Well for one, we don't worry about the server git is on
going down
github has been down for far longer in the past four years than the server where I keep my repositories, which has only been offline for maintenance reboot. This is my main reason actually for not wanting to put anything commercial on github; the performance benefits are just gravy on top of that.
they have a great "view changes" feature for comparison
between repos, this help sort out why master was ahead of
development by some commits the other day
It sounds like you're referring to branches, not repositories. `git diff` handles this very well for me and is far more flexible. Even on an open source project I host on github, I'm going to use `git diff` to perform this operation.
ease of sending links to diff to non-technical people
that just want to see a text change was made, etc.
Yeah. And I could easily set up a box with postfix, an IMAP daemon a webmail and a spam filter.
But in my personal case it's a waste of my time compared to just using GMail. Obviously that's not true for everyone and I'm not trying to say it is. Nor do I thing the pro-Github folks in this thread are trying to say github is always the answer.
It is simpler and easier to set up a new git repository on a webserver than it is to do the same on github. It is also simpler to set up post-receive hooks and the like when you want them to do sophisticated things. The ramp-up to get git working on a webserver is this: Do you have SSH connection? Are your contributors' umask okay? To compare this to the complexities of configuring good SMTP/IMAP/POP with SSL shows that you don't know very much about any of these matters, or that you are not thinking seriously about them.
P.S. I find great benefits of hosting my own email, chiefly, once again, that I can guarantee that my mail service is working, and that I get my mail very quickly. gmail has been offline more in the past four years than my mail server. I also don't have to worry about password resets, a webmail UI constantly in flux, or Gmail constantly hitting me up for my mobile phone number.
I see your point, but for many people they don't want to setup their own webserver. Not everyone has the same skillsets - and often they don't want the hassle of troubleshooting their server when it does go down.
If you already have a webserver, even just a ~/public_html folder (something very common for people at universities, for example, to have), anywhere on the Internet that you have SSH access to push content to (and honestly: I would find it highly unlikely that your average developer does not have at least one), you can push a local repository to it with a single shell command: you just push to a folder on the server as if it exists, it will be created, and the folder can then be used via the web server for anonymous git clones and pulls. As in: if GitHub requires even a single additional step of "type in the name of a repository into a website" it has already far lost; so no: it doesn't seem even remotely reasonable to insinuate that oinksoft's comment is "a joke". If you don't already have a working web server (again: seriously?) then setting up an account that has one in this day and age is really not going to be much harder than getting an account at github, and once you have one it will again be simpler per repository to push.
I'd argue that the "average developer" has probably never used SSH, or so rarely that it's practically as if they don't know what it is beyond a way to type commands into a remote machine. Think FTP. That is something that would be a little safer to assume that an "average developer" would have.
I have to consciously remember that a lot of the development tools I use on a day-to-day basis (ssh, git, emacs, rails, django, js unit testing, diff, etc), while commonly discussed on HN, are not actually the norm in "the rest of the world".
FTPing a pile of PHP files, versioned using .zip files, and merged by hand without diff tools seems to be the "average developer" when I start looking around a bit.
