace your CLI, it intends to augment it. Reimplementing send-email/am would be a waste of their effort toward their true goal.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceol 14y ago
    Apparently this isn't obvious, but when you push your repo to Github, you aren't actually handing complete control of it over to them. You can still `git send-email` from your CLI.
  - mh- 14y ago
    I'm not sure I understand the basis for your conclusion.. There's a lot of git operations you can't do with the Github web interface. How do you do a non-ff merge? A rebase? You use the git cli.
    - dfc 14y ago
      I think that is the thesis of the linked story. I did not write the linked story nor am I in complete agreement with the author. But I think that the thesis is that there is the github way and then there is the git cli way. To use the author's analogy to gmail, what actions do you drop to the shell to complete instead of using gmail's interface.
      - msbarnett 14y ago
        > But I think the thesis is there is the github way and then there is the goit cli way. Which is, again, a false dichotomy. Github is a remote repo. In git you always also have your own local repo, and things like 'git am' and 'git send-email' (and 'git rebase --interactive', and 'git bisect', and any other non-trivial use of git) are operations that you would always want to be performing locally before pushing it out to a remote repository. That there's no interface to perform these things on Github doesn't mean that Github is trying to engage in vendor lock-in, it's just a reflection of the reality of the fact that you should be doing that stuff to your local private repo, with your local client.
      - mh- 14y ago
        I think the difference is that gmail wasn't the first simplification (web-based or otherwise) of email. Remember when people used to sign (and/or encrypt) their emails with PGP/GPG? I'm not aware of a way to do that in gmail in any realistic sense. I do remember, however, many early webmail clients barely supporting even small attachments. Some didn't support multipart. Eventually, as webmail providers improved, the userbase decided the trade-off of losing the low-level access for the usability advances was worthwhile. I think email is an apt analogy. GitHub is the first highly-successful incarnation of its kind. There are already credible competitors (albeit with much smaller user counts), and there will be more. GH has made a business decision on what features they spend time on. Other competitors will arrive at different decisions. Developers, along with popular open source projects, will go to the providers that support their needs.
  - handelaar 14y ago
    Perhaps the github people decided -- since in order to have a `git send-email` button you must first have actually committed a repo from your own machine, and that your CLI/local client has the facililty already -- that the feature being moaned about here was... what's the word?... optional.
- srl 14y ago
  In theory, nothing. In practice, most github users don't know how to use `git am`, and won't accept contributions but through github pull requests (or at least will get very annoyed). In general, open-source projects place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately, for better or worse. Emailing patches around works very well, and modern VCSes have splendid support for it. If you want to contribute to a project on github, you need to abandon that.
  - mh- 14y ago
    >place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately appropriately according to the standards of that project. if using GH pull requests was such a barrier to entry, contributors wouldn't and you'd see an exodus from using them. I haven't seen this.
  - msbarnett 14y ago
    > In general, open-source projects place the onus on the contributor to make sure the contribution is packaged appropriately, for better or worse. Emailing patches around works very well, and modern VCSes have splendid support for it. If you want to contribute to a project on github, you need to abandon that. Rather: if you want to contribute to a project on github, and that project does not accept emailed patches for contributions, you need to abandon that. If the project didn't accept pull requests, you'd need to abandon pull requests. This has absolutely nothing to do with Github, and everything to do with the preferences of the project maintainers and the reality that if you want to contribute to something, it's up to you to conform to its standards, not it to conform to your preferences. Pull requests are popular with project maintainers simply because they're a very low-friction way to accept contributions.
    - dasil003 14y ago
      Also, if you email the maintainers a patch and an explanation about why you don't use Github and humbly ask them if they'd accept the patch, I think there's a good likelihood they will if the patch is good.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

losethos 14y ago

no gpl code -- I wrote all of it, individual file file compression, different language, has binary pictures in source code files, no networking in LoseThos, I like doing global string find-and-replaces, I work alone, I'm in a CIA prison, not ASCII. #5 is cursor position for IDE, #31 is shift-space so I can do spaces-to-tabs on source code, Allows 128-255 so includes pi character.

DiabloD3 14y ago

Actually, why isn't there a git extension for github tasks? Theres no reason why I shouldn't be able to do git send-github gitusername <branch> and have it pop up a commit editor to type the pull request text, etc.

bkbleikamp 14y ago
https://github.com/defunkt/hub https://github.com/defunkt/hub
- bryanlarsen 14y ago
  But that's not an extension. It could easily be. The fact that it isn't, and Defunkt's suggestion to alias hub to git nicely illustrates the original author's point.
- DiabloD3 14y ago
  Its not an extension, but close enough. I cannot upvote you enough.

dtorres 14y ago

That title is misleading... I expected blood! About the post itself: I personally use github as a git host of public code only, other than viewing code (which does a great job at, IMO) and hosting I have no other use for it. All the other things I do them with the cli.

FlukeATX 14y ago

I see this guy's point, and I understand it's not unique (we've seen Linus' thoughts on Github's Pull Requests), but personally I don't see it as a big deal. Pull Requests are very simple to use and in my experience, do what they are meant to very well. I recently made my first contribution to an existing open source project, and it was an interesting experience. One of the things I always wondered was, how do I go from "Ok, I have a bug fix / new feature" to "Great, it's part of the software now!". For this particular project it was as simple as forking the Github repository, making my changes, and sending a pull request- done. I could leave that Github repo on my account to easily show off my contribution to friends or potential employers, or delete it if I felt it was clutter. I didn't have to learn how `git am` or `git send-email` work or making a patch and sending it to a development list or anything like that. And if someone wants to contribute to a project of mine on Github, but they don't want to use Github's system, that's cool too. If you're willing to help me out, I'll gladly learn how to take your contribution and get it into my project.

taligent 14y ago
Same with me. I recently made my first contribution to an open source project using Github. There is no way I would have done the same if I had to deal with patches, emails, arguing with other developers or some other process that wasn't as simple as a few clicks. I honestly believe Github is the best thing to happen to OSS in a long time.

xxiao 14y ago

bitbucket works great for me for all clients. gitlab is also a good option.

storborg 14y ago

This doesn't make sense. You can use Github purely as a git remote, and nothing else--just as you can use Gmail as an IMAP host, and nothing else.

srl 14y ago
> You can use Github purely as a git remote, and nothing else And then you start receiving pull requests. Github, purely as a git remote, adds no value over self-hosting, and is significantly slower. (Seriously - try self-hosting and notice how different 'git push' feels. It surprised the hell out of me.)
- nowarninglabel 14y ago
  You don't receive pull requests if your repo is private. So where is the value you are asking? Well for one, we don't worry about the server git is on going down. But more importantly, we are exposed to a lot of tools usable via the site that are hard to replicate on the command line. For instance, they have a great "view changes" feature for comparison between repos, this help sort out why master was ahead of development by some commits the other day. I could go on (stats, ease of sending links to diff to non-technical people that just want to see a text change was made, etc.) but go take a look yourself. That's not to say that git is for you, but your premise that github offers no value as a git remote is false.
  - oinksoft 14y ago
    Well for one, we don't worry about the server git is on going down github has been down for far longer in the past four years than the server where I keep my repositories, which has only been offline for maintenance reboot. This is my main reason actually for not wanting to put anything commercial on github; the performance benefits are just gravy on top of that. they have a great "view changes" feature for comparison between repos, this help sort out why master was ahead of development by some commits the other day It sounds like you're referring to branches, not repositories. `git diff` handles this very well for me and is far more flexible. Even on an open source project I host on github, I'm going to use `git diff` to perform this operation. ease of sending links to diff to non-technical people that just want to see a text change was made, etc. gitweb handles this fine if I need it to, though.

jlarocco 14y ago

I was under the impression that GitHub stuff is orthogonal to git. In other words, GitHub pull requests don't make the existing git functionality go away and there's nothing stopping anybody from using whichever one they want. If you don't like GitHub pull requests just don't use them. Am I mistaken?

lotyrin 14y ago
You could easily use a send-email/am workflow with a github repo. It'd be identical to using your own git remote. It would also be possible for github to add a yourproject@github.com that accepts a send-email formatted patch mail and creates pull-requests. The only reason these don't happen is because nobody really wants that. The first one is immediately and completely possible, but you'd get harrassed by all the people that want the pull request UX. The second would require effort on the part of github in order to please an audience of nearly zero. Edit: Honestly I think you'd get just as much grief from the people who want pull requests when using a private repo ("Why not just use Github"), except maybe that they don't know your project exists. It's up to you if you want to care, regardless of where your remote is.
mh- 14y ago
>Am I mistaken? no. as others have pointed out in the last few minutes, GH is perfectly capable of being a standard git remote. I've only found two limitations to hosting on GitHub: * Can't use real git hooks. understandable in the shared environment, but an annoyance and it's worth mentioning. * Can't prevent force pushes; no fine-grain permissions- grant read or read-write to a repo. The permission gripe has a solution in GitHub Enterprise, but I don't use it and can't speak to its usability.
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  > Can't use real git hooks. understandable in the shared environment, but an annoyance and it's worth mentioning. It's also worth mentioning that the selection of hooks available pretty much trumps any standard git hooks that I've ever dealt with. And if you really need some custom functionality to fire, you can set up a custom webhook URL that points to your own server somewhere.

akent 14y ago

You can still get the full git diff out of a pull request by appending .diff to the pull request URL on github. Even better, you can get output similar to git send-email by appending .patch. Likewise there's nothing stopping you applying an emailed patch in your local copy and then pushing to github. This post seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill.

jpeterson 14y ago
Yea. At the end of the day, it's still a git repo that you're dealing with. This post is a lot of hot air.
- _pferreir_ 14y ago
  Yes, but he's kind of right - they could do better.
  - tinco 14y ago
    I wholeheartedly disagree. This is like complaining about the mars mission saying that their pictures are not HD enough and they could do better. No they couldn't and they would if they could. Well since I'm already downvoted I'll just finish this rant. Comments like this frustrate me, why would you just assume something could be done better just because it is easy to do? Everyone read how Github works, it's a collective of programmers that assign themselves tasks, anyone at github could for themselves decide to implement this feature. No one did, obviously they've got something better to do! Don't tell me every employee at github is an evil corporate overlord that wants to vendor lock the world into github. They make the best source control repository in the world, and you should unequivocally laud them for that. Frankly if you don't, I think you're a bit of a retard, so that brings me to the linked article. It makes no sense at all. Github does nothing fundamentally wrong, and it is not incompatible with how he or anyone else uses software. If a project requires you to submit a pull request via github, how is that different from a project requiring you to submit a bug through mozilla? It's just not. If you think you and your patch are so important you shouldn't be bothered with pull requests, why don't you just fork and put it on a repository somewhere else? As if e-mailing patches to people is somehow more effective at getting them to merge code. As if git am is somehow a fundamental property of git, instead of just some feature Torvalds hacked onto it. I would like to rant about more invalid points he makes about github being a 'reimplementation' of git, but he doesn't make any other points.

mbleigh 14y ago

GitHub is closed source, but has open APIs to interact with every aspect of the system. It would be completely possible to create an email dropbox for git send-email that would create pull requests from an email. The reason that such a thing doesn't exist is that nearly everyone loves the crap out of GH pull requests. If you don't like pull requests, you can use GitHub as nothing but a git remote. If you use https://github.com/defunkt/hub https://github.com/defunkt/hub, you don't even ever have to visit the GitHub website once you've signed up. GitHub does enhance and doesn't replace git. You're proclaiming an "embrace, extend, extinguish" when the fact is that nothing on GitHub is incompatible in any way with git off of GitHub. If one day GitHub were to torch their servers and disappear, all I'd have to do is git push to another remote and we're back in business. I'd lose my issues, but git doesn't exactly ship with an issue tracker.

geofft 14y ago

I agree wholeheartedly with disliking their pull-request interface (the encouragement to use a non-mailed-patch workflow plus the fact that push notifications don't include diffs means that diffs never land in my inbox, which is unfortunate), and disliking the popular equivalence of Github with git. That said, "They do not improve or contribute to git itself" is simply untrue. Many of the most active git contributors are Github employees. The git website itself was designed by Github people and is hosted by Github; the Pro Git book is written by an employee.

mh- 14y ago

"services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value." I can't tell if the author is being hyperbolic or is just out of touch with reality. "A couple nights ago, I needed to set up gitweb (a story for another post), and learned that no, nginx did not support CGI, and fcgiwrap was a little annoying to get working on OpenBSD. I whipped up a quick 80-liner in go to serve a single CGI script, and then told nginx to reverse proxy." (from previous blog entry) oh.

reidrac 14y ago
gitweb can use fastcgi out of the box (first Google result: http://sixohthree.com/1402/running-gitweb-in-fastcgi-mode http://sixohthree.com/1402/running-gitweb-in-fastcgi-mode). Although I may agree with your comment, it sounds a little bit like an ad hominem argument. He may be wrong in other posts but can be completely right in the post we're discussing here.
- srl 14y ago
  Apparently you and I have very different definitions of "out of the box". The link you give explicitly requires installing and configuring a fastcgi wrapper script distinct from gitweb.
  - reidrac 14y ago
    FastCGI is supported by gitweb, you need to install the dependencies and use a command line flag + env variable (that I think it's required by the module that implements the FastCGI bits). That's not a wrapper. Read the INSTALL file: http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git?a=blob_plain;f=gitweb/INSTALL http://repo.or.cz/w/alt-git.git?a=blob_plain;f=gitweb/INSTAL... (Requirements, "optional Perl modules") EDIT: ate a word.
- sanderjd 14y ago
  It is not ad-hominem, he is using proof from a different source than the original article to show that the author is just flat wrong about services like Github providing no value. In this case, the minimum amount of value Github was adding was the cost of however much time it took the article to mess around with Nginx and then write his Go script. Multiplied across the entire population of people using Git (keeping in mind that many of them probably aren't capable of solving the gitweb problem), that is already a sizable value-add.

sc68cal 14y ago

Github is not like that. The github engineers quite clearly see github as a product built on git (the technology) rather than a product operating within git (the protocol). They do not improve or contribute to git itself GitHub has a number of employees that contribute to libgit2 (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2), and the language bindings for a number of languages. I think that is a serious contribution to the Git ecosystem. full disclosure: I replaced GitSharp with LibGit2Sharp (the C# bindings to libgit2) in Git-Tfs

ftwinnovations 14y ago

I see where the author is coming from with his arguments, but I'll bet 10 bucks his project won't be seeing any pull requests moving forward. Github did not supplant git, it created the market for git. If it weren't for github, we'd all still be using SVN (yes yes and mercurial and blah blah other minor league players).

oinksoft 14y ago
I have little doubt that a great many of the programmers here adopted DVCS long before commercial web frontends became popular. You have it backwards: Github has git to thank, and not the other way around.
- mh- 14y ago
  I won't speculate on HN's userbase, but that I'm confident GitHub is responsible for a much of git's gains both in the wider open-source community and within startups.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Er, both are true. Github is fundamentally a "value added" on top of git. It obviously owes a huge amount to git's fundamentally good design, and especially in the beginning, to a pre-existing git community (which jumped at a somewhat slicker way to set up git repos and interact with other git users). But OTOH, github's slick layer on top of git really helped push git into areas that might have been a harder sell otherwise. [and that's what's amazing about git these days: not that it's popular amongst hackers (duh!) but that it has become popular amongst more conservative corporations and less technically inclined users.] They help each other. Win-win.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    Let me spell it out for you: git would exist if not for github. The inverse is not true.
    - 14y ago

sthatipamala 14y ago

Github is not loyal to the Git way of life. They reinvent or add sugar to parts of Git that do not appeal to amateur developers. For example, Github for Mac hides the Git workflow with semantics that are similar to Dropbox and SVN. They have also switched the default authentication from SSH-based to username and password based. This is very intelligent on their part. Less scary = more developers = solidified Github as THE code repo of the Internet.

primatology 14y ago
Increasing the accessibility of Git isn't treason. Quite the opposite: Git is now used by far more developers. That's a win for the "Git way of life." And the original, "expert" workflow is still available for those who want it.
- sthatipamala 14y ago
  Never said otherwise. As I said, Github is very intelligent to lower the barrier to entry.
- benatkin 14y ago
  > That's a win for the "Git way of life." No it isn't. That's a win for the GitHub workflow. People learn how to use git locally, if they aren't using the mac or windows client. They don't learn how to collaborate the standard way, though.
TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I HATE the auth switch. Entering username and password is very irritating.
- technoweenie 14y ago
  For people that have never setup SSH, HTTPS auth is very simple. The latest Git supports credential cachers so you don't have to type the password in each time. I also personally love that the same GitHub URL works in the browser and through the Git CLI. If you click the "SSH" button on GitHub repositories, it'll remember your preference.

molecule 14y ago

This is quite an audacious article, considering that the author's web-interface to his destination git repo is not set up properly: http://git.bytbox.net/ http://git.bytbox.net/ <base href="http://localhost:8081:8081" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="static/gitweb.css"/> <link rel="alternate" title="bytbox.net Git projects list" href="?a=project_index" type="text/plain; charset=utf-8" /> <link rel="alternate" title="bytbox.net Git projects feeds" href="?a=opml" type="text/x-opml" /> <link rel="shortcut icon" href="static/git-favicon.png" type="image/png" />

anaran 14y ago
Yep, it's still broken. <base href="http://git.bytbox.net/ http://git.bytbox.net/ /> fixes that page, but pages reached from there are still suffering the some bad base href.

hunvreus 14y ago

The real added value from Github is not Git support per se. It is the knowledge that you won't need to do what the author is about to do; maintain one more service by yourself. It's not that it is a particularly daunting task, so isn't maintaining your own mail server, mailing list, NAS, blog... But it piles up, and at the end of the day you're probably better off not wasting your time supporting things that other people can do well enough (and probably cheaper).

thedeuce 14y ago
This; I totally agree. Many people don't get it though...

azakai 14y ago

Valid complaint. I felt this exact way when I first started using github 2 years ago, and I almost didn't use it because of that. But everyone is on github. It won. Even if the article makes 100% valid points, that won't change anytime soon, and until then, I'll be on github. And despite the problems mentioned, it is still an awesome free service.

ozataman 14y ago

Not that I'm against compatibility or that I'm in love with Github, but what about having one place where you track most/all of your OSS project of interest? Integrated issue tracker? Ability to collaboratively work with people across the planet with line by line comments? The value of having entire communities completely familiar with a common platform to collaborate on? Github can and should further improve its relevance while becoming increasingly compatible and just right. But I fail to see how whipping up a self operated server replaces all of that. I don't even want to mention backups, security updates, power interruptions...

MetaCosm 14y ago

If you are leaving github and self-hosting, check out http://gitlabhq.com/ http://gitlabhq.com/ -- still has some rough edges, but getting better fast. Fine grained permissions as well.

olalonde 14y ago

> As far as marketing goes, git has effectively become git, just as search became google. I think this should be: > As far as marketing goes, git has effectively become github, just as search became google.

bryanlarsen 14y ago

I also get that "silo" feeling from git's pull requests, but for a different reason. That great big "merge & close request" button seems nice and handy, but if you press it, you're doing it wrong. You should probably be merging it locally, running your automated tests and some manual sanity checks, and then pushing it to github. What github should do is have a button that pops up a dialog containing some commands you can cut and paste to the command line to do just that. My flow looks something like this: - click around to find the author's repository URL - git remote add it - git fetch that remote - copy the author's issue branch name from the pull request page - git merge that - run the automated tests, and check functionality - then either git push or delete my own master branch and then check it out as a tracking branch from origin/master That last step is probably suboptimal, but it doesn't happen often and I know how to do it that way. It illustrates my point, though: why doesn't github tell me how to do it?

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I recently had a PR I needed to take and improve. Getting the repo URL to pull it was surprisingly difficult.
substack 14y ago
I've complained about this before too, but if you click the "i" with a circle around it in the bar that says "this pull request can be automatically merged" you get a nice box with all the git commands to do a local fetch and merge. I think this functionality should be less hidden away but it is there and quite useful.
oellegaard 14y ago
You should check out Travis-CI. If setup, it will comment with the test results on your pull requests, e.g.: https://github.com/KristianOellegaard/django-hvad/pull/69#issuecomment-6982957 https://github.com/KristianOellegaard/django-hvad/pull/69#is...
takluyver 14y ago
For IPython, we now merge most pull requests by clicking the green button. It's convenient, and it automatically links the merge to the PR, so you can find the discussion associated with the changes. For testing, we have a script (test_pr.py) that merges and tests the changes, posting the result to a comment on the PR.

smagch 14y ago

related HN discussion : Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876

gbog 14y ago

I just discovered the git note command. To add to the article github could have used that for their commit comments, or do they?

wldlyinaccurate 14y ago

To be honest, the only reason I am still using GitHub is because it's by far the easiest way for me to show my work to potential employers.

pooriaazimi 14y ago

I agreed with most of the article, but the last paragraph is really silly: "ultimately, services like github and sourceforge are just fads, with very little (I think no) added value."

bconway 14y ago

OP isn't the only one who feels this way: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github/ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/torvalds_github...

eschulte 14y ago

I've been using github side by side with self-hosted git repositories for years and I've yet to notice github doing anything to my git repositories which makes them harder to use outside github. Am I missing something, or is this article just FUD?

dwc 14y ago
The article is a bit mixed. The valid complaint of pull requests v. send-email is fairly important. The rest of the complaints aren't well thought out, and seem to be pure whinging.

methodin 14y ago

Can someone explain to me why these articles are so popular here? They are always subjective, reflect a single viewpoint and are typically decorated rants - yet for some reason they constantly appear. Why?

zhov 14y ago
Because this website is awful and full of drama queens.
- asparagui 14y ago
  LEAVE HACKERNEWS ALONE!
bryanlarsen 14y ago
He's got a valid complaint mixed in with emotion and opinion. The valid complaint means you can't dismiss it out of hand, but the emotion and opinion mean that the comments get out hand.
- mwfunk 14y ago
  No, he's got a complaint, verifying the "valid" part requires digging into what he wrote and really thinking about it. The emotion and opinion part makes readers not want to do that. But yeah, it doesn't help the comments either. :(

donnfelker 14y ago

IM assuming this rant is about public open source repos that allow users to submit pull requests. Reason I say that is because I've used git for years with numerous teamsall of which used a bit repo. We had no issues you speak of. We never logged into the WebUI to do anything other than admin of adding users or keys.

gingerlime 14y ago

How is pull-requests in github different from e.g. tasks in gmail? If you use the gmail task feature, I believe you are unable to access it via IMAP or from your mail client either. Or perhaps the filter options in gmail too? (can you sync these easily with procmail?). I don't use it much, but some of the google-plus integration might also go beyond simple email... I think there must be other examples of unique features that gmail offers over email. That being said, if I continue to look at the email as an analogy, look at what's happening with facebook. They removed the subject line, gave people facebook.com address, built their own messenger app, all seems to work quite well, with many of my friends stopping to use email and rely solely on facebook messages. Sure, it sends you an email, but effectively obscures your email address from your friends... I think this is worrying, and I can understand at least some of the sentiment of the author about github implementing a feature that people like, use and depend on, but one that is essentially incompatible or draws away from git.

jcoder 14y ago

The author makes It sound like Github actively prevents him from using git://github... as a simple remote: > Self-hosting is easy and cheap, I easily collaborate with people who prefer other solutions, and pushes take a quarter of a second.

conorwade 14y ago

Funny post… Github is built on git. Usually whoever is running a project sets up the protocols for contributing. So any confusion over the send-email versus pull-request is a bit over blown. I have watched experienced devs struggle to come to terms with Git. Github makes the transition easier. Then piece by piece they investigate how to use Git properly. Why do these posts show up after major funding happens. Is it because Github is now not the plucky underdog?

ghotli 14y ago

I think of github more in terms of a foundation than a fad. Something that ought to last throughout time and forever.

jcoder 14y ago

I think the author's personal feelings towards Github the company are blinding them to logic: > They do not improve or contribute to git itself (edit: as pointed out on HN, many individual employees at github are git contributors - but none seem to do so under the auspices of github, and the most prolific were contributors well before github came into being) Sure...by hiring prolific Git contributors, and allowing them to continue to work on the product, they display their disdain for raw Git, because they didn't make them use a company account.

AznHisoka 14y ago

Funny, I had no clue git even existed - I thought Github was Git. Honestly, I don't really care if Github follows the git protocol, it makes version control so painless and easy to use. Setting it up manually is tedious and time consuming. So in short, it solves a pain for me. That's all that matters.

binarycrusader 14y ago

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but the fact that github makes it so that I largely don't have to use git is why I use it. Despite my best efforts, every time I try to use git I run away screaming in terror. I've used sccs, cvs, svn, mercurial, and a few other version control systems over my development lifetime and I can just never wrap my head around git. That may be because I spent so many years using Mercurial before git, but I just can't seem to bring myself to enjoy using it. git makes things far more difficult than mercurial (in my opinion) and has encoded it's creators process and workflow into the tool. Tools like github for mac (or the arguably superior tool, SourceTree) make git bearable for me.

srl 14y ago
This is, I think, a legitimate reason to use github (although I personally think you'd be much better off really forcing yourself to use and grok git). But it would be better for the rest of us if, despite not using git, github made it look exactly like you were using git. But that's not quite the case - quite a bit of git's functionality is missing (cherry-pick), and other bits are replaced with non-compatible pieces (PRs vs am+send-mail, which provide the exact same functionality, but can't talk to each other). As things are, collaborating with you on a project would require me to use github's interface. Or in reverse, if you wanted to collaborate with me on a project, you'd have to use raw git. If github supported foreign clones and PRs (via send-email and friends), it would seem much less "trapping".
pgeorgi 14y ago
Maybe http://hg-git.github.com/ http://hg-git.github.com/ is of interest for you then?

douglee650 14y ago

When asked what VCS they’re using, people reply more often with “github” than simply “git”. sounds like author swims in a specific contained pool that he believes is the only pool around. all the git command line commands still work; why not just use that?

repoman 14y ago

This is why I always use Bitbuekt. As far as I am concerned, I dislike Linus so I won't use git. Well, I still use Linux because it's a great software, but git? Nah. Stick with Mercurial myself. No wonder why Python and Django and Python stick to Bitbucket lol

orefalo 14y ago

Let me guess... you are a LEX & YACC fan!