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by kijin 812 days ago
Git repos only vanish if they have no clones. For the purpose of accountability, the "official" repo is not more privileged than any other clone that retains the same history, and can be verifiably recreated from any clone if it is ever lost or tampered with. (Assuming SHA-1 isn't too broken, that is.)

For archival purposes, nothing prevents people from creating a tarball that contains the .git directory as well, which would preserve not only the current state of the project but its entire history.
1 comments
b112 812 days ago
Git repos only vanish if they have no clones.

And? You're speaking probabilities, not certainties. It's not relevant in terms of archiving. You don't guess, you don't hope, you simply 100% ensure that 10 days, 19 years, or a century from now you can build the same thing.

I agree that adding "extra stuff" to a tarball isn't a bad idea, and in fact, many already do!

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lupusreal 812 days ago
If you can archive the tarball, you can archive the git repos. If for some reason you can't, you can cut your own tarballs from the git repo and then you don't have to worry about them because you made them yourself.
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b112 812 days ago
Archiving an entire git repo is serious overkill, and untenable realistically. Debian has 30k packages, if not more, and some of them are the linux kernel.

My responses in these threads has been to the "why not build from git" logic championed here.

You want to build from a reliable, repeatable source. And as I mentioned, that can be git clone -> tarball, sure.

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