tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:/tag/githubhas_many :through - github2008-04-10T14:30:00-07:00tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:Article/1072008-04-10T14:30:00-07:002008-04-11T06:25:56-07:00GitHubba-hubbaJosh Susser<p>If you hadn't heard, <a href="http://www.github.com/">GitHub</a> had their public launch today. Congratulations to Chris, Tom and PJ on such an awesome product. I'm sure there's a bright future there.</p>
<p>I keep getting surprised by how different using GitHub is for me. Last week someone I never met or had even heard of found my <a href="http://github.com/joshsusser/migration_concordance/">migration_condordance</a> repo and submitted a fixes for two bugs. It wasn't quite as big a thrill as my first kiss, but I sure got more of a rush from that than from seeing <em>Beowulf</em> in 3-D IMAX. On the other hand, when I saw someone else stopped watching my repo I was actually a bit sad. Yes, this is geek social networking with both value and impact.</p>
<p>You've probably heard that the Ruby on Rails is moving the official repo to GitHub. <s>It's not active as of this writing, but give it a few hours.</s> It's now active at <a href="http://github.com/rails/rails">http://github.com/rails/rails</a>. I'm looking forward to seeing what this does to the contribution process. I expect there could be a rich ecosystem of forks of Rails where you can see a bunch of variations integrated into a consistent whole. A lot of folks keep what is effectively a fork of Rails, but it's often in the form of a collection of monkey patches. Using git means that those patches can be managed more effectively, and even made available to the public in a form that can be easily consumed. Then it becomes much easier to evaluate whether a change has enough support to justify including it in Rails core - just see how many people are actually <em>using</em> the change, instead of merely of the opinion that it might be useful. I don't know how to track how many people are using a repo that way, but I'm sure someone will think of something - maybe just a count of how many clones were made or tarballs were downloaded.</p>
<p>At any rate, today feels like some kind of milestone. Or perhaps a furlongstone.</p><p>If you hadn't heard, <a href="http://www.github.com/">GitHub</a> had their public launch today. Congratulations to Chris, Tom and PJ on such an awesome product. I'm sure there's a bright future there.</p>
<p>I keep getting surprised by how different using GitHub is for me. Last week someone I never met or had even heard of found my <a href="http://github.com/joshsusser/migration_concordance/">migration_condordance</a> repo and submitted a fixes for two bugs. It wasn't quite as big a thrill as my first kiss, but I sure got more of a rush from that than from seeing <em>Beowulf</em> in 3-D IMAX. On the other hand, when I saw someone else stopped watching my repo I was actually a bit sad. Yes, this is geek social networking with both value and impact.</p>
<p>You've probably heard that the Ruby on Rails is moving the official repo to GitHub. <s>It's not active as of this writing, but give it a few hours.</s> It's now active at <a href="http://github.com/rails/rails">http://github.com/rails/rails</a>. I'm looking forward to seeing what this does to the contribution process. I expect there could be a rich ecosystem of forks of Rails where you can see a bunch of variations integrated into a consistent whole. A lot of folks keep what is effectively a fork of Rails, but it's often in the form of a collection of monkey patches. Using git means that those patches can be managed more effectively, and even made available to the public in a form that can be easily consumed. Then it becomes much easier to evaluate whether a change has enough support to justify including it in Rails core - just see how many people are actually <em>using</em> the change, instead of merely of the opinion that it might be useful. I don't know how to track how many people are using a repo that way, but I'm sure someone will think of something - maybe just a count of how many clones were made or tarballs were downloaded.</p>
<p>At any rate, today feels like some kind of milestone. Or perhaps a furlongstone.</p>