Note: This post incorrectly said that GitHub was an Engine Yard offering; GitHub is from Logical Awesome, with Engine Yard handling the hosting.

There are at least some Rubyists using git , and Engine Yard Logical Awesome has a site, github, that offers git project hosting. I’d heard interesting things, and requested a beta account.

Ordinarily, though, I use Mercurial, and when on ruby-talk someone asked about “hghub”, someone else replied that there was sharesource.org .

I requested an account there, too.

Here’s a simple, but perhaps telling, comparison of my brief experience with each:

Sign up: github was very simple, requesting minimal information. sharesource wanted a bit more, including by birthday. It was not clear to me just why that was needed, but it was required.

Access: Once registered on github I could start using the site right away. sharesource needed me to reply to a confirmation E-mail.

Project creation: I did not want to just toss a real project into an unfamiliar tool; I wanted something I could play with to decide if either of these services would be keepers. Sharesource asked me to fill out a project submission form, where I had to justify my project; I asked for testproj and explained that the purpose was to experiment and become familiar with the service. A few hours later I got an E-mail denying my request. Apparently such projects are considered “rubbish”; no toy or sandbox projects allowed.

Github had no pre-approval requirement. I was easily able to create a testproj repo, get it running locally, and start playing around right off the bat.