It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Linus Torvalds would just dedicate a few months and build that functionality directly into git, both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth.
Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.
Idk if "gaps" is fair. Building a web UI into git would go quite against the "do one thing well" unix philosophy. And even then, hosting services would still be a thing
Yup MacOS ships with python. I didn’t try a python server since the ruby webrick server worked fine I just found it curious Apache didn’t work since it also ships in the OS.
I disagree, the fact that it's news to people here means people don't know their tools as well as one might assume.
Implying that it's a mistake because people don't know about it is very odd. Clearly, I know about it, as do others.
It's been possible for 10+ years to serve git repos using gitweb, and mercurial repos using hgweb. We did this in like 2007-2009ish, locally, in our LAN, among developers... because our code couldn't be pushed to a third party for... reasons.
Eventually I did setup our own internal SSH server to serve the repos, but for quick browsing of a team's repo state, using the built in HTTP server is just fine.
> both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth.
what do you think are their value propositions? I think they biggest part of their value proposition has to do with a centralized git repository as a service.
The centralized part is really important for most companies. To the point that many git users don't really understand it's decentralized nature.
To me, the primary value propositions are: issues, merge requests, comments on issues and merge requests, related stuff like tags/milestones/etc., and the ability to expose this stuff in a friendly way to project managers who don't use the commandline.
I guess since my team uses a self-hosted instance of GitLab, I'm biased and don't put any value on the social network aspect or the hosting aspect.
You could get these things by running a Phabricator istance - not much reason to pay for GitLab self-hosted version unless you really care about the support aspect and some of tgeir enterprise-focused niche features.
Social networks are not popular because of their tech stacks or their codebase being written. There are already several open source git frontends, GitLab included.
Social networks are popular because of their userbase and the ease of discovering other users and code. There is nothing you can build into a piece of client software that enables that.
What an odd suggestion. Git follows the Unix philosophy of being designed to do one thing and do it well (concurrent version control). Building an issue tracker and more directly into it just doesn't make sense.
Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.