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by wfarr 5612 days ago
I would venture to say it does.

You can't really fault Github for individual teams not opting to host their code in more than one spot online, even if Github doesn't offer the capability for users to use their own domain name for seamless switching of git hosts.

Does Github encourage keeping everything centered at Github? Perhaps implicitly. But they certainly don't lock anyone's data in, so blaming them for their customers opting to NOT put their code anywhere besides Github seems unfair.
1 comments
saurik 5611 days ago
You are conflating "hosting in multiple locations" with "claiming to be a canonical URL". If I choose to host my repository at git.saurik.com, but want to be able to use GitHub's repository browsing features, social timelines, etc., I may choose to /also/ host a copy at GitHub.

However, people are now going to copy/paste the GitHub repository URL and use that to clone my repository, and that URL is going to end up as a large number of peoples' origins. Even worse, that URL may end up in third party projects as a submodule (which is much more difficult to retroactively change).

Again: the problem here is not that GitHub is somehow encouraging people to keep things at GitHub "centrally": it isn't, and the goal is not to have your data in multiple places.

In fact, that's what you need to /avoid/: there should be a single URL for "this is the git repository that we consider to be the official, canonical source for our (distributed) contributions to this project".

That URL should be one that you feel comfortable you can maintain for a long time, as that URL can end up baked into a lot of things. Some of them are theoretically easy to change (the million users who are pulling from that URL, assuming they know how to do that without just re-cloning), and some of them aren't (usages of your project as submodules in other peoples' projects).

To quickly put this in another, maybe simpler manner: the problem isn't that people aren't choosing to /also/ put their code in places other than GitHub, it is that putting you code /also/ in GitHub undermines your git repository URL.

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