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Comment by loudthing | Hacker News Reader

"When I want to see what has been happening on SQLite, I visit the timeline and in a single screen I see a summary of the latest changes, on all branches. In a few clicks, I can drill down as much detail as I want. I can even do this from a phone.

GitHub and GitLab offer nothing comparable. The closest I have found is the network, which is slow to render (unless it is already cached), does not offer nearly as much details, and scarcely works at all on mobile."

This is a valid point. I've always wondered why it seems Github goes out of its way to hide the typical commit tree navigation that so many git clients support (Sourcetree, gitk, tortoisegit, etc).

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If SQLite used Git, they could self-host a more reasonable web view of the repository using GitView or CGIT.

> why it seems Github goes out of its way to hide the typical commit tree navigation

Wild guess: because those kinds of features requires the back end to execute Git implementation code which can invoke some pretty expensive cases. Imagine that across thousands and thousands of repositories being accessed at once.

They want to steer the user toward doing a clone and doing their own in-depth drilling on the copy.

CGIT caches for better performance; but caches require extra storage and some sure-fire expiry mechanism so it doesn't grow and grow. Caching things for internet rando visitors doesn't seem like a good idea.

> because those kinds of features requires the back end to execute Git implementation code which can invoke some pretty expensive cases

Github has the blame view of files, which is much more expensive.

An ex colleague uses GitHub Enterprise at work, and he reports running into some issues that are never seen on GitHub proper. Most notably, network view of repos and GitHub pages experience extended downtime. Wonder how GitHub manages the uptime of these features for millions of repos because I never see these fail there.

I will note that some features actually don't seem to scale reliably on GitHub proper. For example, the profile pages of prodigious commiters tend to time out on. As an example of one that pretty much always does it, check out https://github.com/scala-steward (not on mobile).

> Imagine that across thousands and thousands of repositories being accessed at once.

Not the idea of a decentralised system, is it?

No; github isn't decentralized, except in the sense of whatever load balancing they do across their server farm.

At some point in the last year I stopped being able to find the “search for a file” function on GitHub’s mobile site. On the desktop website you can hit “t” from a repo page to quickly search for a file by filename. The mobile website used to have a button labeled “Jump to file” or similar, but now I can’t find that functionality anywhere.

I have definitely felt this pain when navigating i to the past to investigate the origin and evolution of changes.

Yes! I find it odd. Maybe they just expect you to use one of those clients if that's what you want to see?

That is a good point. I know now when I visit a project on Github that I am seeing the latest version of all files, but that is only because I'm already aware of how git works.

Depending on what the default branch in GitHub is set to you might not be viewing the "latest" version of the files. i.e. the default branch is `main` but all development happens on a long-lived `dev` branch that is only merged into `main` once a month.

Someone who doesn't know what version control is will also just assume they are seeing the one and only version of the files.

It is because the features on github.com directly correlate to a git feature.

Curious: What git feature does Network mirror then?

git log?

Hmm, GitHub Network is much more than log. I think "GitHub Commits" page mirrors git log.

Network is more like `git log --graph --decorate --oneline`. Still git log, just in a slightly different format.

`git log --graph --decorate --oneline` is specific to a branch of a repository. Github Network shows the relationship between forks. It is similar but really the question answered by it is "what and where is the work being done" and "what is the relationship between work being done and this repository I'm looking at". It sucks that Network is buried, I think it should be much more accessible.

Eg https://github.com/sindresorhus/delay/network tells me that this work is being maintained actively, but most forks are not merging back. Another one might tell me work on the main fork is stalled, and many users are now doing PRs against a fork of the original.

Maybe git log --graph --decorate --oneline --all then? Github implements forks as just fancy branches in the same repo. Adding the all param includes all branches.

> Network is more like `git log --graph --decorate --oneline`

... across all forks, which makes the UI much more cluttered than it needs to be. What if you are only interested in commits in your own repo?

Github really does seem to lack a clean equivalent of `git log --graph`.

Under the hood, “forks” are really just fancy branches. So realistically that would also be git log

so where’s the one that correlates to git log —graph ?

Click 'commits' on any repo and you will see the graph.

Where does it show the branches and merges?

That would be the network view.

that only shows you inter-repository activity, not the branches within a repo.

that would be worthless for most people, and for the sqlite authors, who'd surely have a million people pressing the 'fork' button.

it also isn't what anyone in the thread, or post, were asking for.

It’s weird if GitHub doesn’t have that. Gitlab does. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/network/main

all i've ever seen is something which displays a single branch, and does not contain the graph structure information present in git log --graph.

perhaps you'd be so kind as to provide a link to a page on github which demonstrates the same graph structure?

I’ve never found that either. I try to limit my interactions with GitHub to copying the URL to clone and doing pull requests. GitHub has the same relationship to Git as OverLeaf has to LaTeX: a layer of excrement smeared over and defacing a beautiful program. The saddest thing is that much of the current generation of programmers think that GitHub is Git.

Ah yes, pull requests and adjacent functionality is my favorite part of git.

There is, in fact, an analogous Git feature: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-request-pull

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