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Comment by disordinary | Hacker News Reader

Well that's me not able to work.

If only git were a distributed version control

It would be nice not to have to rely on centralized servers at all. A P2P/torrent client built specifically for sharing code from git repositories, perhaps?

But there is much less commercial incentive behind a p2p alternative. Centralized services are easier to monetize.

I look forward to the day governments start to fund free software, for example through the GNU project. Then we'll all have better tools.

Actually, there were already some fundings. Germany funded GnuPG to port it to Windows.

What do I care what is the new world record in sprinting? But I very much do care about a new release of libreboot, libreCMC/openWRT or Debian!

I hope one day we will see peaceful international competitions between nations of who can provide the best/most used free software.

Hear, hear. I've talked about this with people and it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea. While a tiny fraction of the amount we already spend on commercial software would utterly transform the free software landscape, it's not politically viable as long as commercial software vendors have lobby power.

Let's not forget that it is not in many governments' interest to have distributed tools (with strong encryption). It is much easier to take down stuff on centralized services.

BTW, it is hear, hear ;).

But of your government is at odds with an oppressive government, it would make sense for it to fund that kind of software so the people could take it down, or at least make trouble, themselves.

Thank you for the correction :)

> it's surprisingly hard to convince them that government-sponsored software is a good idea

That's because it's not. Governments are not reliably good, and their money comes with far more strings than private money.

The FSF have it right: people should write free software because proprietary software is immoral.

> [Government] money comes with far more strings than private money.

Have you ever worked on a government-funded project? The Tor folks have and do. :)

> ...[P]eople should write free software because proprietary software is immoral.

USGov does fund Libre and Open Source software. One big example is the Tor Project.

Instead of gov. funded software, I like the idea of hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded. This would allow the hedge funds to realize returns, but only if the FOSS produced is viable. Such an arrangement would probably benefit under a non-profit foundation to administer the project(s).

I'm just back from lunch, so I'm struggling to follow. How would the "hedge fund backed FOSS, where the commercial software competition are publicly traded" work?

The government is funding free software. Just not in the way you might expect. :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jQoAYRKqhg

Free distributed P2P software makes technopolies like Github AND mafiaficialities like nationstates obsolete. We do not need to and should not rely on the government to fund that.

There is this https://code.google.com/p/gittorrent/ although I've never tried it...

edit: a more recent (?) link https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent

It would be really nice to get it to succeed. Decentralisation is almost always preferable.

I think they're two different projects, but this is exactly what I thought of. A separate Chinese DDoS was even mentioned by cjb in his announcement of GitTorrent a few months ago: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...

See http://ipfs.io and https://github.com/cryptix/git-remote-ipfs

IPFS, anyone?

Yeah, I'm hyped too.

> A P2P/torrent client built specifically for sharing code from git repositories, perhaps?

Or, we could both set up HTTP servers on our respective machines and simply push to each others repos.

I thought that was the point of git...

github is not only git... how many times will we have to tell that?

PRs, wikis, issues are the reasons why we use github...

If only it were possible to keep those things in git itself. Oh wait, it is.

Can you explain? How do you store issues in git?

> How do you store issues in git?

An org-mode file named 'issues,' with each issue under its own heading?

A directory named 'issues,' with an org-mode or CommonMark file for each issue?

A directory named 'issues,' with a directory for each issue, with CommonMark, org-mode or restructured text files for each person's comments?

You commit your issue database to the same repo as your code and track it alongside your code. Then you just need a tool to manage the database for you, and there's a few tools out there to do this:

http://ditz.rubyforge.org/ http://pitz.tplus1.com/ https://github.com/jeffWelling/ticgit http://www.bugseverywhere.org/

... and probably others. That's just based on a quick Google search.

One nice thing about this approach is that your issue's state follows your code through merges. When you fix the bug you mark it as 'fixed' and commit that change to a branch. When it gets merged into master, the 'fixed' status gets merged as well.

One can create a fully offline version of github fork using https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup + https://gist.github.com/piscisaureus/3342247 ("Checkout github pull requests locally")

(PS: why cannot I reply to paulrouget's message?)

Oh cool, I didn't realize git being distributed solved the communication problems that arise on an engineering team.

Back to work everyone, git is distributed version control so we don't need pull requests or gists or any kind of easy-to-read historical record that is also accessible for non-engineers.

If it's that critical then someone needs to fix the SPOF.

If it's really that important, why not host your own gitlab or pay for a self hosted github installation?

If only there was a way to do p2p communication that you could use to send patch files. Uhmmm.

I think the bigger point is to have a contingency plan in place so your whole engineering team isn't sitting on their thumbs with stupid grins on their faces.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11459475/should-i-check-i...

That might not be your specific problem, but I'm guessing a few people have this problem today. I'm glad I check my libraries into my local repository :) Using a local fall-back for popular libraries hosted on cdns is a good idea too.

To be fair, I don't do it because I think it's stupid not to, I do it because I often work on my laptop while travelling and have to be able to continue to work without an internet connection :)

You don't have to edit the files directly on github in the browser, really ;) Just edit locally, commit even! It's magic!

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