I'm rewriting my earlier Adventuron games to take advantage of the new features and thinking of putting the source code on GitLab or GitHub. I've got accounts on both, but tend to favour GitLab, for no particular reason. Does anyone have any experience with using these as a source code repository? What are the pros and cons of each?
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I think both are largely comparable, especially if you don’t use “advanced” features such as team work, code reviews or CI/CD, and you only want to host your source and use simple features such as issues.
If that matters to you, GitHub is owned by Microsoft whereas GitLab is open-source. With GitLab, you can download a full copy of your repo along with its metadata (issues, comments, merge requests and so on) for archival or to put it on your own hosted instance (if that becomes necessary to you, which I doubt).
GitHub is way more popular though, so you may have better visibility there, but I’m not sure that really matters for a small Adventuron project.
Disclaimer: I prefer GitLab, mainly because I favour open-source projects. Also, I used Bitbucket before, but it stopped supporting Mercurial and I had to convert all my repos to Git myself, and import them somewhere on GitLab, and it was difficult/impossible to keep metadata such as comments and issues. (Luckily I didn’t have a lot of metadata.) This wouldn’t have happened with an open-source platform such as GitLab.
Also, I’m far from being an expert and mainly use GitLab for small personnal projects.
I'll second this post, I'm basically in the same boat, having tinkered with both for small personal projects. However, one thing I've noticed if you venture outside of Adventuron that may influence your choice is that I feel there is a tendency with some IDEs to have native support for GitHub, making integration slightly easier.
The biggest upside for choosing GitHub would be if you wanted more eyes on it.
I'm a fan of GitHub but from what I see GitLab has some neat features I'm not technical enough yet to really use.
Ever since GitHub allowed private repositories, I switched a few repos from Bitbucket to Github, which has better issue tracking. I think Github and Gitlab are both about the same for casual programming.
Looking back, it was important for me just to keep making commits and not worry about the technical stuff. Given that there are good tutorials on how to move a repo from one website to another, I wouldn't worry too much. If you catch yourself saying "I wish Gitlab/github could do this" then maybe it will be time for a change. But I know I got more mileage out of learning how to use git, e.g. cherry picking commits with add --patch or learning to use branches. And learning how to make good commits has helped with my programming habits immensely e.g. not trying to do too much at once, testing each commit, and so forth.