[fartcannon]

I remain unconvinced. If github goes down, it goes down for everyones projects. If everyone ran their own servers, only one or two packages would go down at a time. So instead of 100% its like 0.1%. And since they're simpler, as per OPs comment, they'd stay up longer. So a distributed git, as it was originally intended to be used, is more robust than a single point of failure like github.

Perhaps githubs value is elsewhere.

[notriddle]

For a lot of use cases, there really isn’t any important difference between 100% and 0.1%. If any of the source tarballs are unavailable, then I can’t produce a build, and the fact that some of them are available isn’t much consolation. I’m blocked either way.

Especially for an organization like Arch Linux, the solution is really obvious; maintain your own mirror. Debian and Fedora do it, so can they.

[fartcannon]

Just to clarify, if 100% of all packages go down, thats much worse than 100% of just your needed packages.

But I agree: mirrors is the key!