GitHub Goodness
I’ve been developing software for a little while now and have build up a few repositories for my applications, with all my open source ones being available publicly. Sometimes people find some of my applications useful and I get thanks, patches or PHP hate mail. :-)
For a long time I’ve been using SVN for storing my code, along with Indefero as my project tracker at projects.jethrocarr.com. It’s a good combination, very similar to Google Code in many respects and generally a lightweight application with a good core feature set.
The only issue has been that with the explosion in popularity of Git and the socalisation of coding with sites such as GitHub, users have gotten tired of the “diff and email patch” approach when submitting contributions and want to take advantage of shiner features such as pull requests which make contributes much easier, as well as more recognisable to others.
Whilst I’m keen to do as much as possible to make it easier to get commits and users, switching to any one particular hosted provider is of concern to me – whilst they may be popular now, will they still be as popular in 10 years time? (Remember SourceForge anyone?).
The solution is that undergoing the pain to migrate existing repositories from SVN to Git (a lot more messing around than you might think) opens up the ability to pull and push to multiple repositories, which means that I now have all my open source projects on GitHub and in addition have my own hosted Indefero server which has a full copy of all my code.
This allows me to engage with users on GitHub, whilst still maintaining control of my own issue tracker and full copies of my repositories and data. It also avoids users from setting up their own GitHub repositories of my projects and having them confused as official ones – with my own in place, it’s a starting place for forks to occur from.
I’m going to trial this for a few months – if it all works well, I’m going to take a look at adding in easy support to Indefero to create and push/pull from a GitHub repository automatically as part of creating a new project. And if needed I could add additional Git providers to mirror to as well (eg BitBucket) should other popular hives of activity appear.
I’ve been using both Github and BitBucket for a while now, and I can say that BitBucket is by far and away a better platform. It’s simply much nicer to look at, and to use.
I guess the beauty of Git is that you can host your code anywhere, and everywhere. You can have your code hosted in multiple places. :)
I’d have to agree with you from perspective of user-experience. We use Bitbucket for work and it’s a nice clean simple interface.
However I’m seeing more open source projects hosted on GitHub, than on BitBucket – although it’s entirely possible that this might change going forwards, in which case I can start mirroring my applications to both locations to get user uptake.
I use Indefero’s hosted platform, really sad that they’re shutting up short in the near future.
Yeah I’m sad it never took off for the developer, I think it just missed out on success thanks to the steam rolling effect of GitHub. I’m going to keep using and maybe adding in features regardless, will see if the community steps in to keep developing it or not.
Are you planning to move to self-hosting or are you considering a different platform for it?
Hmmmm…hope u ll get used to it. The philosophy behind SVN and Git are different..
I’ve been using Git at work for a while – it is a bit of a change, I do prefer SVN from a usability POV – however Git has the nice upside of the distributed changes.
Hey man, still waiting for your help with the mail server thing… I m still stuck.
Thx in advance.