GitHub

[Lydia Pintscher]

proxymailing for Jeff ;-)



Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> why don't we use GitHub instead of Jeff's private Git server?
>
> It's a really nice (free) Git hosting service; also offers many
> additional collaboration features. Plus, it's easy to use.
>
>
> http://github.com/
>

Having had experience with GitHub for Funtoo (I wrote the tutorial for
it), I can tell you with authority that GitHub has a major drawback, in
that when you fork off a project, nothing tracks upstream...it's a major
pain in the ass for any real collaboration work.

This means that unless everyone shares a single GitHub account, it
becomes very annoying to actually use this and pass branches back and
forth.  Here's what it really means:

1) If you want to have a branch tracking upstream, you have to add both
the remote ref and the branch yourself, manually, on each computer to
access your GitHub repo from.  This branch also isn't synchronized with
your GitHub account (unless you do it yourself).

2) Since you can't commit to each other's branches (unless you want
everyone sharing one GitHub account, which is possible but odd and may
well be against their ToS), you have to continually make changes, send
pull requests to the original branch creator, and then they have to deal
with merging that in, which means that they also need to be checking
your branches out.  Of course, you can always just format-patch and send
emails, but that's nowhere near as easy or fast.

2a) Needless to say, if everyone doesn't share a single GitHub account,
everyone's branches will be in separate accounts, so you end up with a
bazillion remote refs you have to manage (even if you just want to do
read-only), and you have to fork off everyone's branch in order to make
changes and send pull requests to the right people (and keep in mind,
since forking doesn't create tracking branches...)

3) When people create new branches (assuming everyone doesn't share one
account), unless you've set your remote refs up right and you check
every single one of them, you won't know of new branches that exist.


Basically, GitHub doesn't do us any favors -- in fact it makes things
far more difficult and with **much** more overhead -- unless we all
share one account (if we even can, ToS-wise, and which rather defeats
the point).  Even then, it's not clear it provides any real benefit at all.

If you don't want it hosted on my server (and I'm happy to transition it
 to a git:// protocol server instead of http:// if people want and to
install gitweb), we should host it on a legit git server somewhere, but
not on GitHub, unless we all want to make our lives very difficult.

--Jeff

-- 
Lydia Pintscher
Amarok community manager
kde.org - amarok.kde.org - kubuntu.org
claimid.com/nightrose