Re: benefit from the network effects of GitHub

If I want to find the source code of some package, so I can check what it's doing, or make some hack to it, or see when some behavior changed, how do I best do that?

Increasingly, the most useful answer is "search for it on github". Even when the project isn't actually hosted on github, a copy of their software is almost always there.

I used to use apt-get source, but, having the full VCS history is better.

I could use a general search engine, but that often just finds me the project's homepage. And finding a link to their favored git repository isn't always easy from there (Can you find python's VCS from www.python.org? I can't.). And sometimes, like python, they use the wrong VCS, "officially", so even if I could find such a link, it'd be useless.

So, that's why I always use github to find source code, these days.

If the project itself doesn't upload their own repo, perhaps I find an outdated clone someone else uploaded -- so, everyone really should at least keep an up-to-date mirror of their software on github, even if they don't use it for primary hosting.