The corporate branding, the new “AI-powered developer platform” slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as “GitHub”—the traditional website, what are to me the core features—simply isn’t Microsoft’s priority at this point in time.
Microsoft software is all like this: the features users want and would find most useful are never a priority, nor are the bugs that annoy existing users. The priority is whatever some unholy alliance of management and marketing have pulled out of their corporate bottoms as the focus of this month’s promotion. It doesn’t seem even to be about what would drive sales, since customers like things that work. It’s some logic that only makes sense to the businesspeople who speak that absolutely vapid buzzword slurry that gushes from Satya Nadella’s mouth. I don’t get it, but it’s very consistent with Microsoft.
The same thing happens at Amazon. First they screwed up the product search by treating the user’s query as a suggestion rather than as a requirement. Now reports are coming out saying that the search bar has been replaced by an AI prompt with very badly summarized and often wrong results.
Give a hacker a github, they’ll commit for a week.
Give a hacker a mailing list and an ssh, and they’ll be selfhosting for the rest of their life.
Fediverse version of github when? Unless it already exists?
It’s called git. It’s been distributed from day 1. GitHub was an attempt to centralize it.
Yeah… does git have issue tracking? actions? C’mon: it’s not like github & co. are just git.
It doesn’t have discussions, it doesn’t offer pull request management with commented/annotated code reviews, it doesn’t have built-in ssh and key management features, no workflows, no authorization tools of any kind…
In short I find the “just use git itself lmao” to be an exceedingly weird thing to say and I find it even weirder that it gets said as often as it does and it gets upvoted so much. Git by itself is not very useful at all if there are more than one a half people working on the same code.
A server hosting a copy of the repo, git send-email, a mailing list and a bugzilla instance is all that an open source project really needs.
The advantage of github/gitlab et al. is that it merges all of the above functionality to one place, however it’s not absolutely essential. Git itself is extremely versatile and can be as useful as you are want it to be if you put in the time to learn it.
Again, like OP said, those are typically distinct functionality: issue tracking, source control, deployment etc. GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization. The more stuff you add to a platform the harder it makes it to leave or replicate.
But no, technically speaking you don’t need to have all of it in one place. There’s no reason for which you must manage everything together.
I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks. The fact it still doesn’t have a decent history visualization to this day is mind-boggling.
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools. GitHub’s “one size fits all” approach is terrible and only holds because people are too lazy to look for any alternative.
I don’t even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks.
I agree with this part.
GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization.
Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, “Yeah, no! I don’t want to learn that many tools”.
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools.
The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.
What combination would you recommend to replace most common GitHub functionality?
Gitlab and forgejo
I once heard of torrent git
Something like radicle?
I’ve read that GitLab is experimenting with the concept.
The problem wasn’t that the line I wanted wasn’t on the page—it’s that the whole document wasn’t being rendered at once, so my browser’s builtin search bar just couldn’t find it.
I feel like this has been the case for a while now. Luckily they offer other search tools so its a gotcha that you only have to hit once.
In edit mode they capture the crtl-f keystrokes and offer their own search and replace tool. An argument could be made that they should offer a custom search tool for read mode if they are going to break the browsers built in tooling.
I don’t know what’s happening at github, but even the tree page rendering is annoyingly slow now. I wish they stopped ruining a working product by bloating it up with unnecessary ‘features’.
It’s kind of neat you can launch a version of Visual Studio code by pressing ‘.’ though.
Still not sure why, especially given that it’s pretty much impossible to find out that you can even do that.
I can understand why it excites you. But I’m old enough to recognize that if you cede control of your offline tools like IDE to them, they will eventually exploit it to make money by ruining your day. I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a bit of convenience to protect myself against rent seeking in the future.
Honestly in this day and age where everything runs inside containers, you should be able to do that in your home server. Distrobox proves it. Even a good alternative to vscode exists - theia by eclipse - that’s designed to do exactly this.
The floss forges have blame also eg https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Documentation/blame/branch/main/README.md but idk if it is exact pair to github. There’s probably some vs code alternative.
I wonder if find works properly if you use their version of find rather than native browser. It takes over typeahead find in a super obnoxious way which Firefox seems unable to prevent. Maybe they just aren’t supporting the native find. Though their in page hijacking never works properly. Maybe you need a nicer device.
“GitHub”
