On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 04:50:50PM -0400, doark@mail.com wrote:
I give up. Why do some people dislike github or sourceforge? This is at least the third mailing list in which I've seen discontent without a reason given.
Git is a nice distributed version control system. That is: each node contains the whole archive including all of the history. No inherent central node. So all you need to develop with it is some basic hosting, right?
Now Github comes along and tells you: if you use git in our site, you can have extra goodies. Pull requests work. But only so long as you are a user of Github to begin with. If it's not in Github, it might as well not exist.
So suddenly you have a single point of failure. This is not that good. For instance, what if Github decides not to allow you to host your project (for whatever legitimate reason)?
I believe most people who object using Github here object using those extra services and not merely using Github as a git hosting service. But this point is mostly moot, as why would you use Github and not use bug pull requests, bug tracking etc.?
Are they evil? Certainly not. They provide a great service that people like. We should also provide quality services / software or otherwise people will keep depending on walled gardens.
Sourceforge has held a somewhat similar position in the past (at around 1999-2005 or so) when a large portion of the projects were hosted there because it provided a very fine hosting facility (files, web, shell, mailing list, tasks, and more) for free. It is no longer in that position. One problem with it nowadays is that they have been shown to used some non-optimal methods of getting ad money in the recent past.