On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Ben Finney <[email protected]> wrote: > Howdy all, > > I've never been much of a user of Git, but I appreciate that the most > popular DVCS is free software. > > The worrying part is that most people who *say* they're using Git are > using Github. I have heard rumblings that Github is problematic: it's > non-free compared to Git being free, it's centralised where Git is > federated, it requires users to use protocols that are incompatible with > Git. > > In short, it undermines and defeats most of the benefits of a > federated free-software tool. > > Here is an article by someone who has decided after a long usage to > switch from Github, for these reasons and more. > > The problem is that github is most emphatically not git. If a person > using git (and therefore send-email) wants to collaborate with > someone using github, one of the two of them has to give in and use > an interface they deliberately decided not to use. There’s no way > around it: github does not supplement git, github replaces git. > Deciding whether to use github versus just git is an either/or > proposition.
I'm a big user of git and github, and I don't particularly like the places where github tries to improve upon stuff that git already does - mainly pull requests (I can't actually think of any others). Having said that, it's obvious why they had to create them - pushing patches into someone's mailbox and saying "there you go - figure it out" is hardly in line with their intent to make git easy for the masses. But the above quote is simply not true. I don't like pull requests, so I can (and do) just use `git remote`, `git pull`, `git merge` from my local box, and push the results up to github as a dumb repository. It works just fine, and it's just plain git. Granted, github *discourages* people sending emails-with-patches-attached - you can still do it if you want, although many folks users will look at you funny. I would discourage using send-email as well, for the record. Now, some people will tell you the only way to push changes *to them* is to send them a github pull request, which I always find baffling. But that's no different from me telling my contributors that they must send me a smoke signal with their diffs - it's the fault of the maintainer for requiring that, not the service for providing it. _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
