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Comment by icehawk219 | Hacker News Reader

> HOW: This will be a simple switch – turn off CodePlex, turn on GitHub. You’ll be able to see our check-ins on GitHub that same day.

It's probably a safe bet that CodePlex's days are numbered. Which is kind of a shame. It was definitely heavily lacking but I can't help but think that some more competition in the space would be a good thing.

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There's plenty of competition, from Bitbucket, which is better. "Social" effects notwithstanding, of course.

I like Bitbucket and have been using them for some time but their interface is slow and not as intuitive as Github's.

Also like Bitbucket, and agree with the interface. They made things responsive a while ago, and there were lots of complaints about the 'create a README' decision as a space-waster, they haven't done anything about it since.

I like their revenue model, but because of the existence of JIRA and Stash, Atlassian are refusing/reluctant to improve the issue tracker in Bitbucket. For example, I can't manage releases, create epic(?) issues, and a few other things.

That's all well, but the problem's that getting a JIRA license gives you the ability to manage your issues at a more granular level, until you realise that you also need Stash to create epic(?) issues. I got into JIRA for a few months, and was disappointed by it. I've been considering moving some of my private repos to GitHub.

We use jira at work, and there are definitely epics available...?

Interesting, I was on 6.0-6.1, and unless I'm completely wrong, I went a month seeing an 'activate Stash to use this feature' button/link. If you've had epics before then, then I was probably doing something wrong.

His point is that because of Jira, Bitbucket can't have epics. Cannibalizing sales.

Bitbucket has issue with cross-referencing. You can reference an issue from an issue but to make a two-way reference you need to edit both. This is a showstopper for projects that use tracker for planning too, not just for logging bugs.

GitLab B.V. CEO here, consider using GitLab, it adds a cross-reference when you reference another issue (can be in the same or another repo, even across organizations).

i can't stand when a tech company can't innovate their own webpage more than using a standard Bootstrap template any noob developer can use. No offense to your product I'm sure it's great. I just don't understand why every company, especially in the tech field can't even design their website to be just a little bit unique.

And why should it be unique? Do you require that with every entity you deal with?

Yes :)

Ha. Yeah, we use paid Github and paid Jira at work, and it's an idyllic combination. In a couple of decades, Jira is the closest I've ever seen to the Bugtracker That Doesn't Suck Much.

I'm not sure what exactly you are referring to, but let me give a quick break down of the options here (my day job is primarily consulting around the Atlassian stack of tools).

JIRA itself is highly configurable out of the box and most aspects of the tool can be configured however you like. If you want a record ("issue type") called "Epic" it is easy to configure JIRA to have it. It is also easy - for some definition of easy! - to customise the data you collect for these records ("fields"), when that data is displayed ("screens"), and the lifecycle through which it will progress ("workflow").

However!

Most people want to use Epics as part of an Agile methodology, and Atlassian provides a batteries-included solution called "JIRA Agile". If you saw an 'activate to enable Epics' button it was almost certainly for JIRA Agile (previously GreenHopper) though I don't recall seeing this button myself. JIRA Agile is nice for many reasons, even for people who don't follow an Agile methodology, IMO primarily because it provides a simpler user experience for many people - most installations I've seen have it.

Stash itself is a fairly well targeted piece of software. It manages git repositories, and provides tools to help with that and integrate with external systems. Provisioning projects->repositories->branches and the permissions around them, pull requests, forks, hooks, automations, and integrations. It's also fairly easy to extend with add-ons from the marketplace or that you have written yourself.

The integration between Stash and JIRA is good, but is not much more than showing branches, pull requests, and commits that a JIRA issue has been referenced in.

Hope that helps

I stick with bitbucket mainly because of the pricing schemes. I create a lot of tiny private repos for company related work, sometimes just scripting type programs with only 5 files in it, and I can't afford to pay for each of those on github. Otherwise, github is just the best in the business in every aspect

GitLab B.V. CEO here, what do you think about the interface of GitLab? You can use it for free on GitLab.com and we try to make the interface as clean as possible. (also, we're hiring for an interaction engineer)

What's better about Bitbucket? I've never used it, just wondering.

Private buckets for non-free accounts, for starters

Free private repositories and out-of-the-box mercurial support. Works well for those small side projects which you do not (yet) want to maintain. I have lots of stuff in there which i want to keep as reference for projects to come and would never want to release to the public.

If you don't yet want to publish, why do you need GitHub or Bitbucket? Why not just keep the repository local?

As long as you are backing up your repo in some way, you don't. But these sites just make it easy.

Considering you have to use git to use github, isn't it always an extra step to use github for a private project?

There are lots of tools, like tortoisegit, that make that extra step a triviality.

> If you don't yet want to publish, why do you need GitHub or Bitbucket? Why not just keep the repository local?

There are some reasons, in my opinion:

    * Zero friction to start publishing (in case you suddenly want to)
    * Zero friction to start collaborating
    * Off-site backup
    * A kind of self-discipline boost and desire to make your thing publish-ready
      (get your README, license, packaging in order, organize stuff nicely,
      observe practices good repositories out there employ. This one could be
      just me, though, and I suppose it somewhat decreases for private repositories)
    * Built-in issue management (might be relevant even for personal projects)
    * Nicer GUI to view the repository structure

> If you don't yet want to publish, why do you need GitHub or Bitbucket? Why not just keep the repository local?

My two cents on this are that I always try to outsource any internal services to reduce maintenance time. For example

1. Own git repository will need backup and server configuration to be accessed from all machines that I own, which means I will need to spend time on security.

2. Own GitLab instance will mean 1 + system resources ( GitLab actually uses more than I would like to spare )

3. If I need to benefit hooks and pretty UI I would also need to do 1 + 2 + writing README files and integrate with different CI services.

What I figured out is that there are 1 and 2 outsourced and free ( bitbucket ), so I would not bother doing this on my own.

If you have a machine with SSH access and git, you can always use git+ssh as a cheap remoting solution... it works pretty well, but usability isn't quite as nice as with github/gitlab etc... If you're one person, it's probably good enough though.

Yeah I know I've used such a setup for a couple of years. I got a special SSH user "git" with key only login.

Later on I wanted to track what repositories I had on that machine and get some stats. I found out about GitLab so I decided to take a spin. Two months after the install I found out I was hacked, because of gitlab-shell binary that I didn't patch :(.

Then I decided not to mess with this if I can use it for free.

Anyway thanks for your comment. I think people that think GitHub is "magic" should run their own repo to see actually where "Git" ends and "Hub" starts.

It's easier and faster to use a service like BitBucket than it is to manage your own Git repositories manually.

If you're working in a team the code review workflow is a bit better, because as a reviewer you can explicitly Approve a pull request. I've used it in a team where the requirement was to get two approvals before a pull request can be shipped. Having the number of approvals visible on the pull request list/overview screen is a tiny detail, but very useful.

At my current job we're using a "ship it" label on GitHub to track this, I really don't understand why GitHub still cannot track this in a native way.

It's a bit of offtopic, but I had worked in a similar setup but we were using phabricator for code reviews and it is hands down the best tool for code review that I have ever used.

GitLab B.V. CEO here, in GitLab we show the number of +1 and -1 at the top of the merge request for this reason.

Also ( including the private repos ) there is a similar tool to hub [1], that is created for bitbucket [2].

With the unlimited private repos my mind went crazy, now I version control my "/etc" and every shell script I create. I even don't open the bitbucket website that often. I do everything from the terminal.

1: https://github.com/github/hub 2: https://bitbucket.org/zhemao/bitbucket-cli

In addition to agreeing with the other comments, Github's uptime is also far better

My only complaint about bitbucket is that I want to see the code easily, not click through heaps of buttons to do that.

In the settings of every repo you own in Bitbucket, there is a n option to set "Landing Page" to source code and it will open the root path of your repo when you hit the link.

This one should be the default if you ask me.

Don't make me learn to use your site.

Consider using GitLab. GitLab.com gives you unlimited private repositories for free and is more friendly to use than bitbucket.

(note: I'm a GitLab employee)

I think Microsoft has a much better alternative to CodePlex in Visual Studio Online [1]. It doesn't feel quite the same as GitHub/Bitbucket/CodePlex because it's missing that online community feel. But it's relatively new and has been improving quite quickly [2] and it wouldn't surprise me if they started to coalesce CodePlex into VSO.

[1] http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/what-is-visual-st...

[2] http://www.visualstudio.com/news/2014-dec-17-vso

I definitely like how CodePlex has dedicated tabs for documentation, as well as discussion and issues. It seems like every repo I come across on github is often just a dump of files with very little in the way of documentation. My guess is that because CodePlex makes documentation prominent, it incentivises its use while the opposite is true for github.

Github has its own issue-management, which I quite frankly find way better than anything Codeplex has, because of how it interacts and links with the source-control commits themselves. Github also supports per-project wikis, and if people aren't using them to write documentation on Github, they wouldn't be writing documentation on Codeplex either.

The reason you see more Github repos without documentation is because writing documentation is "boring" work, and mostly bigger organizations can afford the staff to write and maintain documentation.

And most codeplex repos were Microsoft's own, where they had an interest in keeping their stuff documented. On Github anyone can (and does!) open a repo.

So missing documentation has nothing to do with Github itself as much as the users and organizations it primarely attracts.

Yes, CodePlex has a documentation tab... but a lot of projects don't have anything there. I wish it would just hide the tab if there aren't any docs.

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