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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> The entire point of git is that it's decentralized, lol.

No-one here is criticizing git itself. That is not the point.

It is GitHub that is defeating the whole point of it all, once their hosted central server goes down.

The majority of these projects went all in on GitHub, including using GitHub actions, npm packages, hosting their whole website, etc hence as soon as it goes down, they can't push or update anything; especially if it was very urgent. It has become a giant single point of failure for nearly everything.

There is a reason why the Linux Kernel, Mozilla, Qt, Chromium, GNOME, ReactOS, etc self-host their own repositories and have fail-safes repositories if Github goes down and becomes unreliable.

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If you're not building some downtime into your model you're not being realistic. It's easy to point fingers but the reality is every product and company will experience unexpected downtime. It's an easy business decision for executives/buyers, pay a team of top engineers to home grow a durable product assuming it can even be done at extreme cost now and later or be okay with a couple of hours of downtime here and there with far less cost.

Every single project you listed uses Github as a mirror meaning when they go down internally, Github is the backup which from my perspective is a little ironic.

> Every single project you listed uses Github as a mirror meaning when they go down internally, Github is the backup which from my perspective is a little ironic.

And? It is a read-only mirror. It just 'pulls' changes from the self-hosted copy. It can't be used for direct development for the maintainers. If the main official repository was on GitHub and that goes down, then everything will be down as well including (issues, pull requests, actions, etc). Then you will be totally reliant on GitHub for 'fix it'.

There is a reason why those same projects do not use GitHub as their main repository and tell you 'We don't accept issues or patches here'8. They have control over their issues trackers, review process and CIs and their projects won't halt due to GitHub's unpredictable and intermittent issues.

For those projects, GitHub is only* used as a read-only mirror for cloners, but useless for anyone to send patches, track issues, PRs, etc. which that is done on their self-hosted repositories and it has been like that for them for years.

It's a remote origin, once I clone and branch which I can do from a mirror, I can write and commit as much as I want to the repo, where I push the change up to is ultimately my decision assuming I have access. The point stands, these companies use Github to act as a mirror/backup for their project in the event of something like a disaster (e.g. datacenter fire).

There is no perfect solution and there never will be. Everything has associated cost. You're focused on the distribution of devops tooling, but that is only a fraction of the story. Many large companies have moved to Saas based products because they realize doing it themselves comes with significant cost. An hour or two of downtime is cheaper then a datacenter, equipment, bandwidth, licensing, and expertise to manage all of it.

It's a simple cost benefit analysis. You need to look at this issue through the lens of a business and not just an engineer would be my advise. Interestingly enough you can only point to OSS projects which rarely pay for tooling anyways.

> It is GitHub that is defeating the whole point of it all, once their hosted central server goes down.

server != service

assuming its a distributed service vs one server for a multi-billion$ company also group of humans built this service, so its not gonna be perfect :shrug:

companies that use such tools and in trust all the business process to a provided service and do consider an event like this is a blocker should build in contingency plans or accept that there is no real 5-nines of availability more like 90-98%

> assuming its a distributed service vs one server for a multi-billion$ company also group of humans built this service, so its not gonna be perfect :shrug:

Regardless of any of that, it still is proven to be unreliable. It is also not an excuse to go all in and risk being fully dependent on GitHub (and their services) and tolerate such downtimes and run to HN and complain about it each month.

> companies that use such tools and in trust all the business process to a provided service and do consider an event like this is a blocker should build in contingency plans or accept that there is no real 5-nines of availability more like 90-98%

Then I should see no-one being surprised or complaining about 'GitHub having issues' or 'GitHub is down again' whilst also using it for GitHub actions, pages, issues or pushing their changes and they are not paying for GitHub Enterprise or some higher plan; especially serious open source project like Mozilla, Chromium, etc. That's why they self-host.

Until the next time GitHub goes down again (hopefully that won't be in another month's time).

> Then I should see no-one being surprised or complaining

Oh agree 100%, this is the equivalent of the "reply-all email threads" and people responding to be remove or stop. I find it entertaining overall.

> Until the next time GitHub goes down again

Cheers

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