This will be interesting... I just did a grep of my local codebases and found 11 instances where CSS or JS resources were being downloaded from rawgit.com.
I have a feeling when it's turned off, a lot of sites are going to break.
I have a feeling when it's turned off, a lot of sites are going to break.
In the shutdown announcement I committed to keeping the site running in sunset mode for at least a year. Hopefully that's plenty of time for everyone who's aware of the shutdown to migrate, but I expect there will be stragglers.
My unofficial, subject-to-change plan for dealing with that is that at the end of the sunset year, if there's still a significant amount of traffic, I'll start throttling requests to make RawGit slower. Hopefully people will notice their websites are slow and will investigate. I'll also try to notify stragglers individually by filing issues against their GitHub repos if possible.
Start with failing 1% of requests randomly and slowly ramp up from there.
I once had a web host generously give me three months to pay a delinquent bill that I missed the emails for. Sadly it just meant I thought things were fine. When they finally shut my service down, my users made me aware within minutes but it was too late.
By default, pip doesn't show the contents of HTTP error messages [1], so users affected by the brownout would have to take extra steps (using `-v`, visiting the PyPI status page) in order to figure out what was wrong. I think it could easily appear as a networking issue or some other sort of intermittent problem.
There was also no notification of the impending blackout on python.org. [2]
In the end the only thing that will fix the broken sites is to cut it off entirely.
Thanks for your project and I'm glad you're able to bring it to a successful conclusion!
It's unreasonable to expect that a service like rawgit would stay online forever. But even if someone else steps in and builds something equivalent, or if sites turn around and start self-hosting, all of those URLs still need to change.
People focus on the flashy parts of DAT and IPFS like, "oh, someone else could host my website." But there's a much more mundane and arguably much more important side of that which is, "One day NPM might have a different URL." Rehosting content is pretty easy, getting sites and dependencies to link to it is very hard.
And it's not just the problem of updating all of your own projects, there are projects that aren't going to be updated. Rgrove is being super nice about all of this, but there are sites that are going to break in a year, and nobody can really do much of anything about it.
Rawgit has provided a fantastic service that's proved very useful and I'm glad it's been available as long as it has.