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Comment by Perceptes | Hacker News Reader

Every time this happens people make clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we're all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose. But once GitHub comes back up, everyone just gets back to work, trusting and relying on it as much as ever. Eventually it goes down again, and we come back to complain. Convenience is the only thing that we seem to value. (I'm no different, which makes my comment completely hypocritical.)

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> clever remarks about how Git is distributed but we're all depending on GitHub for so much that we defeat the purpose

Yeah, but they'd be wrong about that purpose.

Distributed systems used by people (eg. email, BitTorrent) always have their major hubs (Gmail, The Pirate Bay). That's understandable: no product reaches critical mass without a main stream. The strength of a distributed system isn't that it has no points of failure: it's that, in the event of a significant failure in an established node (eg. TPB's downtime at the end of 2014), the community can retarget around a new solution (eg. KickassTorrents) at the point in which the inconvenience of the downtime outweighs the inconvenience of switching habits, without a significant dip in service associated with the switch.

In contrast, a truly centralized system like BitKeeper would just outright block progress if the central node were to deny access (which was, of course, the purpose that led to devs like Linus Torvalds changing their focus for a few months, so they they could scale back to full kernel production as they constructed a workable alternative, in Git).

The bigger problem here is the number of build packs only relying on Github as a source of truth. We need to find an abstraction to distribute storage so that there is no single point of failure.

Exactly.

So I had to install Gems from RubyGems, not that big of a deal, and I had to look them up on RubyGems since Google gives me GitHub first, but that's OK too, but then all the documentation seems to be on.... Github. Except not, it's also on RDoc. (Though RDoc kinda sucks, compared to GitHub...)

Pretty big win imho, Rails got a few more points with that. :D

Now I'm wondering how NodeJS is faring at this...

We have npm as our single source of truth, although you could host your own npm, or use a tool like sinopia [0] which makes pretty reasonable tradeoffs while being usable. Instead of asking you to replicate all of npm, it just keeps local copies of your packages, and if a package isn't found it'll hit npm.

[0] https://github.com/rlidwka/sinopia

Companies/people don't learn on their mistakes. Almost everything is on GitHub nowadays. This makes it a SPOF even if Git itself is distributed. More companies should host their projects on premises. There are good open source alternatives to GitHub: Apache Allura, Fossil, GitBucket, GitLab, Phabricator, and Redmine.

... GitHub Enterprise ...

It's not open source and it's expensive.

BitBucket

Yes, but at least you can continue to work while it is down. You'll be missing on the collaboration part (and bug trackers, and stuff).

If you are desperate, you can also call another developer and add another remote pointing somewhere else. So Git is a win anyway.

Try that with a "SubversionHub"...

Even if convenience is not a priority for you, it almost certainly will be for people you want/need to interact with.

Only that I don't expect data loss since it is distributed and even if GitHub gets wiped clean I can just happily push up all my stuff from the local repositories and get on with my life.

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