POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : GitHub discourages organization : GitHub discourages organization Server Time
26 Apr 2024 18:31:13 EDT (-0400)
  GitHub discourages organization  
From: Cousin Ricky
Date: 17 Aug 2021 16:33:06
Message: <611c1d02$1@news.povray.org>
I decided that GitHub would be a convenient place for my POV-Ray
contributions, because I would need a GitHub account anyway to lodge
complaints about the fine work being done by the POV-Ray developers.  I
could upload my Object Collection modules in one folder, my non-OC
contributions in another, and heck, maybe a third area for projects
unrelated to POV-Ray.  It would be an ideal way to centralize my
contributions, rather than having them scattered all over the news server.

I very quickly found out that GitHub does not support nested
organization!  But it does allow sub-folders, so I uploaded each module
into its own sub-folder.

But that didn't solve the problem.  GitHub has no means of downloading a
single folder; users would have to download the whole repository, even
for just one module.  I don't want to put users through that.  And
branches (and I presume forks) can only be made off the entire
repository.  Even worse, I cannot tag individual folders; the whole
repository must be tagged for every module update.  Basically, all
pretense of folders aside, all my disparate modules can only be treated
as a single unit.

It appears that the only clean way to manage modules individually is to
have a separate repository for each module, in a completely flat
structure.  This seems to me like an unwieldy way to store and publish
my projects.

I DuckDuckGo'd around to see how other people managed this problem.
Seems an awful lot of people have the same complaint.  One suggestion
was to keep repositories in "Organizations," so I looked into that.

Nope.  There is a reason I'm a broken cog who cannot make it in my field
of expertise, rather than a wealthy businessman.  I suck at
organization, and I have no management skills.  But to use a GitHub
Organization, you basically have to manage a distributed business
enterprise, complete with security and user classes!  I need a simpler
solution, one that allows any average Jo(e) to download a module without
having to login or ask me for permission.

I'm finding it very difficult to believe that people who could create
and manage such an elaborate and sophisticated enterprise such as GitHub
could have overlooked something as simple as hierarchically organized
projects!  Am I missing something?

Is there some simple way to organize repositories on GitHub?  One that
doesn't require an engineering or management degree to understand and
navigate?  Or do I have to content myself with a choice between randomly
scattered repositories and a single repository in which modules cannot
be treated modularly?


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