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"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Now
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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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Again, like OP said, those are typically distinct functionality: issue tracking, source control, deployment etc. GitHub bringing everything into one platform is atypical and obviously done for the goal of centralization. The more stuff you add to a platform the harder it makes it to leave or replicate.
But no, technically speaking you don't need to have all of it in one place. There's no reason for which you must manage everything together.
I don't even understand why people like GitHub so much, its source management sucks. The fact it still doesn't have a decent history visualization to this day is mind-boggling.
Look for ways to do things separately and you will find much better tools. GitHub's "one size fits all" approach is terrible and only holds because people are too lazy to look for any alternative.
It's not that complicated... people use it because everyone has an account there and so your project gets more visibility (and your profile too, for those who plan to flex it when they look for the next job) and more contributions. Even a lot of projects that aren't on github have some sort of mirror there for visibility.
Suppose you wanna contribute to gnu grep (or whatever)... do you happen to know off the top of your head where the source repo and bug tracker are? And do you know what's the procedure to submit your patch?
If you are a company doing closed source, I agree that I don't see why you would choose github over the myriad alternatives (including the self hosted ones).
That's a great way to spend your resources developing yet-another-source-forge-thingie instead of whatever your actual project/product is supposed to be :)
But you don't have to develop anything. There are plenty of ready-made excellent tools you can just drop-in. The main fallacy is that what Github does is actually useful, or that the pieces it integrates are useful. 90% of Github is subpar for any given purpose. Consider all the possible types of software being developed and all the different release flows and support/issue flows, how could they possibly be shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all? Yet people try their damnest to do exactly that.
To do software development you need (A) issue tracking, (B) a clear release flow, and (C) a deploy mechanism that's easy to use. A is a drop-in tool with lots of alternatives, B is unrestricted since Git is very flexible in this regard, and C is typically included with any cloud infrastructure, unless you're doing on premise in which case there are also drop-in tools.
A, B, C are three distinct, orthogonal topics that can and should be handled separately. There's no logical reason to shape any of them after the other. They have to work together, sure, but the design considerations of one must not affect the others.
I interpreted your "look for ways to do things separately" as "look for separate tools that do the various things" (and you have to integrate), but I see now that you meant "look for ways to do things differently". My bad.
I used gerrit and zuul a while back at a place that really didn't want to use GitHub. It worked pretty well but it took a lot of care and maintenance to keep it all ticking along for a bunch of us.
It has a few features I loved that GitHub took years to catch up to. Not sure there's a moral to this story.
I agree with this part.
Perhaps this is part of the answer to why people like github. Unlike you, most people love all-in-one tools. I once suggested a bunch of offline tools to use with git, with much better user experience than github. The other person was like, "Yeah, no! I don't want to learn that many tools".
The advantage of a centralized app is that all the services you mentioned are integrated well with each other. The distinct and often offline tools often have poor integration with each other. This is harder to achieve in such tools, compared to centralized hosts. The minimum you need to start with is a bunch of standards for all these tools to follow, so that interoperability is possible later.
What combination would you recommend to replace most common GitHub functionality?
Forgejo should work
It depends a lot on the setup you have, how many people, release flow etc. Issue tracking depends on the kind of software you do and whether you want a programmer-only flow or a full support flow.
Deploy pipelines will usually depend on the infrastructure, cloud solutions usually can integrate with several and there's also common solutions and even FOSS ones, like Terraform vs OpenTofu.
Git frontends are a very mixed bag, generally speaking their main purpose is to hide Git as much as possible and allow programmers to contribute changes upstream without knowing much beyond the nebulous "PR" concept. Basically they're mostly useless other than enabling people to remain dumb. A good Git tutorial and a good history visualization tool (git happens to include one called
gitkout of the box) will do so much more to teach people Git, and there's really no substitute for communication – using annotations to discuss pros and cons for a PR is badly inadequate.