[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.

[lucideer]

I think I understand your point. And I disagree.

> I’m saying that services that are like GitHub are ubiquitous because they save time

Popular services are ubiquitous for many reasons, some of them based on actual value, some of them based on perceived value, and others based on things orthogonal to day-to-day value like organisational inertia, aspects of network effects, etc. They may save time for you. Others may have chosen the service for different reasons: either wise or ill-advised.

> easily 5hrs a week

Subjective. But also, more importantly, subject to error based on your metrics. How have you quantified time saved by Github?

> creating them anew would cost more than those services do if you buy them as a user (gitlab enterprise or github “pro”)

This is, I think, where you're missing my point. Of course creating them anew would cost more than those services do. That's not the question being asked here though. What's being discussed is whether using Github will save you time over not-using Github.

Not using Github does not necessarily mean maintaining an equivalent service itself, because that presupposes that the features provided by Github save you time as is. The only reason you would host an equivalent service yourself is if they definitely do, which isn't a certainty.

[dijit]

This is..

.. satire?

What do you propose as an alternative to github/gitlab/code hosting?

I can break down reasons for github/gitlab as a service being aggressive value, however I would be shot down with "but that's not reality, you should compare competitors!" as it was in this comment chain... So I'd love for you to pontificate on the point you're making.

[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.