I still don't exactly understand what they are offering? Is there an advantage to using GitHub versus dumping some (yet to be created) virtual machine image on a cheap virtual server?
I thouhgt it has a social network aspect, but I can't see it yet? I really don't want to trash their business, just wondering about the virtual server competition.
You don't need to deal with setting up proper security, which can be a little tricky with git. Plus the social aspects. Plus the pretty interface. Plus it's free for most purposes.
I don't use it for work, but I use it for personal projects.
Don't you think that git's advantage over SVN evaporates when there is only one user on a team? I run my private Subversion repository which I use for everything (not just code), I looked at git, and while I see the benefits for large teams, I simply couldn't justify the switch.
git is great even if you're developing by yourself. I use git exclusively for all my work now (and use git-svn to integrate with others at work that use svn). Some of the benefits are:
merge tracking: this will also come to subversion in the future (but you'll have to migrate your repository)
having the entire repository checked out locally for offline use (being able to code on the train on the way to work is great)
fast branches - branches are really fast, especially since they're done locally, and there's basically no excuse for not quickly creating a branch when you want to try something out, and merge tracking
forking other open source repositories (including svn and cvs ones) for hacking and maintaing patches (until they get accepted upstream). git is nice and will attempt to always rebase your patches off the latest HEAD (and let you resolve conflicts if they occur).
git bisect for binary searching for the revision that broke something (can do a binary search over revisions to find out which revision broke a certain test).
did I mention that it integrates with svn?
git svn clone http://svnrepo.com/trunk
# do stuff
git add stuff/you/changed
git commit
git svn dcommit # commit changes from git into subversion
I have a lot of scripts that sit on top of svn which I'm thinking of moving over to git. Even in the case of a single private repository git offers some advantages.
Git seems a lot faster compared to svn, especially when checking out a large tree. svn co can be glacial at times.
Also with git you don't have .svn directories all over the place. This may not seem like a big deal until you want to store a directory structure created by an application that wants total control over the directories it creates.
The social networking aspect comes from the ease with which you can fork repositories and send pull requests. It makes it really easy to see what projects people are hacking and it bolsters the sense of community (and easy of code sharing) amongst folks working on the same open source projects.
Oh, definitely. But the GitHub guys put a really nice UI on it. It's one of those things that is easy to underestimate until you've actually used it for actively developing an open source project. I've actually met other developers through it, so I guess the proof's in the pudding.
Just tried it. Very nice and very easy to use. Has some really pretty graphs of your commits as well :) . Their free plan is really good for open source projects.
The plan pricing works perfectly for me. I'm currently a micro and likely to move to small in the near future. It's nice that it'll only be a 5 dollar increase a month versus a 15 dollar increase to Medium.
I thouhgt it has a social network aspect, but I can't see it yet? I really don't want to trash their business, just wondering about the virtual server competition.