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Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies. Considering op

by bbx 12y ago

Google hosting Go on GitHub. Microsoft hosting .NET on GitHub. It must feel like an accomplishment to be implicitly endorsed by these companies. Considering open source's history, you'd think its primary management tool would be open source as well. I guess it's GitHub's combination of accessible design + performant version control + lack of ads + reliability that made it the premium source for anything open source. I'm impressed.

shurcooL 12y ago
They've really made it easier to collaborate. Their website design is beautiful, consistent, making it delightful to use everyday. They fix issues quickly, are reliable, and have top notch customer support. They try to be at the top of their game and offer features to make our work easier (while maintaining simplicity, similar to Go). You can edit posts to fix typos, and GitHub Flavored Markdown is efficient to write. They have the best API and docs I've come across. It helps that once you're familiar with the workflow, if another project you want to make a contribution to on GitHub, it's super convenient (unlike in the past, think SourceForge and others). Even if you're not, the web flow makes it easy to press edit and go from there.
- chrisconroy 12y ago
  You must have dealt with a completely different company and product. The public github is a lot better than the enterprise version at least in terms of stability. Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code review features. Github enterprise was a disaster with just a couple hundred users. Under the load of just a few hundred users it died almost every day. Their support team couldn't figure it out. We had to reboot the servers constantly. We begged them to add an option to reject force push to master. They refused. We ended up monkey patching their obscured source to add the feature, but it broke on upgrades and was hard to maintain. This is something probably every single customer of theirs wants, and it should take one engineer less than a day to implement. They only just added side by side diff support. IMHO this is a basic, core feature for any kind of code review workflow. I'm holding my breath for proper syntax highlighting while in diff view. We've since moved on to Atlassian Stash. While it isn't perfect, it's a dream compared to Github enterprise and a lot less $$$ to boot.
  - sagichmal 12y ago
    > Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code > review features. I strongly disagree. What you might consider "basic features" I'd consider antifeatures. The bare simplicity of the issue tracker is precisely why I use it for my (large) projects. The PR model of code review scales elegantly to hundreds of contributors. I'd be devastated to see GitHub's collaboration tools move even a step toward the hellscape that is JIRA.
    - lmm 12y ago
      I agree with that, but just to be clear, Stash is independent of Jira (though they do integrate) and has a simple pull request model. It's actually very nice to use (pretty much just like BitBucket).
    - jgraham 12y ago
      At least for code review, the problem isn't pull requests as-such. The features that drive me to use other tools (on top of guthub hosting, often) are things like: * The ability to mark which commits/files have been reviewed and so track progress. * The ability to distinguish resolved and unresolved issues * The ability to assign a reviewer based on which code is being altered in the PR. * Useful handling of history rewriting during review. I also think that the PR model could be implemented in a way that would make for better collaboration. At the moment, if someone submits a PR that has some issues and you want to help them fix those issues it's a huge pain because the commits typically live in their fork to which others usually don't have push access. It would be a considerable improvement if PR branches were set up in such a way that both the original submitter and the people with commit access to upstream could push to the review branch.
      - themartorana 12y ago
        Beanstalk - private repo hosting for business - just released a brand new code review tool that we've been beta testing for a while now. It's rather nice and addresses many of the rough edges of pull requests. It's definitely for same-company teams as opposed to large open-source collaborative projects, though. http://beanstalkapp.com http://beanstalkapp.com We host all of our private repos with Beanstalk, and use GH for our open source repos.
mmphosis 12y ago
Now we just need Apple's Objective C / Swift to move to github. :) Sorry, not going to happen. :(
- bramgg 12y ago
  Apple has stated that they're going to open source Swift in the future, who cares if they choose to host it on their own platform.
  - andars 12y ago
    I haven't heard that they have announced a decision. Do you have a source for that?
    - SiVal 12y ago
      Let me second this question. I have heard the equivalent of, "It's too early to be talking yet about whether we will or won't open source Swift; let's talk about that later," but I didn't interpret that to mean, "We're going to open source Swift later." Of course, maybe I missed the memo.
    - DannyBee 12y ago
      When I asked Chris Lattner a week and a half account at the LLVM dev summit, there was still no decision yet, ...
  - BruceIV 12y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it; I'm still waiting for the promised open-source release of the Facetime protocol.
    - kyrra 12y ago
      That was canceled due to a patent lawsuit. It would have cost apple a ton of money to pay a patent troll to be able to open source FaceTime. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114
srcmap 12y ago
Use go for a few month, loving it. but I miss not having exception compare to Python. Is the golang spec still tightly controlled by 3 wisemen in Google and no feature is allowed to add to the language without all three in total agreement? BTW, I like 98% of their language decide choices and absolutely LOVE the compilation speed of the program.
- NateDad 12y ago
  No, it's not controlled by them anymore. Possibly in the early days it was, but now it's much more community controlled. You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions. Error values are far superior (given the other features of the language, like multiple returns and interfaces for the error types). You should continue to use Go, I don't think you'll miss exceptions after long. I understand the view, though... first time I saw Go I thought "No exceptions? Pass!". But I got over it, and now I've seen the error of my ways :) There's an amazing freedom that comes with knowing that random functions you call can't exit your function without your control.
  - codygman 12y ago
    Sum types and monads are very useful if you believe that errors as values are far superior, you should check them out.
  - acdha 12y ago
    > You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions If by exception you mean Java's implementation, yes. If by exception you mean not allowing programmers to ignore error values, as most Go programs seems to do at least once, no. I think most of this could be solved easily by either a compiler option or golint rule flagging any time someone does the classic `res, _ := foo()` punt without checking the value before the end of the block or the next time that variable is assigned to. That'd satisfy the “stop repeating C's mistakes” goal most people have without requiring the other changes which true exceptions would require.
arh68 12y ago
I agree. I almost think the name GitHub is unfortunate at this point: they're doing something so right they could nearly invent their own VCS, use ESR's new tool, or even switch to hg/darcs/etc, and still gain momentum. The Go community seems to be hopping onto a fairly heavy pendulum.
- smt88 12y ago
  The best-engineered technology rarely becomes the most popular. I think git has some huge problems, but now it's ubiquitous. Everyone has at least a basic knowledge of it, and that makes it the best technology. Switching to something else would be a step backward.
  - nightcracker 12y ago
    What are gits huge problems and what other technology solves those? Not trying to put you on the spot, just curious.
    - Matumio 12y ago
      IMO the main problem is that the command vocabulary is a mess. Do I need a soft, mixed or hard reset? Can I use "reset" to revert a single file, or do I need "checkout" for that? After years of using and loving git, this still confuses me. It's all logical in terms of git internals, but I'm not thinking in those terms when I want to revert something.
      - pjc50 12y ago
        The "plumbing" is beautiful and the "porcelain" is a hideous mess.
      - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
        And this will never get fixed so long as people keep denying there's a problem. Even when people want to fix stuff like this it's hard to transition well from where you are to where you want to be, but at the moment people seem to be able to use this poorly evolved interface daily without noticing these ridiculous and uneccesary inconsistancies.
nodivbyzero 12y ago
Emacs moved to GitHub as well :)
- biomechanica 12y ago
  Emacs recently switched to git. Emacs did not move to GitHub. There is a mirror repo but Emacs itself is not on GitHub.
  - nodivbyzero 12y ago
    Thank you for your clarification
serve_yay 12y ago
It's a really great collaboration tool. I think git itself could use some work in certain ways, but Github really makes it hard to go to any other web-based version control + pull request type tools.
CmonDev 12y ago
Another monopoly in the making: "github cuz everyone is on github".
- McGlockenshire 12y ago
  "facebook 'cause everyone is on facebook." It's the same effect. There are only two things that are going to fix it - either something amazingly better comes along (facebook vs myspace) or the incumbent royally screws up (reddit vs digg).
  - tjgq 12y ago
    To be fair, it's not entirely the same sort of thing. Git is an open protocol. Github just happens to be one of many sites hosting git repositories. Moving a repository to another host is trivial; you already have all the data in your local tree. Facebook, on the other hand, is one of a kind. I absolutely must have an account there if I want to do anything Facebook. And good luck getting your data out or interoperating with other social networks.
    - McGlockenshire 12y ago
      This isn't about the technology, it's about the people using it and how they choose to interact with each other.
jpalomaki 12y ago
Many good things were probably enabled by their decision to put a not-too-small price tag for private repositories. The money from private side has allowed them to run excellent public service without ads. And the good public service has certainly fuelled the growth on the private side.
jbergens 12y ago
Am I the only one who thinks some more competition would be nice? I would like to see more code move into BitBucket or similar. New version of Kiln will make it possible to use Git and Mercurial against the same repository which sounds like a great feature (not sure if there is a free plan on Kiln yet).
- pestaa 12y ago
  You are not the only one. We finally have decentralized tools only to... put all the eggs back into one basket!
  - coldpie 12y ago
    Sorta. The eggs you're placing into github's basket are different from the eggs you've decentralized. I'd argue those eggs (merge requests, issue tracking, discussions) have never really been successfully decentralized.
- darkr 12y ago
  Gitlab is gaining some traction, and should be considered indirect competition, and direct vs. github enterprise
- herge 12y ago
  Kiln is dead slow, and it's review tool is even worse than github.

by bbx 12y ago

shurcooL 12y ago

They've really made it easier to collaborate. Their website design is beautiful, consistent, making it delightful to use everyday. They fix issues quickly, are reliable, and have top notch customer support. They try to be at the top of their game and offer features to make our work easier (while maintaining simplicity, similar to Go). You can edit posts to fix typos, and GitHub Flavored Markdown is efficient to write. They have the best API and docs I've come across. It helps that once you're familiar with the workflow, if another project you want to make a contribution to on GitHub, it's super convenient (unlike in the past, think SourceForge and others). Even if you're not, the web flow makes it easy to press edit and go from there.

chrisconroy 12y ago
You must have dealt with a completely different company and product. The public github is a lot better than the enterprise version at least in terms of stability. Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code review features. Github enterprise was a disaster with just a couple hundred users. Under the load of just a few hundred users it died almost every day. Their support team couldn't figure it out. We had to reboot the servers constantly. We begged them to add an option to reject force push to master. They refused. We ended up monkey patching their obscured source to add the feature, but it broke on upgrades and was hard to maintain. This is something probably every single customer of theirs wants, and it should take one engineer less than a day to implement. They only just added side by side diff support. IMHO this is a basic, core feature for any kind of code review workflow. I'm holding my breath for proper syntax highlighting while in diff view. We've since moved on to Atlassian Stash. While it isn't perfect, it's a dream compared to Github enterprise and a lot less $$$ to boot.
- sagichmal 12y ago
  > Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code > review features. I strongly disagree. What you might consider "basic features" I'd consider antifeatures. The bare simplicity of the issue tracker is precisely why I use it for my (large) projects. The PR model of code review scales elegantly to hundreds of contributors. I'd be devastated to see GitHub's collaboration tools move even a step toward the hellscape that is JIRA.
  - lmm 12y ago
    I agree with that, but just to be clear, Stash is independent of Jira (though they do integrate) and has a simple pull request model. It's actually very nice to use (pretty much just like BitBucket).
  - jgraham 12y ago
    At least for code review, the problem isn't pull requests as-such. The features that drive me to use other tools (on top of guthub hosting, often) are things like: * The ability to mark which commits/files have been reviewed and so track progress. * The ability to distinguish resolved and unresolved issues * The ability to assign a reviewer based on which code is being altered in the PR. * Useful handling of history rewriting during review. I also think that the PR model could be implemented in a way that would make for better collaboration. At the moment, if someone submits a PR that has some issues and you want to help them fix those issues it's a huge pain because the commits typically live in their fork to which others usually don't have push access. It would be a considerable improvement if PR branches were set up in such a way that both the original submitter and the people with commit access to upstream could push to the review branch.
    - themartorana 12y ago
      Beanstalk - private repo hosting for business - just released a brand new code review tool that we've been beta testing for a while now. It's rather nice and addresses many of the rough edges of pull requests. It's definitely for same-company teams as opposed to large open-source collaborative projects, though. http://beanstalkapp.com http://beanstalkapp.com We host all of our private repos with Beanstalk, and use GH for our open source repos.

mmphosis 12y ago

Now we just need Apple's Objective C / Swift to move to github. :) Sorry, not going to happen. :(

bramgg 12y ago
Apple has stated that they're going to open source Swift in the future, who cares if they choose to host it on their own platform.
- andars 12y ago
  I haven't heard that they have announced a decision. Do you have a source for that?
  - SiVal 12y ago
    Let me second this question. I have heard the equivalent of, "It's too early to be talking yet about whether we will or won't open source Swift; let's talk about that later," but I didn't interpret that to mean, "We're going to open source Swift later." Of course, maybe I missed the memo.
  - DannyBee 12y ago
    When I asked Chris Lattner a week and a half account at the LLVM dev summit, there was still no decision yet, ...
- BruceIV 12y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it; I'm still waiting for the promised open-source release of the Facetime protocol.
  - kyrra 12y ago
    That was canceled due to a patent lawsuit. It would have cost apple a ton of money to pay a patent troll to be able to open source FaceTime. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20236114

srcmap 12y ago

Use go for a few month, loving it. but I miss not having exception compare to Python. Is the golang spec still tightly controlled by 3 wisemen in Google and no feature is allowed to add to the language without all three in total agreement? BTW, I like 98% of their language decide choices and absolutely LOVE the compilation speed of the program.

NateDad 12y ago
No, it's not controlled by them anymore. Possibly in the early days it was, but now it's much more community controlled. You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions. Error values are far superior (given the other features of the language, like multiple returns and interfaces for the error types). You should continue to use Go, I don't think you'll miss exceptions after long. I understand the view, though... first time I saw Go I thought "No exceptions? Pass!". But I got over it, and now I've seen the error of my ways :) There's an amazing freedom that comes with knowing that random functions you call can't exit your function without your control.
- codygman 12y ago
  Sum types and monads are very useful if you believe that errors as values are far superior, you should check them out.
- acdha 12y ago
  > You'll never get exceptions in Go. No one who has used go for a significant period of time wants exceptions If by exception you mean Java's implementation, yes. If by exception you mean not allowing programmers to ignore error values, as most Go programs seems to do at least once, no. I think most of this could be solved easily by either a compiler option or golint rule flagging any time someone does the classic `res, _ := foo()` punt without checking the value before the end of the block or the next time that variable is assigned to. That'd satisfy the “stop repeating C's mistakes” goal most people have without requiring the other changes which true exceptions would require.

arh68 12y ago

I agree. I almost think the name GitHub is unfortunate at this point: they're doing something so right they could nearly invent their own VCS, use ESR's new tool, or even switch to hg/darcs/etc, and still gain momentum. The Go community seems to be hopping onto a fairly heavy pendulum.

smt88 12y ago
The best-engineered technology rarely becomes the most popular. I think git has some huge problems, but now it's ubiquitous. Everyone has at least a basic knowledge of it, and that makes it the best technology. Switching to something else would be a step backward.
- nightcracker 12y ago
  What are gits huge problems and what other technology solves those? Not trying to put you on the spot, just curious.
  - Matumio 12y ago
    IMO the main problem is that the command vocabulary is a mess. Do I need a soft, mixed or hard reset? Can I use "reset" to revert a single file, or do I need "checkout" for that? After years of using and loving git, this still confuses me. It's all logical in terms of git internals, but I'm not thinking in those terms when I want to revert something.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      The "plumbing" is beautiful and the "porcelain" is a hideous mess.
    - ZeroGravitas 12y ago
      And this will never get fixed so long as people keep denying there's a problem. Even when people want to fix stuff like this it's hard to transition well from where you are to where you want to be, but at the moment people seem to be able to use this poorly evolved interface daily without noticing these ridiculous and uneccesary inconsistancies.

nodivbyzero 12y ago

Emacs moved to GitHub as well :)

biomechanica 12y ago
Emacs recently switched to git. Emacs did not move to GitHub. There is a mirror repo but Emacs itself is not on GitHub.
- nodivbyzero 12y ago
  Thank you for your clarification

serve_yay 12y ago

It's a really great collaboration tool. I think git itself could use some work in certain ways, but Github really makes it hard to go to any other web-based version control + pull request type tools.

CmonDev 12y ago

Another monopoly in the making: "github cuz everyone is on github".

McGlockenshire 12y ago
"facebook 'cause everyone is on facebook." It's the same effect. There are only two things that are going to fix it - either something amazingly better comes along (facebook vs myspace) or the incumbent royally screws up (reddit vs digg).
- tjgq 12y ago
  To be fair, it's not entirely the same sort of thing. Git is an open protocol. Github just happens to be one of many sites hosting git repositories. Moving a repository to another host is trivial; you already have all the data in your local tree. Facebook, on the other hand, is one of a kind. I absolutely must have an account there if I want to do anything Facebook. And good luck getting your data out or interoperating with other social networks.
  - McGlockenshire 12y ago
    This isn't about the technology, it's about the people using it and how they choose to interact with each other.

jpalomaki 12y ago

Many good things were probably enabled by their decision to put a not-too-small price tag for private repositories. The money from private side has allowed them to run excellent public service without ads. And the good public service has certainly fuelled the growth on the private side.

jbergens 12y ago

Am I the only one who thinks some more competition would be nice? I would like to see more code move into BitBucket or similar. New version of Kiln will make it possible to use Git and Mercurial against the same repository which sounds like a great feature (not sure if there is a free plan on Kiln yet).

pestaa 12y ago
You are not the only one. We finally have decentralized tools only to... put all the eggs back into one basket!
- coldpie 12y ago
  Sorta. The eggs you're placing into github's basket are different from the eggs you've decentralized. I'd argue those eggs (merge requests, issue tracking, discussions) have never really been successfully decentralized.
darkr 12y ago
Gitlab is gaining some traction, and should be considered indirect competition, and direct vs. github enterprise
herge 12y ago
Kiln is dead slow, and it's review tool is even worse than github.