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Comment by knowtheory | Hacker News Reader

How is it at all odd? Github offers a convenient platform for using git. People use it.

If Github were to explode forever tomorrow, active projects would just take their locally cloned repositories, and put them online somewhere else and carry on committing (albeit sans github's awesome social tools). That's the real power git offers us.

It's just a fact of reality that most projects centrally organize through a few bottlenecks. It's easier for people to remember where to go, if there's only one place to go to. But if you're really concerned about it, i suppose you could build a tool to automatically sync a github repo w/ another 3rd party host if you wanted (or visaversa).

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Yes, but Github is not just about Git hosting, it's about all those awesome social tools. If you use Issues as the main bug tracker, for example, you've got a problem.

Please point me at your distributed issue tracker project. I'd love to contribute!

Fossil includes distributed issue tracking: http://www.fossil-scm.org

At KDE we use Bugzilla with automatic status emails to various mailing lists and projects.

So even if bugs.kde.org were to go down, we'd still be able to fix code at git.kde.org, and use the lists.kde.org mailing list archives to lookup bug details as a backup. We'd probably use a mailing list system that doesn't suck like kde.markmail.org or GMANE for that last part, but that's just shaving the yak...

http://bugseverywhere.org/ does distributed bug tracking.

I've often wondered if we could store issues in a separate branch.

Also http://www.onveracity.com/ offers distributed version control, and distributed tickets, and wiki.

mpyne mentions bugs.kde.org's mailings as a fallback, but GitHub issues e-mails too.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with using Github, but with using only Github as your git remote. Git (in theory) makes it easy to use multiple servers. Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers plus higher availability if Github goes down; just use your other remotes.

Is there a git tool to share your remotes in a repository?

One could use a distributed issue tracker like "Bugs Everywhere"[1] or git-issues[2]. Are there ways to "sync" them with Github's issues?

[1]: http://bugseverywhere.org/ [2]: https://github.com/jwiegley/git-issues

"Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers ..."

It's crazy how GitHub's entire product is so easily marginalized by comments like this. I don't know if you meant to do it, but I think it is a serious problem with hacker culture. It's the kind of thinking that tricks startups into "knowing" they can do a better job than established competitors in spaces they know close to nothing about, because they "know" they can execute better. I speak from personal experience here.

I can guarantee that no amount of "adding some scripts/utilities" will get near what GitHub's service offers.

Here's the relevant HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

I'd disagree, on paper Github has a nice suite of services, arguably best-in-class for some of them, but that doesn't make them untouchable. Github is only the latest in a line of code-hosting services.

Just because you tried and failed, doesn't mean every try will fail.

You may have misunderstood the comment (or I have).

I don't think they were saying that a few scripts and utilities would get you what github offers. I think they were saying with some scripts you could automatically fall over to another mirror when github goes down, then switch back when it's up (updating the repo on github when it's available again).

> Add some scripts/utilities and you get Github with all their "social" stuff, wikis and issue trackers

That was indeed badly phrased. I was meaning some scripts to manage multiple remotes and sync (sets of) them between your different team members. So you could have your code (and maybe dumps of githubs issue tracker) on your server and still use github when they are up and running.

Sometimes you need to read the entire sentence for it to make sense.

The word "add" here is important, as it's talking about having github and something else. So you get github (with all their social stuff...) AND what the scripts add, which is more reliability.

IMO Github doesn't break often enough to make effort of adding `some scripts/utilities` worthwhile.

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