Re: Who’s on GitHub?

On Oct 5, 2011, at 3:15 PM, Geert Josten wrote:
> To put it very briefly: one of its most essential distinctions is that it takes a distributed approach on code development. People not messing around in the same SCM tree, but rather in own forks. Push and pull requests take care of the merging, but instead of doing so blindly, they ‘have’ to be done explicitly. First review, then merge. Much safer. Its distributed approach allows some speed benefits as well, mostly because you usually maintain a local ‘copy’ of the code repository (with all versioning info!).

Yep!  I love it.  

Git isn’t the first distributed SCM, but it’s my personal favorite.  

Actually, I found Bazaar to be much friendlier on the command line, but Git’s performance just blows Bazaar out of the water.  And although Bazaar (and Launchpad) are very much alive, they 


> I think there is a steeper hill for starters to, but it shouldn’t be too big.. 


Personally, I found the concepts weirder when reading about them, but WAY easier to actually use.  

The distributed system is a bit weird if you’re stuck in traditional SCM habits, but GitHub really goes a long way toward making things much easier.  

The general “fork, edit, pull-request� workflow requires only a couple of commands.  If you prefer, you can even go through the workflow without touching the command-line—courtesy of GitHub’s excellent UI.  

GitRef.org is also a good resource.  (The full manual to Git is comprehensive to the point of being overwhelming.  The few commands used for 95% of all Git work can carry you for weeks, months…maybe longer.)


> Apart from that, lots of interesting stuff at github, so that is one other reason to make a visit there. Bit like Google: why join? Because of the cool stuff they have.. ;-)


Precisely! ☺ 

Honestly, there’s a lot I love about Git itself, but GitHub is probably the single biggest reason I switched.  GitHub is very, very alive with activity.  And because of the distributed system, the barriers for contributing to a project are SO much lower.  

Although a distributed SCM is considered somewhat mind-bending to learn by some, I have personally found it to be MUCH easier when it comes to contributing to open source projects.  I’ve always had way more trouble contributing to projects using Subversion (or, god forbid, CVS).  I don’t have to worry about politics or getting permission to commit.  I just fork, make the changes I want, and send a pull request.  And almost 100% of the time the project owner is gladly accepts my changes.  

Oh, I almost forgot: the other thing that helped convince me to switch is Linus Torvalds’ talk on Git at Google.  

For the record, I don’t have a particularly strong opinion about Linus Torvalds—although his reputation definitely preceded him.  But it really doesn’t matter.  If I had never heard of Linus Torvalds, and this talk was by some random person, I would have had an equally high opinion.  I thoroughly enjoyed the talk.  For me it was educational and humorous.  But more importantly, it doesn’t just cover the technical advantages of Git—it covers the social advantages as well.

Hope that helps!

—Tony