[dijit]

I know a company which I will not name, that was passing source-code around with a USB drive.

Their version of an SVN lock was basically 'who has the USB stick right now'. And while this is an absurd and extreme example (and a true one, crucially) you can't deny that github would have saved those developers countless hours.

Maybe even enough hours to pay a person full time to manage something on-site: but that's why this topic (and the OP's site) is interesting, how do we quantify it?

[jonfw]

You're supposed to compare a service against it's competition, not the least productive thing you could possibly imagine in it's stead.

If you walked into a car dealership and the best thing they could say is "It's WAY better than walking!"- that wouldn't make a great pitch.

[dijit]

This is such a bad faith comment I don't know where to begin.

Of course no reasonable person is saying that you have to compare against the worst thing, that's stupid- I was simply stating that I've seen things that have easily quantifiable returns.

I'm comparing it against the 'nothing' that I would otherwise have.

If you're comparing something then that's yours to compare, and this is a tool for doing that.

if you're not running github or gitlab, what are you running?

Maybe SVN+jira? or gogs? or gitea? what about teamcity?

I'm not going to break down the cost savings and expenses of each of those, I'm just saying we're all already using services that have saved us many hours a week compared to those services not existing in any form.

Its up to you to debate the 'many forms' a service takes, and remember that server hosting and human time is not free, so something self-hosted that requires some hours of time to maintain needs to be cost controlled for.

[mattmanser]

How is it bad faith? You're wrong, he's right.

You can run your own code repository, people did for decades, and took backups home. These days you could just send one to A.N.Y.Other cloud service.

It doesn't take 5 hours per week, and if it takes 5 hours per year I'd be surprised.

[dijit]

It’s bad faith because it speaks to the content of what I said and not the point.

I am one of those people who managed code hosting repositories: but it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at all, and to remove all of the other integrated features too? No. Absurd.

And anyway. The point was making is that we are already paying for services that save us a lot of time- they are of incredible value, and thus universal.

And yes, you might not spend 5hrs a year on _just_ code hosting but code hosting and web view and merge request portals and issue tracking and so on- should those services not be provided somehow (or be provided by something like jira/swarm etc); would easily cost more than that in time.

Hell, even running gitlab is an hour/w job just ensuring that backups are well tested and CI machines are purged, running updates and so on.

It has a low cost, because it’s just one person doing it, but the overall _point_ was that we already have some services that save us time and the parent was not speaking about them.

[lucideer]

> it’s completely absurd to assume that code hosting was without any cost involved at all

Noone in this thread is arguing this.

Your original post made some statements about services saving time, as matter-of-fact statements that are apparently self-evident. I replied saying that these statements are not necessarily self-evident nor always true.

It's possible that Github saves you 5hrs a week. This doesn't mean you can say that this is obvious and universal.

[dijit]

I’m not sure if you’re intentionally missing my point or if I’m ineffective at communicating it.

I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they save time, easily 5hrs a week- and creating them anew would cost more than those services do if you buy them as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)

You can argue the minutia of “this service” vs “that service” but at the end of the day those suite of things save time.

[projektfu]

Before git and mercurial I used CVS. It’s pretty easy to set up a server if you have ssh or telnet access. For personal things I used RCS because it was integrated nicely in emacs. So I think one needs to at least compare it to those.

RCS had almost no configuration required. It just wasn’t easily shareable. So, going to git costs cycles for personal projects with the hope of a return from better management of sets of changes, etc.