

A Few Suggestions To Bring GitHub More Users And Money - argvzero
http://www.themarkphillips.com/2011/03/31/A-Few-Suggestions-For-GitHub.html

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Legion
I was hoping this article was going to make the "stop separating account sizes
by number of repos instead of, you know, actual usage" point.

Github will get my company's money when they stop doing just that. We have
many small, low-traffic repos. We self-host them on a minuscule little box and
yet, according to Github, we would be a "Platinum" business account. Say what?
$200/mo? The box we have serving them now isn't even worth $200 in total. Back
in the Subversion days, of course, it was one repo split into projects to take
advantage of SVN's partial checkout ability, but that's not how Git rolls. So
instead, it's many small per-project repos.

Bitbucket figured it out: split accounts by number of users, a meaningful
"usage" metric. That's sensible. So would be actual resource usage (disk
space, bandwidth, etc). It makes no sense to me that we could have a hundred
people working on 5 repositories, using tons of space and bandwidth, and
that's $25/mo. But a handful of us with a bunch of tiny repos, that's biggest-
account-size $200/mo territory.

(It's too bad we're so attached to Git, or else we'd be on Bitbucket and stop
waiting for Github to come to their senses).

~~~
tzs
Similar story here. We're trying to cut down the number of servers at work. I
looked into suggesting a company-wide move to Git followed by moving our
repositories to Github. Right now, I'm the only one on Git.

Then I realized that I'm using 40 repositories. One of those is for reports.
Each report should really be in its own repository. Splitting reports would
add another 40 repositories.

So we're looking at $200/month just for my repositories. Throw in what the
rest of the company would need, and it is cheaper just to keep doing it
ourselves.

There certainly are companies for whom paid Github hosting makes sense--the
Github guys are not idiots and if no one was buying they surely would have
adjusted things already. I just am having trouble figuring out who those
companies might be.

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holman
We've been tossing some ideas around about more statistics in general at
GitHub, but I'd like to point out a lot of these things — number of forks,
followers, issues, commits, and so on — are available through the API today.
It sounds like it'd be an awesome hack day project for someone to work on, if
one were so inclined. :)

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pharkmillups
Yeah. I forgot to mention in the post that the GH API does make it possible to
pull all of these out. But having to write your own service, while fun, is
time consuming. I would prefer to have you build in the feature and then pay
you for it. Looking forward to where you take the stats :)

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askedrelic
I totally agree with the need for more visibility and condensed stats on
Github! Once you start trying to follow a larger number of projects, it
becomes increasingly difficult to follow what is going on with each project.

This has been a minor related rant of mine across Github projects: a need for
project guidelines, similar to <http://semver.org/>, in terms of having
versioned projects, properly tagging those versions, and having a dated
changelog summarizing those changes. Projects have different levels of
organizational needs at different lifetimes, but having a suggested
format/guidelines would help I think, similar to the Readme that Github
suggests you make for a project.

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grandalf
I'd like to see a way for people to flag commits as interesting, so that I
could look only at the interesting commits for the projects I follow...

~~~
lindvall
...where is the API for stars?

