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Comment by hp50g | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I do. Unfortunately it doesn't support your average corporate workflow and requirements of centralisation very well (it can do it but its not its primary use case). The desktop tooling is also crappy and hard to get non-code-monkeys using it. We use svn for documentation as well and our windows users quite happily edit word documents collaboratively on top of it.

SVN is actually better for us.

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Since when, using SVN allows you to edit microsoft Word documents... collaboratively?

I sense a bunch of downvotes coming for me in 3..2..1..

TortoiseSVN and Word+Excel have great change integration. You can merge word documents quite happily.

I stand baffled. Always thought Word and Excel files were binary files, thus almost un-mergeable in any useful - collaborative - manner. Sorry for my misunderstanding.

AFAIK word provides it's own diff tools which can be hooked by version control systems.

I think your issue is, you don't understand DVCS very well.

I do. I'm a long term user of mercurial for my own projects. I was also an advocate for moving to git in our organisation, but it doesn't fit.

One hammer is not necessarily good for all nails.

I'm sorry with the poor assumption... But you started this thread with "Github downtime is the reason we can't use git internally" <--- This illustrates either you don't understand git very well. OR you don't understand logic very well.... I was giving you the benefit of the doubt on the latter... :\

How, exactly, do you propose the following things to work if GitHub is down?

- Pull requests and code reviews

- Automatic integration builds of all checkins

- Commit notifications via e-mail

- Browsing of sources via the web

- Sharing of code between collaborating users

DVCS may be "distributed", but organizations and user collaboration are not.

... None of that stuff requires github.

How about also have the code on bitbucket (if you want to use flashy web services). Chances of them going down at the same time seems remote.

Actually its more likely that they're both unavailable than one is I.e our pipe goes down. Another reason to do it in house.

None of that stuff is exclusive to github.

The would work exactly how they work with the Linux kernel, for which git was created.

Yes, via centralized mailing lists and collaboration infrastructure.

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