On 2014-06-03 11:52 AM, Brian DeRocher wrote:
What i do like about GitHub is how it facilitates forking and automated 
testing.  But i don't like how we are relying on the good will of a 3rd party 
company.

As a maintainer of projects which use github, I understand the reservations.

Github has three parts to it

- Git hosting
- Forking and merge handling
- Issue tracking

For git hosting, we are not relying on their good will at all - it is fairly easy to go and push a git repo anywhere else, or to self-host. There'd be a bit of pain with the transition, but this is true for any host switch.

Forking and merge handling has a bit more lock-in to it, but these things tend to be short-lived in nature, so it's not a huge issue. One alternative workflow here is the email-based on the linux kernel uses, or some other git hosting site.

Issue tracking is more complicated. I understand peoples objections here. There's two reasons why I still like it. The first is it integrates well into the code handling and merge handling. The second is that I'm far far more productive with the Github issue tracker than with others I've used. Sometimes its a bit overly-simple, but it's so much easier to use.

As an example, my latest issue/pull request is https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/599. If I had been doing this in any tracker I've used previously and have experience with, I'd of spent a lot of time wrangling images, formatting, code references and copy and paste.

I use drag and drop images, cross-issue links, issue references from commits, cross-repo links, references to commits via sha values, all the formatting available.

As for automated testing, I don't use it. I know the capabilities are there, but what I've been working on doesn't lend itself to simple automated testing.

Whenever I weigh the positives and negatives of using Github, I always come out in favor of using it.

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