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Comment by tomcooks | Hacker News Reader

For starters, it's not owned by a gigagroup

Instead it's owned by an abrasive difficult to deal with developer who will argue "you're just doing it wrong" with paying customers. Clearly things aren't exactly roses and sunshine here either.

Example?

e.g. https://lobste.rs/s/j1gl4t/sourcehut_prohibits_repos_with_la...

Both the original story as well as the comments regarding Andrew's usage for Zig.

That doesn't sound abrasive at all to me. It's just a normal technical disagreement. What am I missing?

It doesn't (and didn't at the time) sound abrasive to me, either.

You don't think it's strange for a service provider to tell people that "mercurial isn't suitable for this" (even though it clearly works, and has been working for many years) and "you're writing your program wrong"?

It's fine to not support certain use cases because it's too much effort or otherwise too expensive. It's not fine to, as a service provider, tell people that their programs are (and I quote) "wrong".

If you're okay with that then that's your choice, but for me it really turned me off sourcehut.

> You don't think it's strange for a service provider to tell people that "mercurial isn't suitable for this" (even though it clearly works, and has been working for many years) and "you're writing your program wrong"?

No, not really, if done politely. Which seems to be the case here.

It also might "work" to use a large crystal vase as a hammer, but it's still "doing it wrong".

If anything, I'd fault sr.ht for having too vague usage policies and then telling users they are in violation of said policies. That's not good. But they are in alpha, so hopefully it's something that'll improve.

No, because mercurial really isn't suitable for this. Nor is Git for that matter.

Similar thing happened on Github with CocoaPods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652.

It works, so it's suitable.

No. That's one reason we have separate words for things that work and things that are suitable.

If I duct tape you to a car seat it will work just like a seat belt.

Just because something works doesn't mean it is a suitable implementation or a sensible decision.

That sounds like a positive to me.

Idk, I don't have the source for the conversation, but I suspect "direct" is being misinterpreted as "rude".

Using git and mercurial for large binary file storage is, 100%, wrong. Why? They're not designed for it, so they handle it really poorly. Hacks like Git LFS and annex were made for a reason.

From sourcehuts perspective, they need to serve all their customers, and an extreme performance outlier for a still small platform could degrade the experience for others by becoming a significant part of the server load. Thus, it's fair to say no.

Just like Github did back in the day to CocoaPod: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11245652. They also got very unhappy.

Perhaps a relevant comparison here is Pinboard.

It's a paid subscription website and has done very well as a one-man-army project. Its success hasn't compromised its virtues of being lightweight and no-nonsense (unlike Delicious).

If SourceHut could do the same for Git that would be great.

> If SourceHut could do the same for Git that would be great.

It already does. Other than some (minor) missing features that are in active development, what else do you need?

It's a 'public alpha'. Personally I won't be signing up until it's describing itself as stable.

Their description of "alpha" is more stable than many services that describe themselves as stable, IMO:

https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

You can sign-in for free while it is alpha and try it. Everything works very well except the account data export that is not still enabled. I have found it very practical and fast, much better than the typical github+travis combination.

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