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Comment by nezza-_- | Hacker News Reader

We centralized a decentralized version control system.

$2 billion to the first person to draft a decentralised git coin WhitePaper

I think you just did.

No. We need a proper whitepaper explaining how to make GitHub decentralized with blockchain tokenization using distributed smart-contracts. ;)

(Did I forget any important buzzword?)

Just don't host it on Github Pages.

Did I forget any important buzzword?

Nah, but you could always add some Serverless and Lambada to make it more Agile.

"crypto" baiting is like the funniest trend ever in the Stock Market lately.

Kodak is riding that pony home ... (noting I live in Buffalo, just down the road from Kodak's home turf in Rochester and I'm a pretty avid photographer - http://www.instagram.com/crispyfotos/).

"Did I forget any important buzzword?"

BigDataDeepLearning.

You got to ironically buzz to be cool today? Pretend you didnt get it, so all those d* who didnt get it can lecture you. We are deeply invested into the idea of the Seagullarity!

It's missing a sprinkle of AI.

deep-learning. AI is so 2002 (noting I, Cyborg by Kevin Warwick)

It exist! Not a whitepaper, but at least a Medium article: https://medium.com/@alexberegszaszi/mango-git-completely-dec.... Ethereum + IPFS/Swarm as backend for Git.

Source code is currently unavailable as it is hosted on ... drum roll ... GitHub: https://github.com/axic/mango.

Insufficient Dogfood.

Now that it's up you can see:

  This repository is also available on Mango at mango://{...}

Blockchain is so 2017--block lattice is the future.

Actually that's the FIRST time I've ever heard of lattice. Is that a real deal? Not trying to feed into the hype here, but from a math perspective I get fascinated by concurrency

Yeah, RaiBlocks is currently the only one doing it, although you could make the case for Stellar as well.

Yeah, a cryptocurrency called Rai currently uses it (maybe IOTA too?). Essentially, each account gets its own blockchain and they're connected together using a DAG data structure.

I read this as block lettuce the first time around.

You nailed it for the devs but you gotta' say it to people who would pay for it too.

Decentralized GitHub would synergistically leverage our existing cloud infrastructure to provide unprecedented collaboration that is open, robust, efficient, and focused.

Be sure to follow this template

https://i.imgur.com/W0rai6K.jpg

why not just use git-ssb? some gateways:

http://git-ssb.celehner.com/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQ... http://git.scuttlebot.io/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoyf... http://localhost:7718/%25n92DiQh7ietE%2BR%2BX%2FI403LQoyf2Dt...

edit:fix links

(Did I forget any important buzzword?)

deep learning? VR? IoT?

SIA coin is a similar concept. They even have video hosting/streaming on their development roadmap.

Decentralized storage, filesystem and social media seem to be the most valuable use–case for blockchains aside from the inherent value of cryptocurrency.

https://sia.tech/whitepaper.pdf

Gitcoin already exists :) https://gitcoin.co/

It's funny that there's already a Gitcoin project, however they do NOT have a token: https://gitcoin.co/

The goal of the project is to incentivize FOSS development, similar to Bountysource, except without requiring participants to trust a central party. It's pretty cool!

The issue is that the features we use along with git, many of which github provides, are not decentralized. The true but tired argument that git will continue to work when github goes down totally ignores this issue.

Yes, git still works. But we don't just rely on the features git provides.

So this isn't really anything to do with Git then is it? So why joke we centralised Git when really we centralised a bunch of other things that are not really anything to do with Git?

Because we also centralized git.

It's also the issue with git, if it goes down and you don't update your local clones ~daily (or as other mentioned don't have system in place that would allow you to update somewhat locally).

You can still work with your colleagues by pushing and pulling your own repos without involving GitHub.

I think centralised CI is the real problem. I don't have the compute power in my home to run our full test suite, so I can't push with confidence without my CI cluster.

Issues and other GH infrastructure is arguably a bigger problem. That metadata is locked within the Github silo with no easy way to export it elsewhere.

This is indeed the crux of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot (and I wouldn't be surprised if it exists already), we need a decentralised method of storing issues and other things inside our git repos.

I know of at least one solution: https://bifax.org/

Great link, thanks! I've been looking for something like this.

Also, the workflow on Github is one many people like, and it differs a bit if you have to use git "the old fashioned way". Not that it's hard or impossible, but it differs. I can't imagine explaining the GitHub-less workflow to my colleges..

\*colleague.

it's an issue for issues, but wikis at least are also git repos : https://help.github.com/articles/adding-and-editing-wiki-pag...

If you think about it, there's no particular reasons why the metadata can't live in (and be tracked by) the repo itself.

Issues could live in /issues. Simple command-line (or GUI) tools could edit them. I'm thinking in particular of how password-store[0] makes tracking history in a git repo invisible: it Just Works™.

Discussions could live in /discussions, stored in something like RFC822 format. Again, simple CLI (or GUI, if you swing that way) tools could manipulate this easily.

A wiki can, again, live in the same repo.

PRs are a little different, since they really do need to live outside the repo. But what is a PR other than someone saying, 'hey, please pull my branch into yours'?

[0] https://www.passwordstore.org/

PRs and other things could also just live in a "shadow repo". Even if just by convention.

You have a `Product` repo and a `Product-meta` repo.

The biggest issue I have with using git as a truly decentralized system is remote management. Unless you want to be manually futzing with remotes on every single client and pushing/fetching from others correctly, you need some kind of central server.

I really think there is a hole here for a product that works with git underneath, but gives a nice easy way to manage all that complexity.

Like GitHub?

I missed a word there, I meant a "decentralized way of managing all that complexity"!

https://github.com/neithernut/git-dit provides a distributed issue tracker inside git, without cluttering the repository with unneeded files and also gives the possibility for having tree-like conversation, referencing issues and so on.

Unfortunately, no non-cli frontend exists right now (feel free to build one, shouldn't be complicated). Also some convenience is still missing, but could easily be integrated.

What's also missing is a way to give users of the tool access to a repository where they can submit issues (which then could also be used by a web/gui frontend for the tool). This is not the domain of git-dit itself, but a solution needs to be found. One idea would be a publish repo (where everyone can push) which automatically does some sanity-verification on the issues and forwards them to the maintainers repository... or something like that.

Also, https://github.com/vitiral/artifact/ is a really nice tool to do planning of an application or library inside a git repository. I am currently starting using it in iamg (https://imag-pim.org) and it is really wonderful. The author currently does a reimplementation of its core functionality to make it even more powerful.

There are several attempts at tracking issues inside a repository. What we really need to sell the concept, though, I think is one that can reasonably sync with GitHub Issues. GitHub Issues are a reasonable front end for issue reporting for casual and non-technical users and if you can interoperate with them you don't have to reinvent that basic CMS.

Every now and then I sketch ideas on the subject, but haven't yet gotten someone to pay me to build it. ;)

GitLab CI is really sweet, because you deploy your own runners (workers) whereever you want. Downside is, the control is not a standalone CI app but a part of GitLab (or I'm unaware about something).

Drone is very promising but last time I've checked the documentation had some holes in it. The website is "coming soon" and IIRC it's like this for quite a long while.

I'm unaware about any CIs that are usable with local repos. Would be neat to just run a local command and it would spawn a worker somewhere (local or through a remote coordinator) and run the tests on whatever I have in the working tree, just like it happens with centralized repo+CI combos. It's too frequent I find myself doing `git commit -m 'Fix that stupid typo in previous commit'`.

We're working on a 'CI only' mode so you can easily use GitLab CI without the rest of GitLab. This is already possible but now it requires some configuration.

For your local use case GitLab Runner has a local mode exec, although that is currently being reworked https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/2797#note...

We centralized a decentralized communication system too. (eMail)

Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason. Everyone is behind a NAT/firewall, everyone has low computing power, its hard to regulate, etc. This all leads to a centralized solution being easier.

I think the current best thing we have is centralized but open source and encrypted, which gets an "okay"/10 from me.

> Decentralization just doesn't work too well in practice for whatever reason.

Because it's inconvenient. Centralisation is convenient, it gives a single discovery and synchronisation point. Decentralisation makes discovery much more difficult, and requires adding separate synchronisation mechanisms. It generates friction and cognitive overhead.

Even more so for "side-services". Sure your VCS is nominally decentralised[0], but what about bug reports? Contributions? Notes & docs? There were distributed bug trackers efforts back in the early 10s but… they didn't really work IME, they were not convenient or practical.

[0] though even without a single giant point of failure, most project would still have a single canonical master copy, a really mesh/distributed contribution system is very rare (Linux's tree of integrators/forks is probably the closest?) and none of the current VCS makes mesh/point-to-point collaborations really convenient

That's kind of missing the point, everyone's git local clones are still there, I can still work on the code. Git's decentralisation is meant to make sure work doesn't stop altogether when the remote is down.

The major feature of git is that it's distributed, not that it's decentralized.

Git's got two big features over SVN:

1. Automatic, private, per-user branching. Git's even nice enough to keep the private branches out of the main repository, and lets you pretend to be the authoritative repository without creating a branch if you really want to. This is what clone/push/pull actually does, and it's what a distributed VCS really brings to the table. It lets every dev pretend to be the project manager when they're writing their own code.

2. A much improved merging model. The graph model of git is just much better than the linear model of SVN.

The second one is what people thought they wanted when they started using git. The first one is what they didn't know they wanted before they started using git.

Git gets around the problem of "Well, if we do #1, how do we know which repository is authoritative then?" by saying, "We're not solving that problem. This is an exercise for the users that's easily solved by file permissions." So by refusing to solve that (rather hard) problem, the VCS becomes internally decentralized. That doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't centrally manage your repositories or have an authoritative repository. It's just that git itself doesn't care about knowing which repository is authoritative.

The concept of an "upstream" is inherently centralized.

The point of git is that everyone can keep working right now and can push later without things getting very messy.

Welcome to the modern tech world. While you're waiting for the site to come back up, let me tell you all about my new startup, SquareWheel(TM).

edit: Oh jesus christ, there's a fucking tech company called Square Wheel. Kill me now.

Tell me more - sounds like a productive thing to work on given all productivity is gone for the immediate foreseeable future.

So you’re saying that if I put up my own Git server (for a fee), it’s likely to have better uptime statistics than GitHub?

I can’t push changes to the decentralized Git protocol, only to a (centralized) server instance.

Setting up your own instance of a bit server is free.

If you want issues, CI etc... Then you need a local version of github which you will pay for.

Or GitLab. That's free and easy to self host.

Bingo. People think its hard to self host. Its not. They have an omnipackage that you install. You run updates. You enable the automatic backups. Problem solved!

But maintenance is where people can have issues. GitLab is complex.

Well... unless you use something like gitlab https://about.gitlab.com/ - which is also free, and has support for issues, CI, etc. (snap!)

Personally, I prefer something more lightweight and for some time I've been using gogs - https://github.com/gogits/gogs (so far so good)

Is gogs maintained anymore? Everyone I know switched to the community fork, gitea.

Wow, I haven't peeked at the commit history for some time. Thanks for the info!

You can email patches. This is now the Linux team works.

The code for git itself is also managed the same way (though I don't think there are any subsystems in git, unlike the kernel).

The VCS is still decentralized (you can share code with your neighbour or across the world), it's the administration (tickets, PRs, etc) that aren't.

I think it'd be fairly straightforward for github or a competitor to store those things in git as plain markdown files, either alongside the main source code, or (as it does with GH Pages) in a separate branch (that has nothing in common with the master branch but it's still in the same repo).

Similar (maybe) is ADR (http://thinkrelevance.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-archit...), storing architectural decisions into numbered files in git. See also: https://github.com/npryce/adr-tools

Fedora's Pagure[1] implements those administrative bits as Git repos. Issues are stored in a Git repository along with the git repo for the code.

[1]: https://pagure.io/pagure

No way to build my npm dependencies. So the day github would really crash/lost some files, the package decency system thing is dead. That is a very exciting scenario... as exiting as if google would forget to renew google.com and would have no legal right to get it back.

Am I the only one who has project's mirror on Gitlab for exactly this purpose?

I have it the other way around. I use gitlab with github as backup.

I'm curious as to how you manage the mirror. Do you perform all operations twice (e.g. if you push to Github, do you manually push to Gitlab)?

Edit: Nvm, found out Gitlab has the mirroring feature (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...). Pretty cool!

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