GitHub Goodness

I’ve been developing software for a little while now and have build up a few repositories for my applications, with all my open source ones being available publicly. Sometimes people find some of my applications useful and I get thanks, patches or PHP hate mail. :-)

For a long time I’ve been using SVN for storing my code, along with Indefero as my project tracker at projects.jethrocarr.com. It’s a good combination, very similar to Google Code in many respects and generally a lightweight application with a good core feature set.

The only issue has been that with the explosion in popularity of Git and the socalisation of coding with sites such as GitHub, users have gotten tired of the “diff and email patch” approach when submitting contributions and want to take advantage of shiner features such as pull requests which make contributes much easier, as well as more recognisable to others.

Whilst I’m keen to do as much as possible to make it easier to get commits and users, switching to any one particular hosted provider is of concern to me – whilst they may be popular now, will they still be as popular in 10 years time? (Remember SourceForge anyone?).

The solution is that undergoing the pain to migrate existing repositories from SVN to Git (a lot more messing around than you might think) opens up the ability to pull and push to multiple repositories, which means that I now have all my open source projects on GitHub and in addition have my own hosted Indefero server which has a full copy of all my code.
This allows me to engage with users on GitHub, whilst still maintaining control of my own issue tracker and full copies of my repositories and data. It also avoids users from setting up their own GitHub repositories of my projects and having them confused as official ones – with my own in place, it’s a starting place for forks to occur from.
I’m going to trial this for a few months – if it all works well, I’m going to take a look at adding in easy support to Indefero to create and push/pull from a GitHub repository automatically as part of creating a new project. And if needed I could add additional Git providers to mirror to as well (eg BitBucket) should other popular hives of activity appear.