Every day, it seems, another Perl module is posted up to GitHub. Collaboration, of course - great stuff!
But it got me thinking about why everyone is settling on GitHub. Surely not just the fact it's all web two point oh, combined with groupthink. What happened to poor old SourceForge, the previously canonical location for open source software on the web?
I wanted a bit more infrastructure for one of my own CPAN hosted modules, so went to look at GitHub. The first thing which struck me was the lack of mail list support, so in fact GitHub turned out to be a non-starter.
Having not visited SourceForge in a while, I found the site has had quite a nice front-end facelift, along with a bunch of new features.
Yes, there is actually git support (and bazaar, svn, mercurial, cvs). There's also a wiki, forums, image gallery, issue tracker, blog, and much more, if you want.
So I was left feeling a little underwhelmed by GitHub, but SourceForge at first glance seems to offer all the infrastructure I need instead.
Any comments on what I have missed? Would anyone who consciously chose GitHub over SourceForge like to comment?
The downside for me is that the user interface is pretty messy and not as polished as in most modern two point oh apps. I am currently facing a similar dilemma and I am not yet decided if I will go for SF or use a combination of several tools (github for version control and issue tracking and google groups for support).
Re:I find SF too messy
oliver on 2009-08-17T17:36:46
Fair point, although it's not as ad-cluttered as it could be, for what I pay for it
;-) I hope that most interaction will be via mail list, git/svn commands, and so on.
I also like that SF can host a full custom homepage for the project - that's always been a nice touch.
Thanks for the comment!
Re:I find SF too messy
Aristotle on 2009-08-17T19:59:59
I also like that SF can host a full custom homepage for the project
Re:I find SF too messy
Dom2 on 2009-08-17T17:38:09
I use both github and google code for one of my projects. It works, and I like both, but if I were starting again from today, I'd be a lot more tempted to settle on just github. Purely from the consistency of having a single site for users.Re:I find SF too messy
Tadman on 2009-08-18T15:39:23
I've always loathed SF and I might even go so far as to say I hate it. Every trip to SourceForge to get something I needed was one filled with frustration, disgust, and irritation, as something as simple as finding a module or downloading a file was always a process of figuring out where to ask, what to click on, and, even then, of digging through several pointless layers of garbage simply to get to the destination. It's like they're hurting for page-views and will do anything to increase them.
GitHub serves as an example of making the same process much easier. You search, you copy, you clone, you're done. A lot can be learned from the way they have things organized.
I have to say their current re-design of SourceForge has advanced the site around the level of TUCOWS in 1999, which is a step forward, though still so awful as to require goggles. I understand that many developers have zero or negative design sensibility, but are designers so hard to find?
In much the same way Digg trumped Slashdot, GitHub has likely overtaken SourceForge for the simple reason they have gone to great lengths to consider the usability of their product. I'm sure if SourceForge took the same approach they could do wonders with the massive archive they have.
On a related note, it is interesting that this site still requires the injection of HTML to get a simple comment to format. I feel like I'm in a time machine.
What you missed on GitHub is:
GitHub is MySpace for Hackers. It’s about coders and the stuff they do, throw-away hacks and big projects alike, not about faceless projects run by barely identified contributors.
(And in any case, regarding your knock-out criterion, last I looked at the SourceForge mailing list web archives, they blew chunks. Admittedly that was a long time ago and maybe they’ve overhauled that part. But I never had much interest in the site anyway, and only ever used it out of necessity.)
Re:SourceForge is not about people
oliver on 2009-08-18T06:09:49
There seems be a lot more to it than just the tools, I think you're saying. This is really useful stuff, thanks for taking the time to respond.
You mention the SF mail list sucks - no argument there! - but all I want to do really is replace the CPAN Forum, which sucks even more than that!
Re:Git support on Sourceforge is very minimal
grantm on 2009-08-25T01:19:06
It looks like SourceForge have fixed this problem and now projects can have multiple git repos. Unfortunately at this moment all git URLs on their site are broken as what was git://project.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/project should now be: git://project.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/project/project
Re:Different Goals
oliver on 2009-08-18T06:05:16
That does help, many thanks!
Since github is git based, this is no longer an issue. It costs me nothing to push my stuff up to github--I always end up with a full repo in my local copy. No history or metadata is out of my reach. I believe they even use git for their custom web pages--meaning even your project docs and such are similarly protected.
With github you won't lose anything if they go out of business or become evil.
Why does the mailing list need to be hosted at the same place the code is?
I have a number of projects floating around and they all use Google Groups for the mailing list, whether or not the code is hosted on any given Google property.
Re:Mailing lists
oliver on 2009-08-18T18:30:59
Yes I was coming to the same conclusion myself - using GitHub (which seems to have been given the thumbs up all round, here, in the comments) and then putting the mail list elsewhere.
I'd like to do this only once, and get it right first time. Moving lists around is annoying.
Thanks for the comment.
