[shp0ngle]

There are still nowadays projects without a proper source control.

For example, xpdfreader, source of xpdf, is distributed just as source tarballs. The maintainer just publishes them every time there is a new version.

https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html

https://www.xpdfreader.com/old-versions.html

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=xpdf

There is nothing in Debian or FOSS in general that mandates having source control.

(I remember that was a point of contention with WebKit/KHTML... in the olden days of 2000-something, Apple forked KHTML to make WebKit, and in order to comply with GPL, they just published source tarballs, which were basically impossible to merge back into KHTML.)

edit:

ahh I see that the xpdf that is in debian is actually different than this one; someone forked it some time ago and it is in in git here (but no github/other forge, just .git)

https://offog.org/git/xpopple.git/

well ok, maybe I was wrong. but still, a .git folder on someone webpage is not that much more reliable than a tarball on someone's webpage

[hyperpape]

Certainly there's nothing in FOSS that mandates source control, but source control is one of the most important technologies discovered for developing software, and I'd be hard pressed to imagine a justification for relying on software that didn't use it.

[bandrami]

I'm showing my age here, but making version control public is a relatively recent thing; I can't think of a project before OpenBSD that did it, and it wasn't until SourceForge that the idea of projects just having source repos out there and visible became a popular idea, and that was like '99 or 2000. Most projects would just release tarballs and have a CVS repo that was limited to "approved" developers. And that was well after all the big distro build systems developed.

[Kwpolska]

It is likely that the `xpdf` project is developed under source control, but they don’t make the repository public. SQLite makes their repository public, but they do not accept contributions.

[blueflow]

No need to look that far, ncurses is also tarball/patch-based.

[shp0ngle]

Interesting.

Well, xpdf I knew :) but yeah xpdf can be nuked, ncurses cannot.

[cesarb]

A popular project with release-only distribution is Lua. I don't know whether they have proper source control, but even if they do, AFAIK it isn't publicly available.

[forgotpwd16]

A list of only-archive-published projects will be interesting. 7-Zip is another. Regarding that .git web directory, is there an existent tool/script that does something similar to `git clone` for it?

[shp0ngle]

yes there is, it's called git clone.

:)

[forgotpwd16]

Well, unexpected. Git pretty cool.