6 ms·

I checked out this guy's site. I understand he is reinventing the wheel. I respect that and do not mean anything negative about that. A lot of us are here to

by 616c 13y ago

I checked out this guy's site. I understand he is reinventing the wheel. I respect that and do not mean anything negative about that. A lot of us are here to understand the wheel and build for ourselves. There is good value for that. What I do not understand, with all due respect, is the value of Github, and to a lesser extent Bitbucket, is in the features outside of the VCS core and how most people realize there is nothing Git-like to replace the actual project management tools where people find Github value. That is, bug tracking/issue tracking is the killer feature. To self-host this is problematic. This is not to say there are not good solutions. Traditionally that is Bugzilla, Trac, Redmine, and more recently a la ArchLinux and Music Player Daemon (MPD) I have seen Mantis BT. It looks interesting. The problem is, as others point out, maintenance, and adding the centralized to the decentralized, thus the point of Git, Mercurial, and others. I noticed this guy hosts his own repos (I tried links to bugsplat.rb) and it did not load, but I assume there is not bug tracking, despite the name. Even this year, I decided to look into the state of DVCS integrated bug tracking. Very few tools exist, or many have problems. BE, bugseverywhere, kind of exists and has seen contributions as of last year. Ticgit was forked to ticgit-ng, but ironically that is a Github project and its bugs are in the Github issue tracker. There was a very cool Perl project, which seems abandoned, called SimpleDefects (SD), which also wanted to do distributed bug tracking. It was going to sync with Github and other issue tracker systems with decentralizaton, so you could git pull for bugs as well. This one has not seen updates for years, as I can tell, but might be the coolest of them. Unfortunately, keeping you whole project decentralized is difficult. I have begun to look into fossil again, despite what people here say, because it might be ugly, but no VCS has its own bug tracker or wiki integration, all written in C. It is the SCM and bug tracker for Sqlite, Tcl, and even for all of NetBSD packages. The last really surprised me. I think for the little guy, that is ideal. Monotone might be worth revisiting (I had multiple problems 3 or 4 months ago because it was embedding Lua and they had not come up to the 5.1-5.2 API changes and builds failed; everyone is hard to find), even with the only data about it is there page and links to snarky Linus Torvalds jokes about the horror of OO data structures and modern C++ programming for a SCM. In short, you should know to host your own Git repos (they are designed, with the native package tools in Git or others) to host simply on a website. It is best for even the lowest footprint web servers, shared hosting or not. What git does not have, is the beautiful features that keep people on Github all day. I really wish distributed bug tracking advanced, but no one is interested. This topic only comes up when Github is down (or maybe in this case but Github is having publicity problems today). If people made a good tool like SD, that has its own bug tracking that syncs well with Github or (insert hosted SCM here), that would be fantastic. I could be more relaxed, principally, by relying on such tools. Back to read the Fossil manual.

kaoD 13y ago
It's simple: discoverability of open source code. Good look getting attention on your self-hosted project.
- 616c 13y ago
  But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? I come back to programming again and again to solve problems or deepen understanding. Popularity is nice, but I post to Github because it is a public place, not to gain popularity. You will never see my code there, I am sure. Most Github repos I stumble upon are through other media and social networks mentioning cool stuff, just like HN. I use plenty of self-hosted tools and I respect those people just the same, maybe even more because they got their somehow without recommendations on the side of a page or trending repo notifcations and email updates. However, what do I wish I saw more of, like a lot now that I read up on Common Lisp, is people mirror aggressively on repo.or.cz, Github, Bitbucket and the like, when their site goes down or they lose interest. Github makes that easy, but we should not throw out the baby with the bath water: Git and tools like it encourage this simple reproduction of effort. I love open source because it is the only human organization I am familiar with that makes this and transparency such an important mantra (I am biased). In short, I will never get attention, but I hope to get understanding. I understand some people contribute for different reasons, but if you are on Github to get attention, the rest of "normalized" society is laughing at us anyway. I work in an IT department, and when I mention Github and source code and different languages, people stare at me like an alien. I will never get attention anywhere, but Github is not making that better or worse. (And to be fair, I know I am vastly oversimplifying your argument and I know I am overemphasizing it. This is not meant to troll, but I see a lot of people these days on Github and places who embody your one comment much more grandiosely, and it pisses me off. Who does open source for attention? Haha.)
  - mjolk 13y ago
    >But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? Ugh, I hate that the term "circle jerk" is being applied to "a place where people share things they have made." Github is a self-described "social coding" website. If people did post code simply to show it off to others, do you feel this is better or worse than Facebook-esque low-content narcissism? I feel like you come to this with a feeling of superiority for some reason. >In short, I will never get attention, but I hope to get understanding. I understand some people contribute for different reasons, but if you are on Github to get attention, the rest of "normalized" society is laughing at us anyway. So what if people are on Github to get attention? Self-promotion can help you get a better job or help establish a reputation. The programming community is small and there's nothing wrong with wanting to participate. However, I posit that people push to public-read Github so that their code gets attention. When I post code to my tech blog, the broadcast audience is small. When I post it to Github, anyone can see/critique/benefit/suggest changes/easily discuss it with context. That's pretty cool. >I work in an IT department, and when I mention Github and source code and different languages, people stare at me like an alien. If you work in an IT department where Github or code-review is strange, that's a different issue. >I will never get attention anywhere, but Github is not making that better or worse. I don't even know how to respond to this.

by 616c 13y ago

kaoD 13y ago

It's simple: discoverability of open source code. Good look getting attention on your self-hosted project.

616c 13y ago
But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? I come back to programming again and again to solve problems or deepen understanding. Popularity is nice, but I post to Github because it is a public place, not to gain popularity. You will never see my code there, I am sure. Most Github repos I stumble upon are through other media and social networks mentioning cool stuff, just like HN. I use plenty of self-hosted tools and I respect those people just the same, maybe even more because they got their somehow without recommendations on the side of a page or trending repo notifcations and email updates. However, what do I wish I saw more of, like a lot now that I read up on Common Lisp, is people mirror aggressively on repo.or.cz, Github, Bitbucket and the like, when their site goes down or they lose interest. Github makes that easy, but we should not throw out the baby with the bath water: Git and tools like it encourage this simple reproduction of effort. I love open source because it is the only human organization I am familiar with that makes this and transparency such an important mantra (I am biased). In short, I will never get attention, but I hope to get understanding. I understand some people contribute for different reasons, but if you are on Github to get attention, the rest of "normalized" society is laughing at us anyway. I work in an IT department, and when I mention Github and source code and different languages, people stare at me like an alien. I will never get attention anywhere, but Github is not making that better or worse. (And to be fair, I know I am vastly oversimplifying your argument and I know I am overemphasizing it. This is not meant to troll, but I see a lot of people these days on Github and places who embody your one comment much more grandiosely, and it pisses me off. Who does open source for attention? Haha.)
- mjolk 13y ago
  >But why do we care? Does everyone post to Github for the circle jerk of attention? Ugh, I hate that the term "circle jerk" is being applied to "a place where people share things they have made." Github is a self-described "social coding" website. If people did post code simply to show it off to others, do you feel this is better or worse than Facebook-esque low-content narcissism? I feel like you come to this with a feeling of superiority for some reason. >In short, I will never get attention, but I hope to get understanding. I understand some people contribute for different reasons, but if you are on Github to get attention, the rest of "normalized" society is laughing at us anyway. So what if people are on Github to get attention? Self-promotion can help you get a better job or help establish a reputation. The programming community is small and there's nothing wrong with wanting to participate. However, I posit that people push to public-read Github so that their code gets attention. When I post code to my tech blog, the broadcast audience is small. When I post it to Github, anyone can see/critique/benefit/suggest changes/easily discuss it with context. That's pretty cool. >I work in an IT department, and when I mention Github and source code and different languages, people stare at me like an alien. If you work in an IT department where Github or code-review is strange, that's a different issue. >I will never get attention anywhere, but Github is not making that better or worse. I don't even know how to respond to this.