So, what are the cool kids using these days for their own FOSS projects? Gitorious or GitHub?
I’m thinking about hosting my own cloned repo (which would make it easier to tell upstream to include improvements), and possibly adding a few more things on down the road, like a proper overlay for my ebuilds.
Most of the positions on GitHub vs. Gitorious that I’ve seen are two years old, before most everything happened. Before Gitorious got Qt and other bignames using the service. I’ve read some ideological blogposts, too. I know GitHub doesn’t have open source for their server software, and I know that Gitorious has far fewer projects and a much smaller userbase.
I came up with a few pros and cons:
GitHub
Pros:
- GitHub has syntax highlighting for several types of code. Awesome! Though it doesn’t do ebuilds, of course.
- In theory the webpage serving could be really nice, as it could offer more than Gitorious’s built-in wiki.
- Offers private repos if I ever need ‘em, and repos can be switched from private to public.
- Lots of Gentoo folks and Gentoo projects are already on GitHub, as well as the application’s repo I intend to clone.
Cons:
- GitHub takes awhile to load commit history in the right sidebar.
- GitHub is not friendly for seeing a bunch of commit history all at once, both for projects and for individual files.
- GitHub’s search seems to really suck.
- The software that powers their site is not open-source. Not really going to affect my workflow; more of an ideological fault. I’m pragmatic, though; if the rest of the site does what I want it to, then I’ve no real issues.
Gitorious
Pros:
- Has the latest commits right up front, providing a good overview of what’s been happening and what’s available.
- The wiki-type front pages are a bit easier to navigate. The whole site feels less cluttered than GitHub.
- Much easier to see up front who’s part of a project and who’s cloned it.
Cons:
- Gitorious takes longer when searching for stuff; it’s also a little slower just to click through trees and links, like the Neuvoo project.
- Business model? What business model? How are they gonna stay open on down the road?
- Doesn’t seem to offer private repos, should I need one in the future.
Anything else I’ve missed? Which service do you use, and why?
I don’t use git, so I don’t use any service (I host some small projects with mercurial as CGI on my site though)
> Business model? What business model?
> How are they gonna stay open on down
> the road?
Trolltech founded them for at least four months before they got online there. I’d guess that they would step in if the site goes down (if they are allowed to do).
However this is a valid point, but I’d fear the same for every service I’m not hosting myself. Even if a business model exists it may fail horribly. But of course you’re right, such a model can help to trust a site.
Why not ask the people there?
I use a bit of both; I prefer the openness of gitorious, but since I work on a lot of upstream-merged projects I have those on github…
For instance you can find a helluva repositories of mine in GitHub because of my work on various gems…
Gitorious also supports “merge requests” a very nice feature which makes it easier to maintain “official versions” of a package. This was one of the big reasons “BasKet” development recently switched from github to gitorious.
Wait a minute, you didn’t mention “awesome graphs to show commit stats” for a GitHub pro? They’re great.
I began with GitHub just because I didn’t know about Gitorious when I first began and haven’t bothered to consider switching although I have looked at some of these difference posts.
Run my own using cgit. All the extra features these hosts offer just never appealed to me.
As @atomopawn points out, the merge request feature of gitorious is really great. On the StatusNet project, we use it pretty heavily, and it works very well for getting new contributors involved and as a code review tool for more experienced developers.
And not to rehash an old argument, but I find it very ironic when Free Software projects develop and host themselves using proprietary software. If the Free Software developers were “pragmatic” instead of “idealist,” they would have never developed GCC, portage, or much of anything else, because functional systems already existed.
I think we Free Software developers should use Gitorious, publicize it, request new features, report bugs, etc… then as with all popular Free Software projects, developers will improve it. It’s a much brighter future that GitHub’s.
> Business model? What business model?
Nokia is paying them for the branded qt.gitorious.org page, afaik.
As I work in Shortcut, the company behind Gitorious.org, let me step in with a few things regarding our business model.
As mentioned above, Nokia (Qt) has funded quite a lot of new features – among these the merge request feature, which provides the workflow they wanted for managing third party contributions.
Furthermore, both the Maemo (http://maemo.gitorious.org/) and Qt (http://qt.gitorious.org/) parts of Nokia use Gitorious.org to manage their contributions. We provide an SLA for this, offering support and providing bandwith etc – for a fee.
We also offer support contracts for custom Gitorious installs, behind company firewalls. Installation, education, support, custom features etc. One of our current customers is sponsoring LDAP integration in Gitorious, a feature they need themselves which will probably benefit several other companies using Gitorious (the software).
We also plan to offer sponsorship plans for companies wanting to contribute to the services offered to the free software community.
So yes, there is a business model around Gitorious and we are working on finding more. Any ideas are very welcome!
Hey,
You can just install gitorious on your own server, like I do for various clients of mine. That way you have no worries about it being closed in the near future (what I don’t think will ever happen.)
It’s not an easy install but it when you get it working you get all the awesomeness for free :p
just search for the gitorious project on gitorious.org and there are install guides (I got it working on Gentoo a year ago without too many hassle)
greetings,
sejo
PS: your comment check tells me the email sejo at inuits dot be is an invalid one??
I use both but most of my stuff is on GitHub. To be honest I’m fairly relaxed about the differences between the two hosting services because the main thing they are is off-site backup of my repos. Both being git-based of course means migrating is very easy. It would only become more of an issue if you have a lot invested in the Wiki/Bug Trackers.
first of all: github sucks. i’d recommend something that has gitweb running. if you need just a git repo maybe http://repo.or.cz/ works for you. if you want a repo plus trac/bugtracker i can recommend https://fedorahosted.org/web/. they’re not fedora-only at all, even if the name may suggest that at first. good luck!
ps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities#Version_Control_Systems_available
Yes, the main problem with Gitorious the missing private project feature. We hosting several git project/repo for our customers with Gitorious, and this feature is missed by them.
We’re thinking on change to any other stuff, but… with what? Github is not opensource, and i don’t know any other repository manager with functionality of gitorious/github and with support private project.
Why not try to use Mercurial?
The lack of interest of the Gentoo developers in use mercurial makes me very sad.
I’m using Mercurial with all my projects, including my overlay [1], and I’m not alone [2]
Looking at the layman list, 5 or 6 overlays are using Mercurial, and Repoman didn’t had Mercurial support before I create a patch.
I think that the majority of the projects using git could migrate to Mercurial.
Additionally, we have great free hostings for Mercurial[3], but the setup of a Mercurial repository is very simple.
Some people likes to confuse simplicity with lack of features.
[1] – http://overlay.rafaelmartins.eng.br/
[2] – http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/ProjectsUsingMercurial
[3] – http://bitbucket.org/ http://code.google.com/
I use github for all my personal stuff. however at my previous job we had gitorious inhouse. the merge requests were wonderful as we had a release manager and he would take those and build out the release from there.
I found the UI for gitorious rather non-intuitive though. it wasn’t the easiest thing to get around when I wanted to find various stuff, but otherwise it did its job nicely.
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github , gitorious , mercurial , bitbucket. ……
if you want code -review , why not try to use Gerrit tools
http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/
“Gerrit is a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system.
Gerrit makes reviews easier by showing changes in a side-by-side display, and allowing inline comments to be added by any reviewer.
Gerrit simplifies Git based project maintainership by permitting any authorized user to submit changes to the master Git repository, rather than requiring all approved changes to be merged in by hand by the project maintainer. This functionality enables a more centralized usage of Git. “