Hacker News Reader

Comment by m4r35n357 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. This is a Git project. So did none of these people actually bother to clone it?

Probably easier to just rely on binaries . . . suckers!

There are plenty of repository clones, that's not the issue. The issue is that people want to contribute back to the same repository so you don't have to figure out which project is the just up to date. When a project like this goes away, it takes some time for everyone to figure out which fork is actually being maintained properly.

The best course of action, IMO, is to state that you're stepping away, perhaps indefinitely, and ask if anyone wants to be added as an admin to take over. That's not required, but it's a nice thing to do.

I'm sad about this on a lot of levels, any I hope the maintainer does what I'd like, but if not, I'll just wait a few months and see how the dust settles. For now, I'll probably go back to investigating other projects.

The Linux kernel has no central repository, they use email & stuff. I believe that is what the author of Git intended.

> The Linux kernel has no central repository

It does have a central repository, it's this one: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

> and ask if anyone wants to be added as an admin to take over.

That's the worse possible course of action, this is how you get RCE vulnerability or bitcoin stealing malware injected into a popular project. Other random people should not be able to take over any project, they should do the work to promote their own fork and gain their own reputation. At least until we have a language able to protect from threats like that.

One of the downsides to GitHub is that it stores a lot of state that Git cannot capture, and is at the mercy of project maintainers to continue existing unaltered.

But forks prevent that, right?

No, forks don’t include issues or pull requests, among other things. Another problem is with “canonical links”: people will link to comments on the “original” project, which are at the mercy of maintainers to not be edited or deleted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com