On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:10 PM, Ben Finney
ben+freesoftw...@benfinney.id.au 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.
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