GitHub
======

The primary purpose of GitHub is to facilitate the version control and issue
tracking aspects of software development. Labels, milestones, responsibility
assignment, and a search engine are available for issue tracking. For version
control, Git (and, by extension, GitHub) allows pull requests to propose changes
to the source code. Users who can review the proposed changes can see a diff
between the requested changes and approve them. In Git terminology, this action
is called "committing" and one instance of it is a "commit." A history of all
commits is kept and can be viewed at a later time.


Features
--------

GitHub supports the following formats and features:

- Documentation,including automatically rendered README files in a variety of
  Markdown-like file formats (see README § On GitHub)

- Pages, a static web hosting service for blogs, project documentation,
  and books.

- Wikis, with some repositories consisting solely of wiki content. These
  include curated lists of recommended software which have become known as
  awesome lists.

- GitHub Actions, which allows building continuous integration and
  continuous deployment pipelines for testing, releasing and deploying software
  without the use of third-party websites/platforms

- GitHub Codespaces, an online IDE providing users with a virtual machine
  intended to be a work environment to build and test code

- Graphs: pulse, contributors, commits, code frequency, punch card, network,
  members

- Email notifications

- Discussions

- Nested task-lists within files

- Visualization of geospatial data

- image preview in many formats

- Security Alerts of known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures in different
  packages

- GitHub's Terms of Service do not require public software projects hosted on
  GitHub to meet the Open Source Definition. The terms of service state, "By
  setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to
  view and fork your repositories."