When people hear about a new product they often ask if it is any good. A Hacker News user once wrote: “Starting immediately, all raganwald projects will have a ‘Is it any good?’ section in the readme, and the answer shall be ‘yes’.”
I may have to adapt that idea, but changing the answer of course.
One difference between gitlab and bitbucket/github is that gitlab isn’t only available as SASS through their own site. It’s also available as a software package you can run locally: https://about.gitlab.com/install/
So there can be some confusion between gitlab the service and gitlab the product.
And you don’t need to use any of those services to use git. We actually use self-hosted gits for the websites we develop where each site is a git repo and we just sync to the live version over ssh. (it’s a bit more complex than that but the details get kind of complex fast.) But the services to make it a lot easier to share and collaborate with larger groups and the world at large.
Yes, I always assumed that gitlab was a product you installed on your own WAN which is why I was puzzled to see it mentioned here. I suppose it’s inevitable that, like WordPress and WordPress.com, it ends up being a product with an associated hosting service.
As for git, I often use it locally because it gives me a way of reversing my inevitable cloddish errors. Need to edit /etc/${SCARYTEXTFILE} ? Git is there to hold your hand while you crash and burn, and will leave a handy trail for you to recover the file afterwards. Too bad about your /home partition, eh? Git can help you with that.
I’v used them all. And for personal use gitlab wins, it’s not even close.
If you wan’t the project be open and available then of course github is great for that.
Reading the comments, it looks like most people assume Github is paid or public only as it always was.
But since Microsoft purchased Github, they made private repos free: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/
I have currently 19 private repos on my free Github account
For personal private use, git comes installed on most Linux distributions, no server required.
To get started just type: man gittutorial (also available online on kernel.org )
It explain the use of the basic commands:
It’s a lot easier to get started than I had gotten the impression from reading other documentation.
For personal revision control, that handful of commands can get you pretty far.
You don’t even have to plan for it.
You already have a Kosmo-Module project directory?
Just do the following:
cd Kosmo-Module
git init
git add .
git commit
And your stuff is now under revision control.
Just edit files and git commit them regularly.
EDIT: Of course you have to do your own backups yourself as nothing is stored “in the cloud” for you this way, but you are doing backups regularly anyways, right? Right?!
I use git for code at work and SVN for schematic and large binary files. A centralized repo is better than a distributed repo for big binary blobs like images, STEP files, and schematics. But, use what you know! You will probably not notice any difference until you have a lot of files.