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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Someone should make a distributed version control system.

What would that look like? Can you describe it? It's not very useful to say stuff without providing some sort of useful idea. You can't just say "someone should write some sort of stupid content tracker, and give it some random three-letter combination that is pronounceable," or whatever.

Completely agree. But whoever makes it, they should make it free and open source and designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Additionally, it should be easy to learn and have a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. It should outclass SCM tools like Subversion, CVS, Perforce, and ClearCase with features like cheap local branching, convenient staging areas, and multiple workflows.

> it should be easy to learn

That would be a significant upgrade.

Can't tell if your serious or not but I suppose that would be properly implemented git.

It's sarcasm: $ man git "git - the stupid content tracker"

You mean like IPFS? [1] People are working on it.

[1] https://ipfs.io

Their source code pointing to Github is symbolic of exactly how this problem hasn't been solved yet.

I didn't say it was solved, but they are very close. IPFS is essentially a global p2p git repo, with a cryptographically controlled branch namespace.

That sounds very cool. I was just pointing out how divorced these ideas still are from the way we actually program and implement things on the web.

In an ideal world, a link to a source code repository (or a link to anything for that matter...) would never fail because there would be automatic mirrors to at least provide read-only access to it.

It sort of forces one to ask whether this is the result of fundamental mistakes within HTTP / DNS itself. It's not realistic for a web designer to put time into making external links fault tolerant by running some query to switch the routing link to an available node.

Content addressed links at least make this possible. With http you have to reach a particular server. If that server is down, the link is broken. With ipfs all you need is at least one machine on the entire network to be serving a file and the link will work and as an added bonus you can verify the hash of what you get so a mitm attack on that link is impossible.

Very interesting. Do you think ipfs could be used to mimic a server to host a static website that could be loaded by a browser?

You mean like this?

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...

:-) IPFS includes an optional http gateway to give the traditional web access to IPFS before browsers support the IPFS protocol natively.

Would this be useful?

    # pre-push (there is not post-push)
    # Update in several places
    git push bitbucket master
    git push gitlab master
    # ...

Or a local cache of dependencies

What a useless comment.

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