[weystrom]

A reminder of how centralized and dependent the whole industry has become on GH, which is ironic, considering that git itself is designed to be decentralized.

Good opportunity to think about mirroring your repos somewhere else like Gitea or Gitlab.

[nox101]

They're already mirrored on my hard drive. That's how git works.

[cropcirclbureau]

Github is more than a remote host for git repositories. It's become one of the major CDNs for software distributions. Github Pages host a majority of static sites that developer use. You won't be able to use Cargo, Nix, Scoop and other package managers right now because their registries have a critical dependency hosted on Github.

This is not to mention all the projects that rely on Github for project management, devops, community and support desk.

GitHub is also very international, I doubt isolated netziens like those from China are shielded from this outage. I imagine very, very few software shops are unscathed by this. The whole affair is very on brand for 21st century software which is to say pitiful.

[keybored]

- Champion a hard to use VCS which to its credit is distributed

- Make everyone dependent on all the centralized features of your software to use Git[1][2]

- Now you have a de facto centralized, hard to use VCS with thousands of SO questions like “my code won’t commit to the GitHub”

- Every time you go down a hundreds-of-comments post is posted on HN

How to get bought for a ton of cash by a tech mega corporation.

[1] Of course an exaggeration. Everyone can use it in a distributed way or mirror. The problem occurs when you’re on a team and everyone else doesn’t know how to.

[2] I’m pretty sure that even the contributors to the Git project rely on the GitHub CI since they can’t run all tests locally.

[Joe_Cool]

We installed a private GitLab instance on our own servers exactly out of fear that Github might suddenly alter the deal or just cease operations. Pretty happy with our decision so far.

[colimbarna]

Do you mean you switched to self-managed GitLab, or you have a self-managed GitLab that you keep around as a backup plan?

[Joe_Cool]

Actually both. Our internal closed source projects are only in our GitLab. The open-source stuff is both on GitHub and our GitLab. Since our GitLab instance isn't public we only use the issue tracker on GitHub for public stuff.

Another bonus is that we don't pay Microsoft.

[Zambyte]

The key difference is being able to mirror communication channels. While you can continue to work fine with your local repo, the only way to share those changes are via another forge, or sending patches through some other channel. Having another forge to distribute code is generally more ideal.

[turnsout]

I'm taking this opportunity to randomly shout out Gitea! I've self-hosted Gitea for 5 or 6 years, and it has been bulletproof.

[__turbobrew__]

I’m kind of surprised that gitlab doesn’t have a larger market share given that you can run it air gapped on-prem without too much fuss.

[layer8]

It's not the whole industry, just some imprudent sections of the industry.

[readline_prompt]

these things could happen anywhere though. Gitlab also `rm -rf`ed before remember

[jtriangle]

The odds of all services rm -rf / at the same time are pretty small to be honest. The point is to have your work in multiple places, such that you're not reliant on a single service.

[autom4ton]

great point