| > You think we could develop a unified data model that covers source code, static files, documentation, project management and community management as a single unified thing? Realistically, not exactly, given how much space some of those things cover. I do think that entities like code review are as much a part of the history of a project as the deltas to code. Reviews not being first-class objects in the VCS itself has turned out to be a crack into which you can wedge an entire GitHub. I won't claim I know where best to draw the line here. Better handling of large static files by default and a robust way to model relationships between projects obviously belong within the VCS. On the other hand, relationships modeled in issue tracking systems and the like are also part of the software's history, but past some level of complexity it gets much harder to imagine wedging them into something that you can pass around like you clone a Git repo. All I can really say for sure is that it feels broken that all of this stuff lives in competing application silos. (As a sidebar: Not that you can't jam things like review data into git-as-data-store. Gerrit does just that. But nobody's going to mistake that for a usable interface to code review.) Anyhow, I don't think you're wrong about the social & economic factors, but I think a different landscape with less concentration of power could have shaken out if (for example) easy code review had been baked in and host-agnostic early on. Fully p2p architectures aren't feasible, or even necessarily desirable, for a lot of problems - but it shouldn't be too much to ask that things are able to be federated and resistant to capture by a single vendor. > Still... I completely agree that it would be awesome to have a more self-sovereign computing architecture writ large. I’m just pessimistic we can get there from here. Yeah, fair enough. I am myself boundlessly pessimistic about the future of computing generally. |