Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

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There are still nowadays projects without a proper source control.

For example, xpdfreader, source of xpdf, is distributed just as source tarballs. The maintainer just publishes them every time there is a new version.

https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html

https://www.xpdfreader.com/old-versions.html

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=xpdf

There is nothing in Debian or FOSS in general that mandates having source control.

(I remember that was a point of contention with WebKit/KHTML... in the olden days of 2000-something, Apple forked KHTML to make WebKit, and in order to comply with GPL, they just published source tarballs, which were basically impossible to merge back into KHTML.)

edit:

ahh I see that the xpdf that is in debian is actually different than this one; someone forked it some time ago and it is in in git here (but no github/other forge, just .git)

https://offog.org/git/xpopple.git/

well ok, maybe I was wrong. but still, a .git folder on someone webpage is not that much more reliable than a tarball on someone's webpage

Certainly there's nothing in FOSS that mandates source control, but source control is one of the most important technologies discovered for developing software, and I'd be hard pressed to imagine a justification for relying on software that didn't use it.

I'm showing my age here, but making version control public is a relatively recent thing; I can't think of a project before OpenBSD that did it, and it wasn't until SourceForge that the idea of projects just having source repos out there and visible became a popular idea, and that was like '99 or 2000. Most projects would just release tarballs and have a CVS repo that was limited to "approved" developers. And that was well after all the big distro build systems developed.

It is likely that the `xpdf` project is developed under source control, but they don’t make the repository public. SQLite makes their repository public, but they do not accept contributions.

No need to look that far, ncurses is also tarball/patch-based.

Interesting.

Well, xpdf I knew :) but yeah xpdf can be nuked, ncurses cannot.

A popular project with release-only distribution is Lua. I don't know whether they have proper source control, but even if they do, AFAIK it isn't publicly available.

A list of only-archive-published projects will be interesting. 7-Zip is another. Regarding that .git web directory, is there an existent tool/script that does something similar to `git clone` for it?

yes there is, it's called git clone.

:)

Well, unexpected. Git pretty cool.

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