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from the where-will-they-store-the-source-code? dept.
Chris Ball, about whom I know very little, gave a talk to the Data Terra Nemo conference on 23/24 May in Berlin. From the conference site, I gathered the following: "Data Terra Nemo is a technical conference for discussing the ideas behind systems and protocols without centralized ownership and how they impact the landscape of the Internet".
Chris gave a presentation regarding a decentralized git repository which he has dubbed 'GitTorrent'. His notes, which he describes as an 'aspirational transcript' of the talk, take the story up:
Why a decentralized GitHub?
First, the practical reasons: GitHub might become untrustworthy, get hacked — or get DDOS'd by China, as happened while I was working on this project! I know GitHub seems to be doing many things right at the moment, but there often comes a point at which companies that have raised $100M in Venture Capital funding start making decisions that their users would strongly prefer them not to.
There are philosophical reasons, too: GitHub is closed source, so we can't make it better ourselves. Mako Hill has an essay called Free Software Needs Free Tools, which describes the problems with depending on proprietary software to produce free software, and I think he's right. To look at it another way: the experience of our collaboration around open source projects is currently being defined by the unmodifiable tools that GitHub has decided that we should use.
So that's the practical and philosophical, and I guess I'll call the third reason the "ironical". It is a massive irony to move from many servers running the CVS and Subversion protocols, to a single centralized server speaking the decentralized Git protocol. Google Code announced its shutdown a few months ago, and their rationale was explicitly along the lines of "everyone's using GitHub anyway, so we don't need to exist anymore". We're quickly heading towards a single central service for all of the world's source code.
So, especially at this conference, I expect you'll agree with me that this level of centralization is unwise.
The talk continues in the first link at the start of this summary.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:03AM
I think git is just fine. There is some point to github.
What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.
They don't ask for my sourceforge.
What particularly pisses me off is that I prefer not to use any manner of hosting service when I can avoid it, for code repositories specifically I always set up my own server.
I actually do have a github account, but I don't use it a whole lot so I never enter any answer into that form field.
I expect that leads recruiters to conclude that I don't really know how to program computers, despite my having learned to code in 1976, my focus in school being computational physics and having twenty-seven years experience as a software engineer, including a Senior Engineer position at Apple where I debugged problems that no one else had the first clue how to solve.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @04:46AM
GitHub is the trendy place for young posers to pad their portfolios with trendiness. They go to GitHub and fork a whole bunch of trendy projects, never contribute anything ever, and put the GitHub account on the résumé with the expectation that idiot recruiters will see a whole bunch of trendy projects and conclude that anybody who is somehow involved with so many trendy projects must be trendy enough to deserve employment.
The average GitHub project will have a handful of contributors but hundreds and hundreds of useless résumé padding forks by totally worthless morons.
Nobody really cares if you know how to program. The trouble is you're not young, old man.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:08AM
That's why I don't dye my grey hair.
That's why I don't tell anyone what my github account is, despite that I really do have one. I use it only to make actual contributions to projects that are themselves hosted on github.
A close friend who sincerely meant well advised me to stop linking my essays on mental illness from every page on my entire website. I pointed out to her that it is more important to me that those essays be widely read, than that I ever get a job.
Even so, it sucks to be poor.
Wikipedia has a good article about Diogenes of Sinope. He's an important philosopher but even so his lifestyle was what most today would regard as "homeless". Diogenes used to carry a lamp with him even during the day, in hopes of finding an honest man.
I read that just a few days ago, I'm considering doing the exact same thing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:37AM
Diogenes told Alexander to get lost and was lucky enough to live afterwards. Archimedes told a Roman soldier to get lost and died. Socrates who was too lazy to write anything down was instead such a talkative man that the Athenians had him killed just to make him shut up. So my question to you, modern man, is how lucky do you feel?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:56AM
sounded like a fun game.
Two different people - a psychiatrist and a close friend - each pointed out to me that I was "a survivor". In fact I do have the Boy Scout Wilderness Survival Merit Badge.
I've been tazed four times, each time by Clark County Washington Sheriff's deputies. The fourth time I yanked the wires out of the tazer.
I'm not dead certain but attribute my tolerance for pain to my fondness for spicy food. Capsaicin is well-documented to relieve pain. In my experience it does not relieve pain but makes the pain bearable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:09AM
I'm a pain in the ass, for sure, but I'm not a big enough pain in the ass to be murdered by anyone, not even the cops, and they love to murder people!
Look over here, at me! I love attention!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:35AM
Can we have a link to your mental illness articles, then?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:04PM
linked at the top of every page of my site. I have lots more but I need to adjust their markup as I'm moving them from a now-abandoned URL.
Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com]
My Deepest Fear [warplife.com]
Despite not having been symptomatic in any way, simply pointing out the existence of my deepest fear got me held involuntarily three times - twice in handcuffs, by the police.
Oopsy doodle my deepest fear redirects for some reason now lost to history. I'll fix that later this afternoon.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RobotMonster on Sunday May 31 2015, @05:33AM
Meh. Last three times I tried to get something from github via the git command line, the server would barf somewhere from 1MB to 4MB into the transfer, and then you'd have to start the whole thing all over again.
I don't know if that was caused by Git's protocol or GitHub's server, but either way it's pretty unimpressive for a "newish" system powered by a major host.
I eventually gave up.. Z-Modem supported resuming transfers way back in the dark ages.
I generally work on closed-source commercial projects anyway; if anybody's letting GitHub or SourceForge manage closed-source projects for them, they're going to get everything that's coming to them...
Btw, if you want to see some truly horrible C, check the original Z-Modem implementation...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:23AM
What I regard as offensive is the notion that having a github account is one of the factors that goes into hiring decisions.
"What's my github? Oh, that's easy. Just take the "name@" of my email address and replace it with "git.". So, "git.mydomain.com"
The next inevitable question among such morons is, "Oh cool, how do you get your own domain on github?" The answer is, "Apache mod rewrite redirection magic", but the real answer is I host my own public git server on a subdomain (each project's git repo is also a submodule of the main repo), and have thus never needed github. It's fucking easy. Just:
touch git-export-daemon-ok
mv hooks/post-update.sample hooks/post-update
git update-server-info
And my bare repository is available to clone over standard HTTP, use a local repo cloned with SSH to push changes to the remote. Sure, I don't get all the bells and whistles that github has, but that's what the rest of my website is for. Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 31 2015, @07:24AM
Really, if you're a software dev and can't manage a git repo, then you probably shouldn't be releasing software publicly.
Non sequitur. Just because someone doesn't have knowledge about something specific doesn't mean they're not very good at something else.
I agree that people should be able to do this, though.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday May 31 2015, @06:53PM
the forms, sometimes recruiter solicitation emails that ask, are always quite specific that they want my github username.
they don't ask for my bitbucket, my sourceforge or what have you.
I've been hosting my own repositories since 1988 but because I choose not to use a cloud service to have someone else host my repository, I am regarded as unemployable.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:24AM
Well, you could create a GitHub account, and put a single repository there which contains a single file that lists the web addresses of all your privately hosted publicly accessible repositories. :-)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday June 01 2015, @08:59PM
Filter error: Comment too short
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Sunday May 31 2015, @11:39AM
Gitlab is a self hosted repository alternative to guthub. It's nice, quite user friendly, and it works.
You can easily install it alongside an owncloud server, for example on a raspberry pi with some storage.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 01 2015, @07:49AM
But WHY?
Git already manages repositories, and can use any web server. What GitHub / GitLab adds to that is the "cloud" management via http interface. And if you already have local access, why would you need that?
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:56PM
Issues, for one.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday June 02 2015, @12:48PM
And as an alternative to Own Cloud, Gitlab is also available on https://sandstorm.io/ [sandstorm.io] and https://bitnami.com/stacks [bitnami.com]
(And Bitnami also has Gitorious [bitnami.com].)
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Tuesday June 02 2015, @05:04PM
And ArkOS, I think, but I don' tknow the maturity of any of these.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!