While working on my Gliffy Ruby Client, I decided I wanted a better way to describe the command line interface. Finding nothing that was any good, I whipped up GLI and refactored my Giffy command line client to use it. While doing that, I finally got annoyed at technoweenie’s version of rest-client, and also noticed that the original author’s had totally changed interfaces. So, clicked the nice “Fork” button on GitHub to get my own copy and fixed the issues. But that’s not the cool part. The cool part is that I can change my Gliffy gem to depend on my rest-client implementation and, viola! No special instructions, no hacks, no nothing. This is a really cool thing that would be difficult with Subversion, impossible without RubyGems, and downright painful without GitHub.
Posts Tagged ‘github’
Git, GitHub, forking: the new hotness
Thursday, February 5th, 2009GitHub does it again; another killer feature
Thursday, December 18th, 2008GitHub Pages (explained here) is yet another awesome feature of GitHub. You can publish, via git, arbitrary web content (even piping it through Jekyll for Textile markup and syntax highlighting). They have been keeping a tremendous momentum of late; introducing new features on a regular basis. I hope they keep it up. GitHub is, IMO, crushing SourceForge and Google Code in terms of simplicity, ease-of-use, and overall functionality.
Better open-source hosting: SourceForge is looking weak
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008I currently host my Vim Javadoc doclet on SourceForge and every time I have to deal with it, it’s just a monumental pain. The documentation is insanely long and detailed, the website looks horribly out of date and cruddy, and when compared to stuff like GitHub and Lighthouse, it’s almost embarrassing how difficult it is to deal with and how bad the UI is (despite my best efforts, it still insists that the featured download is the vimdoc samples and not the doclet itself. WTF?).
I’m already hosting the code in GitHub and just moved my tickets to Lighthouse. The only thing left is where to host binary downloads and static assets. For RESTUnit, I’m using Google Code, which is pretty easy to deal with (about a zillion times simpler and easier than SourceForge), however it has no facility for hosting arbitrary HTML. Currently, I’m just using my website for static assets.
While I do like the new Web-2.0 way of doing things (one site like GitHub really focusing on source, another like Lighthouse just does ticketing, etc. and they integrate via web services), I’m not sure where the best place is to host downloads and static assets. I would need programmatic access and some liberal download/diskspace quotas for sure. It would also be nice to be able to connect to other services, for example generate a changelog based on commits or tickets closed since the last release.
