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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Git is a distributed version control system. Github is simply a place to host a repository and some issues. There is nothing stopping anyone from pushing to another remote hub for redundancy.

So you want Github to open source where they put your git repo and issues? Who cares about that? It's unimportant because regardless they're still the central endpoint to many open source projects, opened or closed source. If you want open source use Gitlab or any other service that sprinkles extra features around git.

I'll never understand this outrage of dependence on Github when you have a distributed version control system. It's not like it should be on github to setup third party repositories for you.

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From a developers point of view, you're right. But there are package management systems and other stuff depending on being able to download from Github.

Ofc, Github isn't to blame for this, rather the ones that thought Github would be great to use as a CDN.

I agree with you that is an issue for the package manager. A package manager should never have such a single point of failure. I know bower, for example, would fail (at least last I checked unless they added a caching system since then) but it at least can point to specific git repositories so it can be moved if necessary.

Honestly if anyone is working on something important enough where they must be able to rebuild at a moment's notice then they should either be checking in dependencies from these package managers or setting up their own copies of what they need. But that's like backing up; most don't realize they needed to be doing that until they have an issue so I can understand the anger when Github does go down.

"But there are package management systems and other stuff depending on being able to download from Github."

Rust program building, for example, seems to require that Github be up.

Only if you need to fetch new dependencies.

Or do a clean rebuild.

During the outage I was not able to push and that's all. I can build everything locally and push to Heroku from my machine. You can always add an upstream repository to Bitbucket or something like that.

In my case at least is not outrage, it's just that I would love to feel that they are more responsive to their community and that I think that I'm not the only one who thinks that GitHub community would gladly help to make the product even better. I see it like a win win situation. Maybe not and it's just business.. dunno

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