Hacker News Reader

Comment by binarymax | Hacker News Reader

Missing something? :)

Actually, they use https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 to create and manage Git repos. "libgit2 is a portable, pure C implementation of the Git core methods"

(You can find that listed on the page)

No, GitHub primarily uses regular git on the backend. It powers all fetches and pushes, diffs, and most of the history traversals. Some functionality is provided by libgit2, and it's ever-increasing because libgit2/Rugged is often more natural to call from ruby code (though a lot of it is replacing old Grit code, not git itself).

libgit2 powers much of GitHub's desktop apps, with regular git mostly filling in any functionality still missing from libgit2.

Since libgit2 is not yet feature complete when compared to git core, I'm quite certain that they use both. (For example, libgit2 did not have merge until relatively recently, so they could not be using it to power pull requests.)

Last I heard (couple months ago) it was used for a couple or three pieces of functionality only.

Based on my experience with it (master incredibly stale, not recommended, and the recommended "development" brittle and buggy), that's not surprising at all...

I'm sorry if you've found the development branch to be buggy - we strive for a high-level of stability there, so we'd be very pleased if you would open issues there.

Hey thx for the reply!

I was working closely (via IRC, email) with somebody (I forget whom) who discouraged work on master and suggested "development" -- is that still the case?

The more I delved into git, the more I realized what a large delicate job it seems to be (which is a matter for a different discussion). Regardless -- apologies if I came across to harsh -- I haven't looked at it in months... will re-pull, give it another look.

Good luck w/ the development!!!

No, you did not come across as harsh, your criticism is very accurate. The master branch tracks the latest release and is stable, but unfortunately we do not release with great frequency. We work in the development branch and - while we try to keep it stable - there's not a strong guarantee that it is. Especially when there's ongoing work in an area, it may become somewhat destabilized. This is regrettable but, I hope, understandable.

We should certainly be better about more frequent releases. As it is, we tend to overreach. Thanks for the feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com