[quickthrower2]

Is it possible to decentralize "I know about package X -> Find Package X online -> Git Clone"?

While keeping the property of very high availability? And making it convenient.

I think the first two steps could be covered by a source search engine that spans different repository providers, and includes self-hosted git instances.

That source search engine will probably be centralized, although if we are just searching names and descriptions (and not code) the engine could be a fairly small .zip file that anyone can install. So comes down to "passing around lists".

[mbreese]

That’s the idea with pkg.go, npm, pypi, CRAN, (CPAN?!?), etc… discovery of packages. I think each of these has a wider record for the package showing where individual code repositories are hosted. But I wouldn’t necessarily call them “convenient.”

But that isn’t helpful for cross-language searching, or a code search engine (which I think is a great idea).