A Few Suggestions To Bring GitHub More Users And Money | Hacker News Reader

A Few Suggestions To Bring GitHub More Users And Money

themarkphillips.com

28 pointsargvzero8 comments

I was hoping this article was going to make the "stop separating account sizes by number of repos instead of, you know, actual usage" point.

Github will get my company's money when they stop doing just that. We have many small, low-traffic repos. We self-host them on a minuscule little box and yet, according to Github, we would be a "Platinum" business account. Say what? $200/mo? The box we have serving them now isn't even worth $200 in total. Back in the Subversion days, of course, it was one repo split into projects to take advantage of SVN's partial checkout ability, but that's not how Git rolls. So instead, it's many small per-project repos.

Bitbucket figured it out: split accounts by number of users, a meaningful "usage" metric. That's sensible. So would be actual resource usage (disk space, bandwidth, etc). It makes no sense to me that we could have a hundred people working on 5 repositories, using tons of space and bandwidth, and that's $25/mo. But a handful of us with a bunch of tiny repos, that's biggest-account-size $200/mo territory.

(It's too bad we're so attached to Git, or else we'd be on Bitbucket and stop waiting for Github to come to their senses).

I'm currently thinking of moving away from github for exactly that reason... I have a lot of small very small traffic repos but it makes no sense for me to pay the bigger account size.

I get along by hosting some of the repos on my own box but I'd really rather centralize everything...

Similar story here. We're trying to cut down the number of servers at work. I looked into suggesting a company-wide move to Git followed by moving our repositories to Github. Right now, I'm the only one on Git.

Then I realized that I'm using 40 repositories. One of those is for reports. Each report should really be in its own repository. Splitting reports would add another 40 repositories.

So we're looking at $200/month just for my repositories. Throw in what the rest of the company would need, and it is cheaper just to keep doing it ourselves.

There certainly are companies for whom paid Github hosting makes sense--the Github guys are not idiots and if no one was buying they surely would have adjusted things already. I just am having trouble figuring out who those companies might be.

We've been tossing some ideas around about more statistics in general at GitHub, but I'd like to point out a lot of these things — number of forks, followers, issues, commits, and so on — are available through the API today. It sounds like it'd be an awesome hack day project for someone to work on, if one were so inclined. :)

Yeah. I forgot to mention in the post that the GH API does make it possible to pull all of these out. But having to write your own service, while fun, is time consuming. I would prefer to have you build in the feature and then pay you for it. Looking forward to where you take the stats :)

I totally agree with the need for more visibility and condensed stats on Github! Once you start trying to follow a larger number of projects, it becomes increasingly difficult to follow what is going on with each project.

This has been a minor related rant of mine across Github projects: a need for project guidelines, similar to http://semver.org/, in terms of having versioned projects, properly tagging those versions, and having a dated changelog summarizing those changes. Projects have different levels of organizational needs at different lifetimes, but having a suggested format/guidelines would help I think, similar to the Readme that Github suggests you make for a project.

I'd like to see a way for people to flag commits as interesting, so that I could look only at the interesting commits for the projects I follow...

...where is the API for stars?

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