GitHub - the standard by which any hosted VCS should be judged
August 31, 2017
GitHub - the standard by which any hosted VCS should be judged
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with GitHub
We use GitHub across our entire (small) software development organization for software configuration management (version control). We also use it for dev-ops - again, for configuration management/version control. For the most part, we do not use the wiki or issue tracking functions - just the core git functionality. Our developers also use GitHub when forking open-source tools that we use in order to develop enhancements or bug fixes.
- Hosting git repositories - GitHub is rock solid, and very reliable. It's much easier than maintaining our own servers.
- The collaboration features - pull requests and code reviews. Having the complete framework for facilitating the collaboration, including email notifications, is great.
- The user (collaborator) mechanism is simple and straightforward. In our organization, we do not need complicated access control facilities.
- The integration with other services (e.g. Slack) is great.
- I sometimes wish I had a better view of the various branches in our repository. However, I can address that need with client-side tools.
- With open-source projects that are (semi) abandoned, it can be hard to locate a good fork to base one's work or fork off of. That's not really a problem with GitHub as much as a problem with projects that get abandoned.
- I can't image operating any software project without some form of version control. I've been using various VCS tools for 30+ years, and GitHub is best I've used. Compared to not using a VCS, GitHub provides nearly infinite ROI, but I'd be hard-pressed to provide specific numbers.
- The each of branching and merging facilitate by git and GitHub makes software development much faster. I can recall meetings and policy discussions before branching or merging with other tools (e.g., CVS). We have none of that with git and GitHub.
The most direct competitor to GitHub that I can think of would be BitBucket from Atlassian. The biggest advantage that I know of for BitBucket would be that they support both git and Mercurial. If you have at least one team or project using Mercurial, then BitBucket would be a natural choice since GitHub doesn't support Mercurial. But, if you're a git-only shop, I can't see much advantage to BitBucket, but then I haven't used BitBucket since long before they were acquired.