> The second you made Github more "SysAdmin friendly" you'd piss off the Programmers. Their egos are too softly stroked by having their name first in the URL.
I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.
Especially with organizations being free (for open source projects at least), I think this usage will increase for github.
As for Zed main argument, I am not sure it is the whole story. I think the launchpad vision is great, but the delivery mostly a failure. The fundamental idea of being able to track downstream bugs in a project sounds really right to me, but launchpad UI is really a big mess: you need a lot of hoop to get the code. Sure, you can do lp:foo for project foo, but few people know bzr, and for a long time, there were numerous issues between different incompatible bzr versions (which have been fixed ever since I think). Forcing people to use bzr has been one cause of failure I think.
I also wonder how much differences can be attributed to how the things came to life: launchpad wanted to do many things from the start, wherease github grew organically.
I don't think the launchpad UI is a mess, if you don't expect to be able to browse code in it. The code browsing is horrible. But, the PPA, branch tracking, bug tracking, and other stuff is great.
I can tell you from personal experience though that github's bug tracking is stupid as all hell. Remember that whole blow-up over my book and people turning one damn bug into a massive flame war? That all happened because I couldn't figure out how to contact the project owner directly and figured the bug was the best way to do it. Little did I know that this would turn into a massive idiot festival with no way to turn the damn bug or emails off.
So, I disagree, launchpad's UI is only broken if you're into code. Github's is broken if you're into projects. Too bad they both can't just make both use cases a nice experience.
i think the odds of the github folks figuring out projects are far greater than the launchpad folks sorting out code (or proper whitespace and padding, for that matter).
that said, i do think that launchpad has some excellent attributes, like a bug tracker that doesn't make me want to defenestrate its author.
I agree that github's bug tracker is quite limited (for some reasons that I cannot pin point, bug tracking seems really hard to do: that's the only example I can think of of a fundamental part of any developer toolbox that has no great open source implementation).
As for launchpad UI, code browsing is indeed the worse part, but I find the whole thing difficult to understand. For example, we created a page for scipy quite some ago (https://launchpad.net/~scipy), and still today, there is no hierarchy in the information. For example, where can I download the software(and I do mean the releases, binaries if possible) ? A lot of the UI space is spent to convince me to subsribe to the project, or give me information that I really do not care about if I just want to use or install the damn thing for my users if I am an admin.
Also, stuff like email UI to subscribe/create bug has been horrible for a long time in launchpad(I have not checked recently, maybe it has been fixed).
That was a joke. You know, those things that make people laugh? In seriousness, it sort of doesn't matter if you're a programmer. Either way works so long as the first thing you get is code. If you're a sysadmin or packager though, that's annoying as hell. You want to just go to /project and not worry about the who's-who of forks.
I don't think that's true. Having the name first is great for uniqueness of the fork, but has been a pain when finding the canonical version. I've seen plenty of projects that adopt the similarly named user account, which is great.