It's a good idea! However, the distributed nature seems to make it sufficiently involved as to preclude a good UI (e.g., issues seem to use hashes), and the simple fact of not being git, regardless of whether it's better than git, is a serious problem for adoption. Bitbucket also learned this the hard way, and even made an April Fool's joke about it before realizing they had to primarily support git.

GitHub being centralized is a feature, not a bug. You don't have issues that exist in some people's repositories and not others. You don't have a question of who has the authoritative repository; either GitHub does, or GitHub doesn't and there's a note saying it's not authoritative. You can support things like have cross-site forks, but it's actively good for UX to have a single authoritative server for the current state of the project. (And you certainly don't want to require cross-site forks, since that would make it far more burdensome to submit a single patch.)

Fossil is so great... only if they picked branding that doesn't mean "something from the far past"...

GitLab and gogs are both fine for getting 80% of the UI, but there are network effects with GitHub: that you're already signed in and have keys and such set up (although OAuth and API cleverness with keys can get you close), that your contributions across all projects show on your profile, that third-party tools like Travis know how to talk to your GitHub in particular, etc. And all sorts of little things, like that when you mention another project's PR in a commit, a note shows up on that PR. That's a lot of what makes GitHub nice to use, more than just the UI, and I suspect that's what pushed some of the Python core devs in favor of GitHub.

There's potentially a way to build a system that federates all of this, and then toss GitLab on top for the UI. A good standard would be whether a newcomer could submit a PR with only one more click (for the OAuth screen) than they would need on GitHub.

Also, Gogs. Still, I stick with GitHub over either of these two others.

Good point, gitlab is probably 90% there already.

Is GitLab federated?

Another mild annoyance: that any time this is brought up, people think that it's relevant to clarify whether GitHub is performing a genuine copy or just simulating one.

> For the use case you describe, a one-line fix, note that GitHub has a web-based editor (that will create a fork if necessary), so you can skip the local branch entirely.

And you've just optimized out the wrong thing.

Person A: "The thing I don't like about going to that place is that I have to spin around three times, go outside, scratch the belly of the cook across the street for ten seconds, and then I come back and place my order and my food shows up."

Person B: "When you go there, you can just do the spinning thing and scratch the other cook's belly and then go home. You don't have to go there to eat."

Oh, Thanks!

The number of times that GitLab was mentioned in my comment or those upthread in the parent chain: 0.