YUI2 and YUI3 now join YUIDoc on GitHub.

Welcome! You can read the blog announcement with all the details.

Henrik has a great article explaining why and how to display Git’s dirty state status (along with the branch, of course) in your bash prompt.

Here’s his Gist:

topfunky prefers a skull and bones for his dirty state indicator. zsh code here

Thanks guys!

Dustin is on fire. His newest trick? GitHub Sync. Use it to track a user’s GitHub projects. All of them.

Once [the sync] finishes, you will have all of my current public repos in /tmp/dustinatgithub and if you run it periodically, you’ll see new repos I add appear while the existing ones are being updated.

Do yourself a favor and subscribe to Dustin’s Atom feed already.

Until now, whenever you pushed a modified gemspec to a repository that is gem enabled, we rebuilt it, no questions asked. This was convenient if you needed to fix a broken gem version, but had the very undesirable side effect of making it very easy to accidentally overwrite a good gem release with a broken development version.

We recently changed the system so that only gemspec pushes that contain a bumped version will be built. This will prevent accidental gem clobbering and we can now guarantee that when you release a specific gem version, that version will never change. The downside is that if you botch a release, you’ll need to bump the version in order to get a fix out. This is a small price to pay to ensure that good gems don’t get overwritten by bad gems.

...we rolled out some big changes. Okay, not all of you were asleep. But some of you were.

For one thing, the site should be much faster. Every page.

Second of all, you may notice our new Ajaxified tree browsing.

Commit information is now fetched via Ajax to help alleviate stress on our file system. As our caches fill up you should see the “Loading…” message less and less.

Enjoy, and please let us know if you run across any issues. These are some pretty massive under-the-hood changes and we expect a few kinks.

Update Another fun graph:

And we’re back! Rebase went on a bit of hiatus, but it has returned in full force for 2009. Read on for the latest and greatest coming out of GitHub!

Stats Breakdown

Stats are still on vacation, hopefully they’ll return soon.

Featured Project

metro is a Python driven tool that can easily and flexibly assemble Gentoo Linux releases. Used for the Funtoo project, it claims to be more extensible, consistent, and organized than its competitor, the Gentoo Catalyst. Metro allows easy configuration of builds for your own system and architecture with just the tools you want. It also has some awesome wiki articles on how to get started, make your own custom builds, and explaining its various features. It’s a great example of how the Linux community is growing and thriving here on GitHub.

Notably New Projects

irccat is a Java IRC bot that is pretty much self-aware. It can read incoming data from a specific ip and port as well as execute commands, scripts, and world domination from inside a channel. Usually this kind of messaging takes a lot of free time or shell scripting, but this project makes it easy to set up and get started writing your own custom actions. What’s neater is that Last.fm uses irccat for everything from announcing commits, releasing caches on their website, to feeding security camera images into their development channels.

vimeo API implementations are usually a dime a dozen, but this one is definitely one to watch. Built on HTTParty, wrapped up with Jeweler, this gem provides both a simple and more granular way of accessing Vimeo’s API. It’s definitely useful, be it in a new Shoes app that can play videos from the site or if you’re looking to integrate their services into your own projects. It’s also a great example project if you’re looking to implement your own API based gem and need a good starting point.

erlfs is bring cloud computing down the ground by writing their own distributed file system in Erlang. Scaling linearly is the project’s goal: the more computers, the more capacity, throughput, and reliable it gets. That’s awesome, but how does it work? Well, it doesn’t exactly yet. If you’re interested in learning Erlang or contributing to a fledgling project with an awesome idea, fork away.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

xdev hosts the PHP and ActionScript work of both Joshua Rudd and Charles Mastin. This team offers some of the most prolific work in their respective languages on GitHub and truly shows how shops can develop their products in an open source world. Their primary projects include two PHP CMSs, blackbird, a relational data management system that’s good at scaffolding and brickhouse, a seemingly Rails inspired app. They also have some helpful ActionScript helpers along with a flexible mediaplayer that has plenty of demos for you to play with.

If you’re wondering how to get on Rebase, it’s simple! Read the Guide!

Nerd Merit Badges has their first badge on the way, and guess who it is.

That’s right: our very own Octocat!

You can enter your email address or follow their Twitter to find out when the Octobadge is ready.

Neat.

Update Hardcore forker Dustin Sallings has some more punch card fun.

We won! Thanks for voting everyone, we (obviously) could not have done this without you.

Here’s the full list of winners. Thanks for a great 2008!

We just rolled out a security fix that puts all wikis under the wiki.github.com subdomain. This means they can execute arbitrary JavaScript (like scriptaculous does, or maybe the Lighthouse Badge) without getting access to your cookies.

Private wikis do not allow JavaScript for similar security reasons.

In December, the Gnome team did a survey of its contributors about which DVCS they might be interested in moving to in 2009. The GNOME DVCS Survey Results are now out and the raw data is available, which some of the community has started analyzing.

GNOME contributors with an SVN account who had an SSH key installed on their account were invited to fill in the survey. A total of 1083 account holders were invited, and 579 filled in the survey.

It had a ranked choice component, where you could choose your first, second, third etc choice for which VCS you preferred to use.

Elijah Newren of the Gnome project put up his Gnome DVCS Survey analysis, which is really interesting. Among the various graphs that he has is this one showing the average weighted rank of each VCS by different demographic groups of which VCSs they knew or used:

No real surprise here as far as the favorite goes — users who are familiar with or regularly use a certain system tend to prefer that system. However, git enjoys positive support in all cases and at least comes in second? I found that somewhat surprising. I thought it would get a average ranking lower than 3 by those familiar with or using bzr/hg — much as bzr, svn, and hg did among those familiar with or regularly using git.

What was interesting to me there is that of people who are familiar with or regularly use git, any other system seemed to be equivalent as a second choice – they would as soon stick with SVN as switch to bzr, and would slimly prefer either over using hg. That struck me as really strange – I like Git more than anything, but I certainly like Hg more than SVN. Even stranger to me is the bzr users, who rank bzr their first choice, then often Git a close second and then Hg last, again after staying with SVN.

Shawn McCance also did an interesting analysis of first picks by which systems users were familiar with – this doesn’t take the secondary votes into account, just which system got #1 for each demographic group:

• Of everyone who knows bzr and git, they choose git 2:1
• Of everyone who knows hg and git, they choose git nearly 2:1 – (1.8:1)
• Users who know all three choose git or bzr mostly evenly over hg
• Users who actively use git and hg divided their first choice basically evenly between them (though the sample size is pretty small)

Furthermore, even the less technical users seemed to prefer Git over the other systems. The only group that did not was the ‘documenter’s, but in that case the survey size was 4 (out of 579). This is interesting to me because of the nature of this group – it’s not the ruby/rails or linux kernel sort of group – I would have assumed Hg to have gotten a much better showing, but it seems to have done worse than sticking with SVN in most cases.

In any case, it’s interesting that Git is gaining ground pretty significantly in all corners of the open source world and that when developers use Git and compare it to the competition, Git is very often the favorite.

A few hours ago, Petr Baudis, the man who put up git.or.cz and repo.or.cz and has worked on TopGit and a ton of other useful Git projects, just redirected the git.or.cz main site to git-scm.com, a fork of the git.or.cz site that I started a few months ago.

His email to the Git mailing list reads thusly:

Hi,
thanks for the changes, Scott!
Based on the previous feedback of other developers and my last 
review of git-scm.com, I have changed git.or.cz to redirect to 
git-scm.com.
The wiki is still hosted at the original place for the time being, 
as well as the man/ gitbot redirect. To reach the original 
manpage, use https://git.or.cz/index.html.
Have a fun year,
--
Petr "Pasky" Baudis

So, I’m now the maintainer of the main Git website. If you have ideas for features, please let me know, or even better – fork the project, make the changes and send a pull request.

2008 has been an incredible year for many of us, both here are GitHub and within the fantastic community that has bloomed around us and that we depend on.

I wanted to take a minute to expound on what has happened at GitHub over the last 12 months and what we envision over the next year and more.

A Look Back

First, where we’ve been. GitHub launched in beta almost exactly a year ago from code that Tom and Chris wrote together as a side project. The first private beta repository was created on January 12th. After a little over a month, PJ had joined the effort and the site had reached 1,000 repositories. In contrast, today we have over 50,000 public repositories.

In April, we got out of beta, were joined by the Rails project, and hit 1 million events. In June, I (Scott) started working on the site as a contractor, beginning with the Gist website. Tekkub started customer support in July. In August, Tom quit his day job and started GitHubbing it full time and in October, I formally joined the team.

Since we’ve all been working on it full time, just over the last six months, we’ve released Gists, Commit Comments, Subversion Importing, Code Search, Traffic Graphs, the Fork Queue, Pages, and more.

Over the course of the last year, we’ve had over 280 blog posts, 5,000 commits to the GitHub codebase, and dozens of speaking engagements. The website itself has had over :

• 27,000,000 events generated
• 40,000 users join
• 33,000 public repositories created
• 17,000 of those forked
• 40,000 gists created

It has been an awesome (and busy) year.

A Look Forward

CNet is reporting about how things are good for open source in 2009. We couldn’t agree more, and we hope that GitHub can help the community grow.

In the coming year, we aim to continue building tools that help developers, and especially the open source community, be as productive as possible. This means providing the tools that save maintainers and contributors time, so they can use it to do what they should be doing: writing awesome code. GitHub is trying to make every part of project management and maintenance easy for you – we feel we’ve come a long way, and that there is a long way to go.

Our second main goal is to make Git easier to learn, use and adopt. We really believe that Git is the best SCM tool out there, and furthermore that learning it and using it well makes most developers so much more efficient in what they do that it’s an important thing to evangelize and train for. So, we’re constantly trying to rethink how to make it easier to learn Git (from beginning to advanced stuff) and how to make the argument of why switching to Git is so helpful as simply and succinctly as possible.

The last major GitHub goal is helping you get Git into the corporate environment. We remember from the early Rails days how difficult it can be to break a new and efficient technology into the place you work, so we want to help make that as simple as possible.

We look forward to the coming year with you, and thank you for making the last year possible. Happy new year, everyone!

The GitHub Team
(Chris, Tom, PJ and Scott)

Since GitHub will be in Europe at the end of March (23-29), if any of our European friends are interested in Git training, please let us know so we can stop by while we’re there.

Normally we charge for transportation costs which would normally be pretty expensive to get out there, but if you want us to stop by and help your company learn Git, we’ll already be nearby. Contact us through the Training form if you are interested.

This March, GitHub is coming to Europe. We’re planning on hitting the ApacheCon for a few days in Amsterdam to meet some of our continental friends, then flying up to Edinburgh for Scotland on Rails, which I’ll be presenting at.

(I already have my Utilikilt and Bagpipe Hero t-shirt packed)

 

So, if anyone will be in Amsterdam March 23-26 or at Scotland on Rails and is interested in a little Git Together, let us know so we can figure out where we can all meet.