The Perfect Weapon

Here are some of the things the GitHub team totally nailed:

• Projects do not get a homepage. At SourceForge and its clones, you get this lame default page that you have to maintain, even if you don’t want it. At this point in history, I think we can assume that projects will already have a homepage, no matter how small.

• Bi-directional connections between parent projects and forks. This lowers the barrier to entry for a typical open source patch tenfold. A simple idea that seems obvious in retrospect.

• Having user URLs so close to the toplevel makes it trivial to remember the path to a particular project without searching. Imagine github.com/users/wilson/projects/213?name=foo and give thanks for what we have instead.

• No need to fear github turning ‘evil’ or shutting off all the servers. Every clone of the project is another complete backup, unlike the nightmare of Subversion.

• A ‘forker’ can trivially request an upstream developer’s attention via a pull request.

• Optimized for storing and displaying source code, rather than downloading binaries.

There is a little bit of pain here during the ‘transition period’ as github takes over the open source world; existing projects will have to either enforce a single technique, or start checking two different places for patches. Presumably better Trac / Lighthouse integration with GitHub is forthcoming, however.

I recently had the opportunity to spin off a fork of RSpec in order to work on better Rubinius support; thus far the process has been painless for both me and the RSpec team. Nice work, GitHub.