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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is the first and last reason to prefer Git to anything else. That community is so vital right now, it cements Git as the essential VCS. I could believe Mercurial is better in some ways than Git and I could even believe Atlassian's BitBucket service is in some theoretical sense better than GitHub. But most code is on GitHub, so git wins.

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There are 6 responses your comment and not one has mentioned that both hg and bzr have full interoperability with git. I use github extensively with both bzr and hg, and haven't used git in a while. Your personal choice of SCM is entirely irrelevant to which web service you use.

As a lover of bazaar, how did you manage to do that? I always feel so dirty when I have to use git because everyone uses github.

Just use bzr-git, it works perfectly.

Can you tell me how you use hg with github? I really prefer working with mercurial but have often switched to git for projects I want to put on github. I know there's some git plugin for mercurial but I thought that was old and unmaintained?

http://hg-git.github.com/

Nice. Thanks!

Irrespective of git vs. hg, there is one case where BitBucket is definitely better than GitHub: when you have many repositories and a variable number of contributors.

My company is in this exact situation and we've chosen BitBucket because the pricing model per contributor is a much better fit than GitHub's model for our usage pattern.

I haven't looked at the pricing for BitBucket but it seems (in my experience) you can have as many contributors as you want in an "organization" on GitHub and you only pay based on the number of private repos that organization has and forks of those repos don't count.

Is that not your experience?

BitBucket pricing: https://bitbucket.org/plans GitHub pricing: https://github.com/plans

We currently have 9 people accessing our 12 source repositories (9 BitBucket users or 9 GitHub collaborators). With BitBucket we pay 10USD/month, with GitHub we would have to pay either 22USD/month (the Medium plan) or 25USD/month (the Bronze plan).

In the end, BitBucket's pricing structure is much simpler for us and fits our model much better.

I don't see the number of programs on GitHub mattering at all. It is not like you can't use a gem from github and two from bitbucket and one from savannah and one from an old floppy disk and two you were emailed a tarball.

Github is no doubt useful, but don't ignore the others -- this is not facebook.

I disagree, we use mercurial because it has a full product line of management tools, the issue tracker is 1000% better with mercurial compared to github. I don;t care where "most code" is, I care about where my code and me teams code is.

The point, imho, is not about you caring where your code is, it's about other people discovering that's where it is too.

Surely the importance of that varies wildly depending on what you're doing? What percentage of developers even code publicly? I'd imagine that the vast, vast majority of businesses do not.

I love Github and its community, but it absolutely is not the first and last reason for my team to use Git. Our code is highly proprietary and Github is not the solution for us. I continue to use Github and agree about its vitality, but it isn't a one-size fit all for teams.

Show me how you set priorities on tickets at Github? Apparently they are philosophically opposed to you being able to sort issues by importance.

One thing I love about Google Code is that they allow multiple repositories per "project". This is very important for when you want to share the same issue tracker, wiki, downloads etc because the items are related. Many of the overall projects I work on have a server piece, some tools and an Android client. They all work together as a whole. When there is an issue, it is often not apparent where the blame actually lies and which component will need to be changed to fix it. (Eg a font being too large in the Android client could have been generated from the server which served up templates made by a tool.) Google rule out private hosting so they can't be used in this scenario - http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1829

As a regular user of Google Code, Bitbucket and Github, the arbitrary differences are very annoying. Each uses a different wiki syntax, and most relevant each has a different syntax for closing tickets in a commit comment - they are similar but not exactly the same.

We use tags on github for priority. Combined with milestones, we're easily able to figure out what to work on next.

Right now just limited to "High", "Medium" and "Low", but we could have whatever level of granularity we want. We can also color code the tags (red = high, orange = medium, yellow = low).

The thing I really miss on github is a place to stick a numeric estimate for how long something will take to help with knowing how much capacity we have left in a release/iteration.

I don't see any way of sorting by tags. We also use tags for several other things so it wouldn't even know which tags to sort by.

trac does a really good job on this side of things, especially a nice place to provide (and sort) milestones, show their progress, a little bit of writeup etc. This is an example:

http://trac.edgewall.org/roadmap

Github Issues isn't their strongest point. One sticky bit is that it doesn't seem to keep track of the full history of a ticket.

This. Github is the killer app for dvcs. Both git and mercurial are good enough, and github simply makes it a no brainer.

Apart from the large chunk of us who don't do open source stuff and manage products with it.

Github brings us no benefit then.

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