Hardly. Do they hit edge cases? Yes! Is using GitHub for your CDN a dick move and going to cause problems, regardless? Yes!
The response from mhagger is unnecessarily apologetic, and I predict we'll see an official update from GitHub on this soon.
The response from mhagger is unnecessarily apologetic, and I predict we'll see an official update from GitHub on this soon.
I don't know about that. Both oh-my-zsh[1] and emacs prelude[2] use git repos as their code distribution mechanisms, and that works really well. I think the real issues here are exactly what is called out in the issue: poor usage of git, and poor directory layout.
[1] https://github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh [2] https://github.com/bbatsov/prelude
What is not perfectly fine is using GitHub as your package host, CocoaPods/Specs is the equivalent of Debians APT using one big GitHub repo to host all their packages. It has 92567 commits and 6872 contributors.
The big differences seems to be in the way they do their thing: I'm reasonably sure homebrew just git clones then updates the local repository normally[0], it has "only" 2500 files in Library/Formula, and because of its different subject it is way less write-active, CocoaPod has 1k commits/week which look to be increasing pretty much constantly, homebrew is around 350 with ups and downs.
Also not sure it matters, but homebrew has lots of commits updating existing formula, cocoapod changes are almost solely addition (publishing a new version of a package adds a new spec and doesn't touch the old one)
[0] which is exactly the bread and butter of github
Most of the changes committed to Homebrew are formulae-based; of the ~5600 contributors in Homebrew's lifetime only ~430 have contributed to the core code.
But CocoaPods/Specs is the equivalent of someone collecting all possible packages you could ever use in Bower in one big GitHub repo.
Though I wonder if the actual project-fetching is similarly daft.