I just joined a new team (very small: four developers in total, with two of those leaving soon). The two original developers set up the git repo on a folder in a Windows network share.
Am I taking crazy pills, or is that a bad idea? Our organization does have github/gitlab/bitbucket available, so is there any good reason not to use those hosted solutions?
That may depend on how you’re using it. You certainly can add a windows share as a remote and push to it just like any other remote. You’re not going to get anything fancy like hooks/ci/cd of course but it works. Though I can’t imagine the performance is great.
If you’re each using that directory as your own checkout, that’s pretty bad and likely to result in problems. I would avoid that.
There are definitely features of a real git server like protecting branches from force push, accidentally deleting, tracking issues, etc etc that you’d gain from even a basic GitHub repo. I’d still push for that.
I’d say that while it should be fine, if you have a hosted solution available it’s a little crazy to not use it.
I use a GitLab instance at home for my personal and contract projects, with no other users. It’s great as an interface for reviewing previous changes, browsing code in other branches, and as a final check before I merge code to my main branch (I follow the same pull request workflow I’d use at work; open a PR from my feature branch, review the code from the GitLab UI, then merge).
