Everyone is saying: just work on your local repo. But GitHub is way more than just git. There's bug tracking, code review, continuous integration, etc etc.
Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect and I'm not sure what GitHub offers to mitigate this.
I always wonder if people prefer to use a centralised model that github seems to promote, or if people are not tooled up to take advantage of the distributed nature of git?
How technically hard is it to have an internal roundrobin git system that's synced up with the github repos needed, and then redirect to the internal git servers as needed when github goes down? I'm just wondering, no snark.
Github will go down by the nature of it being a web service. Web services aren't 100% by nature.
I just wrote about this very thing yesterday. I'm wondering why people don't host their own git repos. Yeah, GitHub's interface is amazing but is it always necessary? I can only understand using GitHub for git for open source stuff and maybe large team stuff. Otherwise there's really no need for that fancy UI with private repositories. Just branch, pull, and inspect the code. It's not like it takes any longer than waiting for GitHub's pages to load. But hey, maybe I'm the weirdo and everyone else is sane.
Github is more than a Git repository host. It provides other services for coordinating software development as well as a continuous integration service.
Interesting comments about GitHub. What do you think about using GitHub for code hosting and issue tracking but having a separate website that you want to be the main presence for a project? I've literally just done that while Open Sourcing a successful project I've been working on for almost 2 years.
I've been surprised how many commercial, closed-source projects have opted for Github in recent years. While I would probably prefer to self-host (Gitlab, or similar) in order to reduce dependencies, I do see the benefits. Having recently worked at an organisation hosting exclusively on Github, it made collaboration with remote contractors and third parties very straightforward and helped eliminate much of the maintenance burden on our small team.
Yes, but Github is not just about Git hosting, it's about all those awesome social tools. If you use Issues as the main bug tracker, for example, you've got a problem.
What? That's the complete opposite of what OP was saying.
You don't need github to be online to work with your code or even your repositories so long as you haven't gone and thrown all your digital eggs in the same basket (i.e. as long as you have other remotes or at least local copies of your repositories).
I was thinking about both, but git repos specifically. Aside from the code itself github comes with a lot of stuff like issue management that only offers an API to access.
It's also a good reminder of why data portability is important. For the git part, you can just git push to another service, even a selfhosted one, and be up and running in no time, and GitHub does keep pages and wikis in git... but all the tickets, that's a problem, and why I don't trust GitHub to be a canonical source for development.
Making your organisation too dependent on a remote service can indeed be a scary prospect and I'm not sure what GitHub offers to mitigate this.
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