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Comment by dom96 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that GitHub being down can have such an impact means that Git’s decentralised features don’t go far enough. Why aren’t issues, PRs and all these other little things we depend on also stored in a git repo? Or something similar that can withstand GitHub being down.

I set aside time today to go through my notifications and I can’t because of this. Notifications are trickier to decentralise but still, ugh.

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"Everything goes in the repo" is one of the main features of the Fossil [0] SCM which is built and used by the SQLite team. It's a neat idea and I wish something like that had caught on.

[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/

It's not too late! At one point, git was the new kid on the block while everyone else was using something else (or copy-pasting directories/zip files for versioning).

All it takes is more people using it, and people here on HN are more suitable than others to start playing around and build their projects with it.

There's so much activity around SQLite nowadays - surely some of it must be applicable to dialing up the coolness of Fossil.

Those who use it by emailing patches around aren't affected, ala the linux kernel.

They aren’t affected until the mailing list servers go down.

Couldn't find any stats online about it, but how often does the servers for the mailing daemons for the linux mailing list go down?

Then you can send PR's to the maintainers' direct inboxes, that'd still work.

What do you even mean? Github made a decentralized service a centralized one by encapsulating it. This “impact” isn’t the fault of Git at all.

That's why he said that Git's feature set doesn't go far enough. Most projects need an issue tracker and a tool for discussing proposed changes. These things are out of scope for Git, but since people needed them, they congregated around a centralised service that builds around it. Of course, decentralised alternatives for issue tracking and pull requests exist, too.

This is why Linus uses email. It’s the Unix way — Git is just another tool. It doesn’t need to be a website, and an issue tracker, and a change proposal database, and version control software, and a social media website, and pull request tracker. It just needs to be a version control software with some decentralization.

If todays developers were tasked to build the World Wide Web again, we would all log into some oAuth portal.

It is the fault of Git because it doesn't take it whole way. If the things I need to work are centralised then Git is not doing everything it should.

For comparison, check Fossil - https://www.fossil-scm.org/

Everything you described are features of GitHub not Git. They are not the same... despite the name.

With that in mind, your comment is similar to complaining about Jira being down, or Jenkins... they are different products.

> The fact that GitHub being down can have such an impact means that Git’s decentralised features don’t go far enough

Github was created to literally bring central server to a decentralized system. Yes, when that central server goes down, that's a problem for its users. It has nothing to do with Git.

You can, if you'd like, send Git patches in emails, or via snail mail, and you won't be influenced by any outages outside of individuals' laptops (which will affect only those individuals). Also, good luck managing your 250 microservices that way.

heh, this was my argument back in like 2009 when everyone was all, "DECENTRALIZED!! We have to take months to migrate from SVN to git cause DECENTRALIZED!! You don't one a single point of failure do you?!"

all I could say was, uhhhh github is a single point of failure. Unless you're mailing diffs around like Linus (which nobody I knew did), it's 6 of one, half-dozen of the other.

there are lots of great things about git and especially git over e.g. svn (especially merges) but I never bought the decentralization argument the way it was spearheading the conversation back then.

With git I can create, edit and merge branches locally. If GitHub is down I can push to another remote I can send diffs. I can calmly carry on working until GitHub is back. If GitHub is down too much I can migrate to gitlab or gitea.

I would say the decentralised features of git work for me. And they are no overblown.

Sadly, people seem to push their entire development flows into GitHub Actions, so things like deployments happens on GitHub's servers, and then their servers go down and you suddenly can't deploy anymore... Or writing their documentation via GitHub issues/PR descriptions/comments and now you cannot access that either...

If your SVN server went down, you couldn't even commit. At least with got, you can do everything as normal except push and pull, and that's only if you don't have multiple remotes (which, admittedly, very few GitHub users do).

> The fact that GitHub being down can have such an impact means that Git’s decentralised features don’t go far enough.

This is like blaming Bitcoin for your exchange collapsing. :p

The point has been missed hardcore.

I fail to see how this is git's problem. Who was forced to use GitHub because git doesn't provide issue tracking?

That being said, Fossil has what you want. Are you willing to switch?

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