[TheAceOfHearts]

Other tools are developed and maintained to stimulate competition and avoid vendor lock-in. Monocultures are dangerous.

One example of a use-case where GitHub falls short is offline support: you can't take the issue tracker and wiki with you. There are alternative tools such as fossil [0] which have built-in bug tracking and wiki, which is an attractive feature for some people.

[0] https://fossil-scm.org/

[dtech]

I think you're right about the issue tracker, but the wiki is just another git repo [1] that you can checkout, commit and push.

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

[alphaIuGN59]

Yeah.. this is one thing I recently discovered. I use github for my personal projects, and was going to start using the issue tracker to keep track of the bugs. But then I realized that if I do that if I do start tracking bugs on github, I will pretty much be tied to github.

Hopefully gitlab or bitbucket comes up with a solution which enables the owners of the repos to move bugs/issue tracking, which will force github to enable this feature as well.

[TheAceOfHearts]

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware this feature was available on GitHub.

I like fossil because it's all built-in and can be wrapped up in a single file. But it's always great to have more choices available.

[alphaIuGN59]

I agree 100% that monocultures are dangerous. But too much fragmentation is also harmful.

For example, now we have github, gitlab, mercuirial(bitbucket).. I only use the above 3.. but I am sure I can come up with 100 different github/gitlab type companies.

When there is so much fragmentation, it becomes difficult to find project or code reliably. For example, I have seen certain projects on bitbucket, which are awesome (say `ProjectA`) and create a lot of value. But there exists a very similar but differnt project `ProjectB` on github. Probably the author of `ProjectB` had the same problem that the author of `ProjectA` had, but couldnt discover that `ProjectA` already exists.

What open-source software enables you to do is to reuse software, however, if we create so many distinct places where the code resides, it becomes harder and harder to discover that code. Which leads to recreating codebases over and over again.

thanks for pointing out fossil by the way..

[shurcooL]

You can actually access a mirror of Go’s issue tracker (hosted on GitHub) offline by using a tool [0]. Of course, a lot of code was written to make it possible, and it’s a read-only view.

[0] https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/build/maintner/cmd/maintserve