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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

Kinda scary how de facto Github has become, that external tooling is discouraged. Github is a bad issue tracker, a bad code review tool, an ok wiki and a bad distribution platform. Still, one has to mostly use the whole package to get contributors.

(Github has other strengths, though)

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And it’s not even open source. They don’t follow the development model that so many of its users who are responsible for its success do.

It's ironic. GitHub, a closed, centralized and for-profit platform, has become the sole viable place for open source.

Gitlab works really well. It uses almost the same workflows but if shit hits the fan I can dump my issues and rehost them on a local instance.

I'd never host my own stuff on github since gitlab is good enough but doesn't lock me in to as proprietary web service.

One thing Github does that really bothers me is that if your paid account lapses, you must pay to get your private repos back. You don't have the option to simply set your repos to public. The only options Github gives you is pay money or lose your repos. As far as I care, that's practically extortion. So I moved to Gitlab.

Luckily, Github screwed up and temporarily unlocked my private repos, letting me grab the ones I didn't have locally and move them to Gitlab.

No opt-out option, no deal, Github. This is something that students should particularly take note of, because it applies to Github Education accounts, too.

I believe this is false. The private repos will be locked when you're no longer on a paid account but you can set them to public to regain access.

https://help.github.com/articles/unlocking-a-locked-personal...

That's interesting. I was under the impression they became read-only not completely inaccessible.

BitBucket is plenty popular as well, I run into projects that are on there instead of GH for Python. I kind of prefer BitBucket to GitHub the only thing GitHub does right is their "Explore" section which I don't think BitBucket has (or GitLab?) but that's about it for me. I don't care where one hosts code, as long as it's not some obscure server.

For a long time BitBucket was the only one with the protected branch feature that could prevent history rewrites on a branch by branch basis. Github finally added it after the force push that blew away so many critical repositories.

BitBucket also has free private repos.

I only use GH for projects that are open source because that's where people expect OSS to be.

I use Gitlab and just have it push to Github, then disable issues/wiki/whatever else I can there, and add a link to the Gitlab repo in the description.

BitBucket is my default for pet projects nowadays, and it's also what I typically recommend for professional work. Better pricing, direct access to Atlassian's tools (which have their own issues, but are generally pretty popular), and the "projects" feature is nice (I just wish it was usable for personal repos rather than being an organization-only feature).

We have BitBucket at my job, I think because I showed my code during an interview through my BitBucket account it probably made me look good to my interviewer (now my boss) due to familiarity with tooling we already have. I can use any of them honestly. I use GitLab for private pet projects and BitBucket when I open source my projects, and then mirror to GitHub.

GitLab has an explore section https://gitlab.com/explore but it isn't as good as GitHub's one. Both to having less projects and us spending less time on it.

Oh that's nice, found some interesting projects there, thank you. I use all three git sites, I mostly use BitBucket because it was the first one I found with free git repositories, but I use GitLab now for private projects. Thank you again for coming on here and always being willing to respond to anyone asking about GitLab I always appreciated that about you.

Thanks, you're very welcome.

GitHub has always had far superior code search features. BitBucket is gradually trying to add these, but they still pale compared to GitHub. I love just going through a repo by searching for things.

Except for when you want to search within a different branch.

Or search for any of the non-alphanumeric characters found within every project.

Aside: In your opinion what are good issue trackers and code review tools?

I'd also be interested in knowing. I also feel GitHub's issue tracker is not right for a large project like this.

As for the code review tools though, I've not yet seen something that I feel is materially better than GitHub + PRs + some bot-enabled automation. I understand that many people _prefer_ things like Gerrit, but I've found the difference to mostly be opinion, and that Gerrit can be a significant problem in getting contributions - it's quite hostile on first use.

GitLab's threaded, resolvable discussions is very efficient, especially if you enable mandatory resolution before merge, forcing you to create issues for unresolved ones through the related button, guaranteeing you never loose track of something that should be resolved. I have a hard time going back to GitHub because it's so useful.

That's great to hear, I haven't used GitLab for code review before. I struggle to use the rest of GitLab, but it's improving all the time so we might consider it once it's up to the usability of GitHub for the rest of the experience.

GitLab's UX Researcher here. I'd love to talk to you so I can understand what you've been struggling with. I've sent you an email.

I'd recommend looking at RhodeCode for code-review. It has few unique features like pull-requests versioning allowing partial diff between updates, todo notes. Team looked at few gerrit features and want to port it too to make code-review much better.

so you don't mind having review comments disappear if somebody updates the PR, and it doesn't bother you not being able to say in a comment "this needs fixing" in a way that you can mark it fixed later on (and without marking as fixed the PR can't be merged)?

Github reviews are fine for a one-and-done merge, but for a back & forth review I really wish it had the above...

This looks like a good spot to plug Reviewable (https://reviewable.io), which addresses the disappearing / untracked comments issues and more, while still integrating with GitHub rather more gracefully than something like Gerrit. While GitHub's PR review tooling has improved in the last year there's still a fundamental difference in philosophy such that Reviewable isn't lacking for customers. :) (Disclosure: I'm the founder.)

I've looked at Reviewable several times, and I'm afraid to say I've never been convinced to try it. There's obviously a huge cost to moving team process over to a new tool like this, but also I just found it more difficult to understand what was going on compared to GitHub reviews, so it wasn't particularly compelling for us. Hope you don't mind the candid feedback!

Feedback is always appreciated, and candid feedback is highly prized! I get what you're saying, but it's a fine line to walk: if Reviewable is too much like GitHub, it won't be able to add sufficient value to be worth using. If it's radically different, few people will be able to figure it out at all. I'm happy with the balance I've hit but it's definitely not for everyone -- on either end of the scale! Also, there's a forthcoming migration from Angular to Vue where I intend to make major changes to the UX, which will hopefully increase usability and make onboarding easier... We'll see!

I totally agree, I wish it had that too!

As someone who doesn't mind GitHub's issue tracker or code review, I wonder the same.

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