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Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

I suppose this is a good opportunity to ask, why do people get so affected by DVCS hosts going down? You can work locally with Git without uploading every change. Despite the constant reported GitHub downtime, I have not ever been adversely affected even once, since pushing and pulling are done every few days and I can freely branch/commit/merge locally.

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Nowadays, these code forges have also become a centralized place for issue tracking, kanban boards, wiki editing and, specially, as CI/CD servers, in the case of GitHub Actions, which are, sometimes, the only for you to deploy software to package repositories. The same limitations apply to GitLab CI or Codeberg's Forgejo Runners/Woodpecker.

Whenever GitLab, Codeberg, BitBucket and, mostly, GitHub goes down, a lot of the software and websites you use can't be updated, including dependencies of your software that you're pulling from npm, for instance.

Finally, companies use code forges mostly for the ease of doing code reviews through Pull Requests/Merge Requests. Developers rarely, if ever, actually merge branches locally, before having it reviewed by peers in one of these code forges.

Git is a DVCS, but many companies have a build server/cluster that depends on Github or Codeberg being available.

Teams I've worked on for the last several decades aim to push 10-20 builds per day to external alpha testers, so any downtime in Github is going to be an impediment.

Do you not spend much time writing and discussing issues or reviewing code?

You could use separate tools for those tasks. JIRA/Bugzilla/etc. for issue tracking, Sublime Merge or equivalent for comparing a dev branch to a main branch, and CI/CD with Azure Pipelines or whatever the “modern” equivalent of Jenkins is.

That isn’t as convenient as an all-in-one tool, and might not be what the user you’re responding to is doing. But it’s doable.

Sure, but then you're vulnerable to that going down. The question was about why people can be substantially impacted by relatively brief forge downtime.

Mailman provides decentralized issue tracking.

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