Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derekp7 | Hacker News Reader

This post is so apropos for me (at least the title is) -- I'm perfectly fine with the Git part of github, but was struggling with the other parts of it. For example, trying to figure out how to make a versioned release. The download link they provide gets you the latest version from the repository. Took me a bit of searching and looking at other projects to realize that if you tag a release, it can make that available too.

But now trying to get that to show up in the project page (using their auto page generator) -- I ended up having to hand edit the html code, because I wanted the web page to have a list of specific releases. But even their source download link isn't fully intuitive. For example, mine shows up as "https://github.com/derekp7/snebu/archive/1.0.tar.gz, but it downloads a file called "snebu-1.0.tar.gz".

Oh, and to get the readme file to utilize their markdown, you have to call it reamde.md, instead of readme.txt. And I'm looking for where my users can leave feedback or discuss things, other then opening an issue in the issue tracker. But they don't have any mailing lists or forums (I guess most projects set up a separate forum, and link to it from the readme.md file or the gh-pages page).

What I'd like to see is a document going over the entire lifecycle of all the features offered through github, including documenting the standard practices for items that they don't provide (such as the forums thing). Anyone got any pointers?

Re: releases; GiHub used to have a cool feature that was removed* (and I deeply miss): they removed the file uploads.

* https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

You know, the code distribution can be different to the code you have in the repo (git archive != python setup.py sdist).

The uploads functionality wasn't perfect (I had to make the dist package, upload it), but it did work for me.

One alternative for the uploads is to make an orphan branch similar to gh-pages, populate it with your tar.gz file contents, tag it, then delete the branch. It will show up like a normal tagged download without having extra messy branches in your repo.

Well, of course you need to give the markdown extension to files which should be rendered as such. How else is Github supposed to know which files are markdown?

Github Pages is strictly for hosting static files. Thus, it's not meant for discussion between users. You're better of renting a VPS and hosting your project's website on it.

Yes, i understand the logic behind that, but had a difficult time finding the specific extention documented. That was just a recent example for illustration. What I'm trying to find is a full user manual for github. Not little tidbits scattered all over. Does that exist, and I'm just not finding it? I just keep feeling I'm missing a lot of functionality somewhere. Or maybe im expecting it to be a full alternative to something like Sourceforge when it isn't intended to be. Thanks.

A complete introduction to Git can be found at http://learn.github.com/p/intro.html. I know you mentioned that you're comfortable with Git, but some of the information there may be of some use.

GitHub has a series of help articles, which could be regarded as a manual of sorts. They're at https://help.github.com/

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