Github problems

[EXreaction]

Has anyone else been having difficulties with Github more recently?

I have had serious issues with notifications not working at all in Pull Requests I've created and in other items where I'm supposed to receive notifications. The links to view comments from notifications are also broken more than half the time for me.

I've tried contacting Github staff numerous times to get this issue resolved, but basically, they just tell me that if I create a pull request, I'll receive notifications, and clearly ignore the part where I tell them it does not work.

If this is a common issue, I'd like to discuss moving phpBB to another repository that has a working service and can actually provide support for their own software.

[DavidIQ]

I don't know about moving away from github. We've invested a lot of time and resources into integrating our processes with our various repos there. To throw that away now would mean we would need to change everything we've done regarding repos over the last two years. I can't say much about the PR notifications though other than I've been getting them for the ones I'm subscribed to, which aren't that many.

[Oleg]

My experience with github support:

1. Never received a response to feedback submitted via feedback form on their site.

2. Did receive responses when mailed their support address (support@github?)

3. If your issue is not on their roadmap you can forget about anything being done about it.

Specifically regarding notifications, I gave up on them the last time github "redesigned" them.

[MichaelC]

I got replies from the support one.

As for github notifications, it takes some getting used too but I've never had it 'not work as it should'. If it isn't working email their support who normally replies within a few days.

As for new features, as Oleg said, it won't be getting added (at least not for a while and not unless there is enough demand (although they seem to add features nobody needs/wants a lot).

Again as DavidIQ said, we have invested resources in Github and there simply aren't any big alternatives to Github. It dominates the market. The nearest thing is bitbucket but that is a lot smaller. We wouldn't so much lose the repos content (we can just push it to a different remote location (I have a few private mirrors of a few phpBB repos at bitbucket)) as lose all the pull requests, forks, watchers etc.

[EXreaction]

I've been in contact with support about this issue for the last 8 days just in this last time I complained to their support that this was not working properly. Every time they come back saying something like "if you do what you are telling me you are doing, it should work," or go off talking about something entirely different, but I have been clearly explain to them that it is NOT working.

The nice thing about Git is that it's easy to move providers. If we were to decide to look at moving to another git provider, we can easily do everything there going forward, and still maintain the repository on github until we've cleaned up all the older pull requests and everything (it's just a matter of someone pushing to two repositories after merging for a few months).

[Oleg]

We don't depend that much on github. The biggest benefit of using it is saving people from having to register (yet again) to submit patches.

However, moving to another hosted provider does not guarantee that the new provider won't have similar issues down the road.

[callumacrae]

I've never had a problem with GitHub, and have never found a git hosting provider better than GitHub; I definitely don't agree with moving away from them.

[EXreaction]

However, moving to another hosted provider does not guarantee that the new provider won't have similar issues down the road.

This is very true, but as long as they provide some level of reasonable support, I think we'd be more likely to get further with them if we have problems. There is also always the option of hosting our own git repository, although I do not know what sort of work that would require (but we should research it if we wanted to think about moving away from github.

[naderman]

We definitely don't want to host it ourselves. I would really prefer to move as much of the day-to-day infrastructure work out of our team's responsibility so we don't need to spend as much time on it. Personally I find GitHub a really excellent service with a few minor problems, I don't know of any other similar service that is even close to comparable. So I think we should rather spend our time on other problems.

[EXreaction]

After becoming a bit more aggressive in my email responses I've seemed to finally get a real response from someone. Now at least one issue has been fixed and if I see an instance where the main issue comes up again I'll be documenting it better so they can hopefully fix it.