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Comment by prepperdev | Hacker News Reader

That sounds great, but it's a very fragile state of things.

While it certainly makes lives of Iranian developers easier, it does not make it a good idea to put their code there: laws change, and quickly sometimes.

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Laws change and there are also a bunch of other ways to get banned from your code on GH. And once that happens, you have nowhere to go.

Much easier to migrate to a Gitlab instance. And they know this! Which is why it's so fun to see Github dancing around these issues lately. Finally some healthy competition.

I'd love to know how many times MS have tried to buy Gitlab. :D

On the other hand, hopefully the more contact Iranians have with the outside world, the more they will petition their government for peaceful relations with other countries. Obviously GitHub access isn't going to make the difference, but rather lots of these kinds of things in aggregate.

You make a good point, I'm surprised to see it downvoted.

It's always a risk to put IP in a bucket you may lose access to just because of politics.

Git is a distributed system, so even if you lose access there isn't a huge data loss.

That’s true if you use it the way its creator does, but not so much when you replace git send-mail with GitHub’s proprietary extensions (issues, etc).

Yes, making daily on-premise backups would mitigate the risk of losing source code.

That applies to everyone, not just Iranian developers: setup daily backups of all your code.

Even more than that, as long as one person has the repo cloned you can bootstrap the entire project again, any single clone has the entire project history to the most recent point it was fetched. Git is neat that way.

That's not necessarily true. If your organization has tens of repositories with multiple important branches in each, all odds that at least some of those branches are lost.

Proper backups of all repos are an answer, of course.

The way we use git, master has everything that is production with short-lived feature branches for development work. Not needing to worry about git backups is perhaps the least of the benefits of this approach (and no real drawbacks as far as I can tell).

Unfortunately, github is 50% git, 50% proprietary code that you don't control and can't neatly export your data for other platforms. All these git hosts are walled Gardens. It's a sad state of affairs but not really limited to git (Gmail walled Garden despite email standard, messaging apps, etc).

Github has some great management tools for reviewing code and integrating with various integrations. But so does Gitlab, Bitbucket... and I'm sure there are more. They aren't 1 for 1 replacements, but they do exist. I'd personally recommend against using a ton of integrations that tightly bound you to any service.

Yes, they all have great tools on top of git, but they are all different and hard to transfer between platforms.

Thankfully git is a distributed VCS. You just push the latest version somewhere else.

Yes, as answered in another branch, it's possible and reasonable to setup continuous / daily backups, if you're using a hosted Git service (Github or not). This will mitigate the risk of losing access to the code.

It's not advised for these Iranian developers to use any Github-specific features, such as issues, wiki, CI, because losing them will cause disruption / knowledge loss.

And then the reason to use Github specifically, instead of something else is quite low.

You don’t understand - there is no need to setup backups. Every user has a full “backup” of the repository (unless using sparse checkouts or other niche configs).

It really depends on how small or large your organization is.

If it's a single repo with a single branch, sure. No need for explicit backups.

If it's tens of repos with multiple important branches in each, then it would be very dangerous to assume that developer machines have all of them.

This is true for the source control aspects of Git, but not all of the project management aspects of GitHub. (wikis, gists, gh-pages: yes. issues, pull requests: no)

Does Iran not have it's own version of online git service after such a long time? I imagine it's not too difficult to set a barebone git hosting service up (without the hub functions, obviously).

I suspect to get the same level of availability and trust folks have in github 100% inside Iran using local hosting providers / infrastructure is actually a bit difficult.

I think it's kinda hard to compete with the big boys with limited resources / footprint even whit / perhaps because of sanctions.

Right? Unless someone was actively squashing sites down, it doesn't take much attach a CRUD to a directory of folders for git repos.

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