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Comment by koluna | Hacker News Reader

This person seems very upset about something that customers actually love. Speaking for myself —- GitHub pull requests are amazing. I have an easy way to collaborate and propose changes to my projects through a human-friendly interface that doesn’t require me to use tech from early 90s.

Surprise - technology evolves. We’re not all going to stick with BBS just because “it’s a standard everyone uses, ZOMG don’t extinguish it!”

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> Surprise - technology evolves

Evolution != constant re-implementation to fit the latest UI trends. (Neo)Vi(m), emacs, terminals, REPLs, email, etc. are still common because they’re the best tool for the job. Hell, even IRC refuses to die because enough realize its advantages over modern “shiny” alternatives.

All the tools I mentioned have improved and evolved without being reimplemented into obsolescence. The closest thing to “reimplementation” is Vi -> Vim -> NeoVim, but everything in that chain built off its predecessor without intending to replace it.

Wait until you need a Microsoft account for accessing github, wait until your account gets blocked. All of sudden all of your code is out of reach.

Wait until your mail server goes down or experiences a malfunction that erases all mail threads. Wait until your hard drive fails and you lose all the code.

There can be a lot of hypotheticals. GitHub does not preclude you from using git for what it’s intended to be - a distributed source control management system. If you don’t have backups, that’s on you.

"GitHub does not preclude you from using git for what it’s intended to be", yet. Never trust MS, FB, Amazon, etc. Sooner or later they lock you in or kill the service you rely on.

IMAP allows you to have multiple synchronized copies of the entire mailbox. And you can depend on multiple email servers (and IDs) if the mail server is unreliable. Email has fewer single point failures. Git may help you backup code against failure of Github/lab. But it doesn't prevent you from losing ability of issue PRs or accessing issue trackers.

Ah yes, because apparently no one besides GitHub is qualified to run reliable services.

https://status.sr.ht/

https://www.githubstatus.com/

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-07-03-how-we-monitor-our-ser...

https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/13/Backups-and-redundancy-at...

When your mail server goes down, nothing happens, the internet continues to function normally and then when it comes back up you will receive all of the emails that were sent to you when it was offline. If the mailing list goes down, you can still send emails and you're collagues probably won't even notice the outage because they were CC'd. When the mailing list comes back up, it'll receive all of those emails in the same way and get caught back up.

When GitHub goes down, everything stops. And GitHub goes down often!

I started trying out sourcehut out of curiosity and only recently started understanding the resilience and convenience of email workflow compared to Fork-PR workflow. It's also is clear to me that the pains with the email workflow is the user experience and not the workflow itself. None of this was apparent in the beginning (and hence the complaints). It would be great if there was a single page listing comparison of both workflows against specific technical points like these.

SMTP is designed to not lose mail in the event a mail server goes down. It's generally days before an email is abandoned (bounced) if the dest server is down for that long. Every other hypothetical you list applies to all services involved.

The problem isn't the code, it's the workflow. Every git fetch gets up-to-date code history. What I can't easily replace is the CI/CD pipeline attached to pushing to the repo or the review process before merging.

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