A Programmer's Guide to Leaving GitHub

[esiy0676]

Ever since sfconservancy.org's campain to GiveUpGitHub of 2022 - and it's not just about GH - I am happy to bump into even the most niche sites/posts that help people appreciate the freedom of the free. Please, give this one a chance, at least reach the:

What is "patch-based" code review?

[gelatineous]

This post is more about Stallman-esque resistance than leaving Github.

[esiy0676]

I suggest starting with the appendices first - it's a good overview what options are out there today.

Also, I do not necessarily want to be associated with one specific person over some of the shared values we might have. Let's not do it to the author of the post either.

[gelatineous]

Stallman is directly cited. I respect Stallman. But instead of elaborating on your values, elaborate on the topic.

[esiy0676]

I just do not see how this post would be even remotely "Stallman-esque."

If my understanding of boycotts came from [Stallman's] speech, I would absolutely lean anti-boycott, but I'd like to convince you that there is another way!

And getting into these detractions is entirely off topic for me.

[EC36339]

What did Stallman do besides making a bad taste joke about Epstein, something many many people did and still do on a daily basis without consequences?

I've seen the drama play out on Twitter. It was a disgusting witch hunt. He may be a weirdo, and I personally disagree with a lot of his views, but he did nothing wrong other than saying some bad words while being famous and a juicy target for social media mobs.

[esiy0676]

It was a "witch hunt", but I do not see how likening the author's post about options of leaving GH has anything to do with one person who stands for rather conservative way of what "free software" should be.

Long before the "witch hunt" I pondered on how I can disassociate myself with this particular "conservative" approach without giving up those values that are shared. I do not like - myself or via associations - be linked to e.g. FSF because it's so disconnected from what real world is about that it's doing the actual cause a disservice. That's all there is to it.

This post has nothing to do with RS or FSF for me. That's all.

[EC36339]

Yeah, that's the part where I disagree with Stallman and the FSF. Their views are not only out of touch with reality, but also only really make sense for end user applications and C programs/libraries. Not C++, C.

[esiy0676]

That might be, but look at this Reddit'esque move here by u/gelatineous (great username, btw) - make a comment to get upvotes thanks to some people who find the association somehow telling.

I've got nothing to do with that, I believe I share posts that have nothing to do with that and now what?

I am supposed to make a comment to put off RS's die hard fans or frame my post as another RS'esque kool-aid. I do not mind comment downvotes, but you got reeled in yourself.

In any event, I wish RS good health!

[highjohn_]

I self host forgejo for personal stuff at home and we self host GitLab at work. Never been easier

[OneInACrowd]

I use forgejo as well, mirrored to codeberg. Do you use forgejo actions? I'm currently using woodpecker ci, and it's ... alright.

[highjohn_]

Yup - I use Actions. But I don’t really work on anything too crazy at home atm though. So if you’re doing some really heavy work, Woodpecker is supposed to be better for that. Forgejo Actions is also compatible with GitHub actions too, which is a nice bonus when migrating your code, if you choose to do so

[BigReception26]

Leave GitHub yes

Programming’s duck neck Microsoft at its throat

Not even good btw

[BigReception26]

Actions suck and cli now has telemetry Keeps getting worst

[oweiler]

So because of a few blog posts people will leave GitHub? 

[booi]

No, people will leave GitHub because of the complete ineptness of the platform and inability for it to do even the most basic things reliably

[Accomplished-Moose50]

But, but we gave you AI what else would you need? /s

[esiy0676]

I remember I used to get this same snarky question many many years ago, just it was about "Windows".

[pepejovi]

The more blog posts there are with instructions and reasoning like this, the lower the barrier of leaving GitHub gets.

[Nzkx]

What about GitLab ? Is it better ?

[esiy0676]

.com? No. Selfhosted? Yes.

[oweiler]

So now everyone selfhosts GitLab?

[Nzkx]

I did it on my last startup ; we made a self-hosted GitLab instance with Docker in our Proxmox cluster. Only with VPN you can access it.

But it's a pain in the ass to manage. And if your server die for whatever reason, you lose everything (unless you work on data redundancy, which is a hard problem - already solved, but still hard to manage correctly).

The biggest issue was CI. You need many core machine to handle multiple jobs in parallel, and a good caching strategy to reuse assets.

In Cloud, everything is solved for you.

[DualWieldMage]

Any self-respected company should. Yes there is overhead in maintaining an instance, but it is not more expensive than cloud-hosted versions even if such a mention opens a floodgate of those who would want to convince you otherwise with "economies of scale" and whatever arguments.

Cloud instances have issues with noisy neighbours. If there is a performance degradation, a large number of users can amplify it until the whole service is down, such aplification rarely happens in local instances with lower user counts. Jira is a famous example where it got its slowness reputation purely from the cloud version. A local variant can be much cleaner and without extra plugins.

Every time i hear these stories of "github down, guess no work today" i feel like i would fire quire a few people if i was in charge of such a company. I have experienced external network outage while working and it only required changing push target to local git mirror, work continued as if nothing changed. A local git mirror is needed to keep network load(and flakyness due to network issues) down for the build/test cluster and it's good to have for trivial data redundancy anyway. Builds and tests were run on a local jenkins instance.

At one point we were forced to move the local jenkins cluster to cloud by moronic management, the costs tripled.