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Comment by shurcooL | Hacker News Reader

They've really made it easier to collaborate.

Their website design is beautiful, consistent, making it delightful to use everyday. They fix issues quickly, are reliable, and have top notch customer support. They try to be at the top of their game and offer features to make our work easier (while maintaining simplicity, similar to Go). You can edit posts to fix typos, and GitHub Flavored Markdown is efficient to write. They have the best API and docs I've come across.

It helps that once you're familiar with the workflow, if another project you want to make a contribution to on GitHub, it's super convenient (unlike in the past, think SourceForge and others). Even if you're not, the web flow makes it easy to press edit and go from there.

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You must have dealt with a completely different company and product. The public github is a lot better than the enterprise version at least in terms of stability. Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code review features.

Github enterprise was a disaster with just a couple hundred users.

Under the load of just a few hundred users it died almost every day. Their support team couldn't figure it out. We had to reboot the servers constantly.

We begged them to add an option to reject force push to master. They refused. We ended up monkey patching their obscured source to add the feature, but it broke on upgrades and was hard to maintain. This is something probably every single customer of theirs wants, and it should take one engineer less than a day to implement.

They only just added side by side diff support. IMHO this is a basic, core feature for any kind of code review workflow. I'm holding my breath for proper syntax highlighting while in diff view.

We've since moved on to Atlassian Stash. While it isn't perfect, it's a dream compared to Github enterprise and a lot less $$$ to boot.

    > Still, both lack a lot of basic issue tracker and code 
    > review features.

I strongly disagree. What you might consider "basic features" I'd consider antifeatures. The bare simplicity of the issue tracker is precisely why I use it for my (large) projects. The PR model of code review scales elegantly to hundreds of contributors. I'd be devastated to see GitHub's collaboration tools move even a step toward the hellscape that is JIRA.

I agree with that, but just to be clear, Stash is independent of Jira (though they do integrate) and has a simple pull request model. It's actually very nice to use (pretty much just like BitBucket).

At least for code review, the problem isn't pull requests as-such. The features that drive me to use other tools (on top of guthub hosting, often) are things like:

* The ability to mark which commits/files have been reviewed and so track progress.

* The ability to distinguish resolved and unresolved issues

* The ability to assign a reviewer based on which code is being altered in the PR.

* Useful handling of history rewriting during review.

I also think that the PR model could be implemented in a way that would make for better collaboration. At the moment, if someone submits a PR that has some issues and you want to help them fix those issues it's a huge pain because the commits typically live in their fork to which others usually don't have push access. It would be a considerable improvement if PR branches were set up in such a way that both the original submitter and the people with commit access to upstream could push to the review branch.

Beanstalk - private repo hosting for business - just released a brand new code review tool that we've been beta testing for a while now. It's rather nice and addresses many of the rough edges of pull requests. It's definitely for same-company teams as opposed to large open-source collaborative projects, though.

http://beanstalkapp.com

We host all of our private repos with Beanstalk, and use GH for our open source repos.

So, I'm no Jira fan either, but the code review side of github is definitely it's weakest point. They only just rolled out side by side reviews, something that I would have said was essential from day 1.

The fact that every comment on a review turns into a separate email is insanity, and just fills up your inbox with crap (one email for all of one person's comments on a review makes a ton more sense).

I hope they make it better, it definitely seems like a place where some TLC can go a long way.

Again, that's the idea with competition in the market. What one group wants may not be what everyone else wants. If enough people really want a specific set of features it would be nice if a vendor/Open Source solutions implemented that feature. There might for exmple be big differences in how enterprises use a tool and how (big) open source project use the same kind of tool.

Github Enterprise has supported disabling force pushes for at least a year.

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