
Leaving Github - srl
http://bytbox.net/blog/2012/08/leaving-github.html
======
akent
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.

~~~
masklinn
> Likewise there's nothing stopping you applying an emailed patch in your
> local copy and then pushing to github.

Right. Now let's say you are the one not using github (you use raw git), and
you want to send a patch to somebody using github ("not git"). As TFA notes,
either nothing gets done (you send-email and the other guy just doesn't
see/want it) or something has to give, you have to create a github repository
with the result of your patch or the other guy has to learn git-am.

That _could_ be fixed if github had better mail integration (and more
generally more hooks for standard git behaviors) and you could essentially
create a pull request by git-send-mail-ing some sort of special address
@github. And the pull request got its own mail thread (so the initial sender
got replies & al without needing to go on github).

As far as I know, that's not the case.

~~~
bryanlarsen
That's something that github could easily add, given their current level of
resources. The million dollar question is "why haven't they added it?" There
are at least two possible answers: not many people have asked for it, or to
increase lock-in.

It's a feature that github SHOULD add. There are some people who want it, and
these people are the type of people that can become quite vocal proponents or
detractors.

More importantly it signals quite strongly that github intends to become a
good citizen in the nation of git rather than trying to appropriate it.

~~~
masklinn
> There are at least two possible answers: not many people have asked for it,
> or to increase lock-in.

Watching Zach Holman's various presentations on Github and how they work
interally provides a third one: since Github uses pull requests internally
(and new githubbers are probably github users in the first place) nobody has
any issue with _not_ supporting `am` and `send-mail` there, so nobody went and
built support for that.

------
mbleigh
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>, 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.

------
mh-
_"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.

~~~
dustyleary
He's out of touch with reality.

 _Xanga, MySpace, Digg… the lists extends to infinity, and only fools could
think that Twitter and Facebook, giants now, won’t be added to that list
within the next five years._

I wonder if his tune will change in 5 years when Twitter and Facebook are
still giants?

I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to bet that they'll still be "top dogs"
in 10 years...

But asserting that " _only fools could think they'll survive 5 more years_ "
is crazy.

~~~
fruchtose
I agree with you about the 5/10 year deal, but I think it needs to be said
_why_ Facebook will survive, and why Xanga, MySpace and Digg did not.

All of the latter three sites did multiple things wrong:

1\. Fail to compete with competitors 3\. Fail to build a community

Issue 1 manifested itself differently for each site. Xanga couldn't keep up
with LiveJournal, which not only arrived on the scene after Xanga but out-
innovated them as well. MySpace was a clusterfuck of design and functionality
that got stale while Facebook was improving constantly. Digg ignored the hell
out of its users and simply had nothing compelling vs Reddit.

Also, none of the sites pulled in people and kept them. The narrative for
MySpace users was that people were becoming "friends" with hundreds of people
who they did not know. It doesn't take a genius to realize that this
essentially invalidates the whole point of a social network. Xanga never got a
large audience and also suffered from the same problem of anonymous users.
Digg? Digg never even really tried. Shouts were pathetic.

Facebook solved these problems. While MySpace appeared to do nothing after
News Corp acquired them, Facebok kept changing the site in a very public way--
and even when they got negative publicity (e.g. privacy settings), they made
sure that people knew they were actively developing the site. Additionally,
users on Facebook know the people in their network, and users are constantly
given a reason to come back (communicate with your friends! apps! interact
with companies!). Faceboook survived because they made it clear that they are
the best game in town.

------
sc68cal
_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>), 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

------
molecule
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/>

    
    
      <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
Yep, it's still broken.

<base href="<http://git.bytbox.net/> /> fixes that page, but pages reached
from there are still suffering the some bad base href.

------
bryanlarsen
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?

~~~
substack
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.

------
FlukeATX
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
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.

------
jlarocco
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?

~~~
mh-
>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
> _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.

~~~
oinksoft
This then requires exposing a crucial part of your development workflow at a
public URL (even if the resource is authenticated). For various reasons, this
is quite simply a non-starter for many shops who might otherwise be prepared
to bite the bullet and put their source code on Github's servers.

~~~
llimllib
> this is quite simply a non-starter for many shops

And, for those people, github offers an appliance that sits on your network.

~~~
oinksoft
I didn't know github offered an appliance, that sounds like a good fit for
those folks as long as it's priced reasonably.

~~~
Karunamon
It's actually absurdly expensive :(

It's a very cool app (Github, only on your own server, basically), but it's
priced out of the range of anybody but large enterprises.

------
binarycrusader
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
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".

------
ricardobeat
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?

~~~
msbarnett
> 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
_"false dichotomy"_

How can you commit to the linux kernel using github's interface? I have not
seen a button for `git send-email`.

~~~
mh-
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
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.

~~~
chris_wot
If that is the thesis, then his example of gmail is strange. After all, he
uses fetchmail, alpine, mutt and Thunderbird to use the service. I strongly
doubt that gmail has every single feature of mutt in their web UI!

~~~
spullara
It is also strange since gmails IMAP implementation is so horrible due to the
way they changed how email works (labels, archive, etc).

------
sthatipamala
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
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.

~~~
benatkin
> 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.

------
geofft
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.

------
ftwinnovations
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
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.

~~~
snogglethorpe
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
Let me spell it out for you: git would exist if not for github. The inverse is
not true.

~~~
takluyver
I doubt git would be nearly as popular without a really polished hosting site,
though. Github is git's killer feature.

And there are other DVCSs. As it is, the main hosts for bzr and hg are clearly
less slick and less popular than Github. But had Git not been there, it's
quite plausible that someone would have built an equivalent site around
another technology.

~~~
benatkin
> I doubt git would be nearly as popular without a really polished hosting
> site, though. Github is git's killer feature.

GitHub isn't polished. It just has engagement mechanisms like twitter does,
that keep people coming back. When people say how much they like GitHub
they're usually talking about the community or git, both of which GitHub takes
way too much credit for.

> And there are other DVCSs. As it is, the main hosts for bzr and hg are
> clearly less slick and less popular than Github. But had Git not been there,
> it's quite plausible that someone would have built an equivalent site around
> another technology.

There were a lot of people moving to git from hg when GitHub came out. I think
it was clear there was demand, and if not for GitHub other services would have
sprung up to fill in the gap.

------
storborg
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
> 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
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

      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.

~~~
lotyrin
Yeah. And I could easily set up a box with postfix, an IMAP daemon a webmail
and a spam filter.

But in my personal case it's a waste of my time compared to just using GMail.
Obviously that's not true for everyone and I'm not trying to say it is. Nor do
I thing the pro-Github folks in this thread are trying to say github is always
the answer.

~~~
oinksoft
It is simpler and easier to set up a new git repository on a webserver than it
is to do the same on github. It is also simpler to set up post-receive hooks
and the like when you want them to do sophisticated things. The ramp-up to get
git working on a webserver is this: Do you have SSH connection? Are your
contributors' umask okay? To compare this to the complexities of configuring
good SMTP/IMAP/POP with SSL shows that you don't know very much about any of
these matters, or that you are not thinking seriously about them.

P.S. I find great benefits of hosting my own email, chiefly, once again, that
I can guarantee that my mail service is working, and that I get my mail very
quickly. gmail has been offline more in the past four years than my mail
server. I also don't have to worry about password resets, a webmail UI
constantly in flux, or Gmail constantly hitting me up for my mobile phone
number.

~~~
taligent
>It is simpler and easier to set up a new git repository on a webserver than
it is to do the same on github.

Is this a joke ?

~~~
saurik
If you already have a webserver, even just a ~/public_html folder (something
very common for people at universities, for example, to have), anywhere on the
Internet that you have SSH access to push content to (and honestly: I would
find it highly unlikely that your average developer does not have at least
one), you can push a local repository to it with a single shell command: you
just push to a folder on the server as if it exists, it will be created, and
the folder can then be used via the web server for anonymous git clones and
pulls. As in: if GitHub requires even a single additional step of "type in the
name of a repository into a website" it has already far lost; so no: it
doesn't seem even remotely reasonable to insinuate that oinksoft's comment is
"a joke". If you don't already have a working web server (again: seriously?)
then setting up an account that has one in this day and age is really not
going to be much harder than getting an account at github, and once you have
one it will again be simpler per repository to push.

~~~
tonyarkles
I'd argue that the "average developer" has probably never used SSH, or so
rarely that it's practically as if they don't know what it is beyond a way to
type commands into a remote machine. Think FTP. _That_ is something that would
be a little safer to assume that an "average developer" would have.

I have to consciously remember that a lot of the development tools I use on a
day-to-day basis (ssh, git, emacs, rails, django, js unit testing, diff, etc),
while commonly discussed on HN, are not actually the norm in "the rest of the
world".

FTPing a pile of PHP files, versioned using .zip files, and merged by hand
without diff tools seems to be the "average developer" when I start looking
around a bit.

------
hunvreus
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).

------
ozataman
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...

------
eschulte
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
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.

------
dtorres
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.

------
gingerlime
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.

------
methodin
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
Because this website is awful and full of drama queens.

~~~
asparagui
LEAVE HACKERNEWS ALONE!

------
MetaCosm
If you are leaving github and self-hosting, check out <http://gitlabhq.com/>
\-- still has some rough edges, but getting better fast.

Fine grained permissions as well.

------
azakai
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.

------
bconway
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/)

------
jcoder
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.

------
pooriaazimi
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."

------
smagch
related HN discussion : Linus Torvalds won't do github pull requests

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960876>

------
conorwade
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?

------
donnfelker
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.

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AznHisoka
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.

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repoman
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

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jcoder
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.

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DiabloD3
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
<https://github.com/defunkt/hub>

~~~
bryanlarsen
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.

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olalonde
> 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.

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wldlyinaccurate
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.

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

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

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

