8 ms·

I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.

by ezoe 6mo ago

putna 6mo ago
i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.
gk-- 6mo ago
even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams. they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.
- ahartmetz 6mo ago
  Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?
  - jeltz 6mo ago
    It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR. It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.
    - jon-wood 6mo ago
      Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched. If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.
    - ahartmetz 6mo ago
      Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla. It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.
      - jeltz 6mo ago
        I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big. But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.
      - dude187 6mo ago
        KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind of change that would have been a PR from a fork in GitHub. However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise shop that doesn't have software as it's core business
        ahartmetz 6mo ago
        KDE uses GitLab now, the change-over was mostly in 2020 with some less commonly used features staying on Phabricator a while longer. I use a self-hosted GitLab instance in a commercial setting (with developers on Linux and Windows) as well. It's a software department of a non-software company. Fairly small. The person or persons in charge of GitLab have set up some pretty nifty time-savers regarding CI and multi-repo changes - I'd prefer a monorepo, but the integration makes it bearable.
      - 6mo ago
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
      > It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more public-facing interaction, but its about time that developers understand that they need to host their own canonical repos.
      - thiht 6mo ago
        We understand, and say no thanks. The benefits don’t outweigh the costs
        PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
        The benefits now don't outweigh the costs. No doubt, totally agree. The benefits down the road, when your chosen 3rd party host has been enshittified up the wazoo ... they far outweigh the costs.
troad 6mo ago
What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying? I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.
- yoyohello13 6mo ago
  GitLab. We self-host ours and it's rock solid.
- password4321 6mo ago
  Azure DevOps <shudder/>
- moron4hire 6mo ago
  If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all? To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all. Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects. So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.
  - sumanthvepa 6mo ago
    Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow
  - esafak 6mo ago
    What do you use for code review and CI/CD then?
8cvor6j844qw_d6 6mo ago
Are there any obvious successor to GitHub yet? There are a few alternatives, but none have the critical mass of users yet.
- jeltz 6mo ago
  For open source I would say Codeberg looks like the most promising. There is also SourceHut but seems like Codeberg has the mind share.
satvikpendem 6mo ago
Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more users today than ever before though. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286
- Andrex 6mo ago
  They can have the new users pushing out sloppy projects. The serious users leaving will definitely dent profitability. And GitHub being a social network, could start a death spiral.
  - satvikpendem 6mo ago
    What profitability? I'm pretty sure GitHub is a loss leader to push people to Azure and cloud services. I also don't know anyone who actually uses GitHub as a social network even though it ostensibly has such features.
    - Andrex 6mo ago
      The social features were GH's early secret sauce that contributed heavily to its stickiness and why it eventually dominated. IMO. I should have said "will dent whatever profitability." I'm not sure it exists either. From the outside, it would seem crazy that it wouldn't be profitable with all the Enterprise stuff (and it's not like you can throw 10k engineers at whatever GH is doing).
- lynndotpy 6mo ago
  Just speaking anecdotally, Codeberg today feels like the Gitlab of yesteryear, except that Codeberg has projects on it. Someone who is contributing to open source will eventually need to create a Codeberg account. The top comment of the linked thread ("If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks") is something that I find much more likely today than back in 2018.
- windward 6mo ago
abighamb 6mo ago
For personal stuff I hopped over to source hut and it's fine. Simple, direct, and I really like the email based workflows.

I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.

by ezoe 6mo ago

I guess it's time to consider ditching GitHub. Everything that are purchased by Microsoft ware destined to be rotten.

putna 6mo ago

i am surprised it took them time to destroy Github. usually they manage to make acquired companies a garbage pretty fast.

gk-- 6mo ago

even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams. they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.

ahartmetz 6mo ago
Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?
- jeltz 6mo ago
  It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR. It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.
  - jon-wood 6mo ago
    Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched. If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.
  - ahartmetz 6mo ago
    Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla. It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.
    - jeltz 6mo ago
      I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big. But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.
    - dude187 6mo ago
      KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind of change that would have been a PR from a fork in GitHub. However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise shop that doesn't have software as it's core business
      - ahartmetz 6mo ago
        KDE uses GitLab now, the change-over was mostly in 2020 with some less commonly used features staying on Phabricator a while longer. I use a self-hosted GitLab instance in a commercial setting (with developers on Linux and Windows) as well. It's a software department of a non-software company. Fairly small. The person or persons in charge of GitLab have set up some pretty nifty time-savers regarding CI and multi-repo changes - I'd prefer a monorepo, but the integration makes it bearable.
    - 6mo ago
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
    > It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more public-facing interaction, but its about time that developers understand that they need to host their own canonical repos.
    - thiht 6mo ago
      We understand, and say no thanks. The benefits don’t outweigh the costs
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6mo ago
        The benefits now don't outweigh the costs. No doubt, totally agree. The benefits down the road, when your chosen 3rd party host has been enshittified up the wazoo ... they far outweigh the costs.

troad 6mo ago

What are some good alternatives for closed source codebases that people have been using and enjoying? I only ask because I already know of good alternatives for FOSS, but it's the private / work projects that keep me tethered to GH for now.

yoyohello13 6mo ago
GitLab. We self-host ours and it's rock solid.
password4321 6mo ago
Azure DevOps <shudder/>
moron4hire 6mo ago
If it's for work, why do you need GitHub at all? To me, GitHub only makes sense as a social media site for code. If you are publishing to GitHub with no intent to be open in your code, development process, and contributor roster, then I don't see the point of being on GitHub at all. Because it's not like their issue tracker is particularly good. It's not like their documentation support is particularly good. It's not like their search is particularly good. It's CI/CD system is bonkers. There are so many problems with using GitHub for its own sake that the only reason I can see to be there is for the network effects. So, with that in mind, why not just setup a cheap VPS somewhere with a bare git repo? It'll be cheaper than GitHub and you don't have to worry about the LLM mind virus taking over management of your VPS and injecting this kind of junk on you.
- sumanthvepa 6mo ago
  Very true. We have a private git repository running on a server that serves as our master. Works fine for us. We backup to GitHub. But it isn't used in any way in the dev workflow
- esafak 6mo ago
  What do you use for code review and CI/CD then?

8cvor6j844qw_d6 6mo ago

Are there any obvious successor to GitHub yet? There are a few alternatives, but none have the critical mass of users yet.

jeltz 6mo ago
For open source I would say Codeberg looks like the most promising. There is also SourceHut but seems like Codeberg has the mind share.

satvikpendem 6mo ago

Funny that people said the exact same thing back when GitHub was originally acquired [0], I wonder how many actually went through with their words and ditched it. I bet GitHub has more users today than ever before though. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17227286

Andrex 6mo ago
They can have the new users pushing out sloppy projects. The serious users leaving will definitely dent profitability. And GitHub being a social network, could start a death spiral.
- satvikpendem 6mo ago
  What profitability? I'm pretty sure GitHub is a loss leader to push people to Azure and cloud services. I also don't know anyone who actually uses GitHub as a social network even though it ostensibly has such features.
  - Andrex 6mo ago
    The social features were GH's early secret sauce that contributed heavily to its stickiness and why it eventually dominated. IMO. I should have said "will dent whatever profitability." I'm not sure it exists either. From the outside, it would seem crazy that it wouldn't be profitable with all the Enterprise stuff (and it's not like you can throw 10k engineers at whatever GH is doing).
lynndotpy 6mo ago
Just speaking anecdotally, Codeberg today feels like the Gitlab of yesteryear, except that Codeberg has projects on it. Someone who is contributing to open source will eventually need to create a Codeberg account. The top comment of the linked thread ("If Microsoft shares SSL certs with NSA they could do MITM attacks") is something that I find much more likely today than back in 2018.
windward 6mo ago

abighamb 6mo ago

For personal stuff I hopped over to source hut and it's fine. Simple, direct, and I really like the email based workflows.