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Comment by alphaIuGN59 | Hacker News Reader

I know there are a lot of code review tools, but with GITHUB and all the tools they make available, I wonder why the other code-review tools are still being developed/maintained.

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Other tools are developed and maintained to stimulate competition and avoid vendor lock-in. Monocultures are dangerous.

One example of a use-case where GitHub falls short is offline support: you can't take the issue tracker and wiki with you. There are alternative tools such as fossil [0] which have built-in bug tracking and wiki, which is an attractive feature for some people.

[0] https://fossil-scm.org/

I think you're right about the issue tracker, but the wiki is just another git repo [1] that you can checkout, commit and push.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware this feature was available on GitHub.

I like fossil because it's all built-in and can be wrapped up in a single file. But it's always great to have more choices available.

Yeah.. this is one thing I recently discovered. I use github for my personal projects, and was going to start using the issue tracker to keep track of the bugs. But then I realized that if I do that if I do start tracking bugs on github, I will pretty much be tied to github.

Hopefully gitlab or bitbucket comes up with a solution which enables the owners of the repos to move bugs/issue tracking, which will force github to enable this feature as well.

You can actually access a mirror of Go’s issue tracker (hosted on GitHub) offline by using a tool [0]. Of course, a lot of code was written to make it possible, and it’s a read-only view.

[0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/build/maintner/cmd/maintserve

I agree 100% that monocultures are dangerous. But too much fragmentation is also harmful.

For example, now we have github, gitlab, mercuirial(bitbucket).. I only use the above 3.. but I am sure I can come up with 100 different github/gitlab type companies.

When there is so much fragmentation, it becomes difficult to find project or code reliably. For example, I have seen certain projects on bitbucket, which are awesome (say `ProjectA`) and create a lot of value. But there exists a very similar but differnt project `ProjectB` on github. Probably the author of `ProjectB` had the same problem that the author of `ProjectA` had, but couldnt discover that `ProjectA` already exists.

What open-source software enables you to do is to reuse software, however, if we create so many distinct places where the code resides, it becomes harder and harder to discover that code. Which leads to recreating codebases over and over again.

thanks for pointing out fossil by the way..

> GITHUB

Off-topic, but I'm genuinely curious why you chose this capitalization?

My wife often types complete messages in caps. I asked her why she was shouting, and she told me she doesn't consider it shouting at all. To her there's no difference between typing in small letters and all caps.

I see this fairly often that somehow a group of users collectively decides that a certain name has to be typed in all-caps. Whenever someone asks me a question about SWIFT, I tell them I have no idea about fintech, but I can instead answer any questions they have about Swift. But it's an uphill battle.

(OpenStack Swift, that is, not Apple Swift. And not Suzuki Swift either.)

My favorite is when people capitalize LISP. It's not 1958 anymore, we can just say Lisp now.

No reason really.. Probably unconciouslly highlighted GITHUB :)

I wonder that too. Even competing code review tools are very similar.

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