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GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

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Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#81

Post by wfarr »

saurik wrote: post #66
wfarr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web services go down. It happens. You make the choice to use them anyway. In this case, Github is very responsive about outages and clearly strives to eliminate or reduce them as much as possible.

And sometimes web services go down for good. Again, this is an understood tradeoff, and I'm not arguing that. What I do argue with is that "git is distributed" does not cancel out this particular tradeoff, which I'd the statement that was made by the person I am responding to. An actual solution used by many other services is "let me use my own hostnames with this service", which GitHub does not support for your repo…

I would venture to say it does.

You can't really fault Github for individual teams not opting to host their code in more than one spot online, even if Github doesn't offer the capability for users to use their own domain name for seamless switching of git hosts.

Does Github encourage keeping everything centered at Github? Perhaps implicitly. But they certainly don't lock anyone's data in, so blaming them for their customers opting to NOT put their code anywhere besides Github seems unfair.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#82

Post by deno »

rodjek wrote: post #77
deno wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe for a few months. When you run a server for 2 or 3 years the distro goes out of support, software upgrades are getting behind, before you know it you are compiling patches from source, ... You can get 5 years security updates support with Ubuntu Server LTS and you can set up safe unattended updates[1] with email notification if anything ever requires your attention. If you set your backups right as well, you…

Sorry, but there is no such thing as "safe unattended updates" when you have anything more complex than your home desktop box. There's way too much that can and will go wrong to be that naive.

Safe unattended means no configuration files are altered and those updates are not adding new functionality in the first place anyway. It's only Package X.Y with security patch applied.

Actually your home desktop box should be much more difficult to upgrade than a simple generic server box with generic virtualized hardware drivers.

There are valid reasons to use service providers or maintained hosting but properly configured (and backed up) VPS running stable (& maintained) software can get you a long way.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#83

Post by deno »

roel_v wrote: post #64
deno wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe for a few months. When you run a server for 2 or 3 years the distro goes out of support, software upgrades are getting behind, before you know it you are compiling patches from source, ... You can get 5 years security updates support with Ubuntu Server LTS and you can set up safe unattended updates[1] with email notification if anything ever requires your attention. If you set your backups right as well, you…

"...it shouldn't be that difficult" Famous last words... I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just saying that my experience has been different. Another example, I used to have my own installation for our websites and bug tracking and time sheet management software, on a locally-hosted machine with apache and mysql and a bunch of other software. The number of hours I've spend migrating data between versions, tweaking…

> The number of hours I've spend migrating data between versions,

It seems (from prev. post as well) like you were trying to stay on the cutting edge functionality wise. OTOH I was arguing for running stable and maintained Linux distribution.

I'd certainly agree that the initial investment is pretty big—not only it takes some time, but you need non-trivial specific knowledge about Linux administration—and for that reason alone I'd advocate using maintained hosting. My only beef with your comment was that, in theory (and in my experience), a properly configured VPS running stable software shouldn't require nowhere near the level of maintenance you seem to be suggesting.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#84

Post by icefox »

tptacek wrote: post #74
icefox wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people really think of this idea? Would you buy it? I have written a web interface for managing git repos called GitHaven (my personal home install is here: http://git.meyerhome.net:8080/ ). It has the usual goodies, private/public repos etc. I have some friend's companies that run it in the cloud already. Do you think it would actually make money i.e. Would you be willing to join me in a startup on it (in bo…

Probably not. Github is on a path to become the market leader, has a critical mass of customers, and has a business model that harnesses those customers to benefit from network effects. This idea is akin to building a business offering private white-label Stack Overflow clones. Key point: the actual software is not what makes Stack Overflow and Github valuable. Simpler reaction: Github:FI is already priced at a round…

Guess the real question is why do people keep upvoting the first comment?

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#85

Post by jshen »

rodjek wrote: post #77
deno wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe for a few months. When you run a server for 2 or 3 years the distro goes out of support, software upgrades are getting behind, before you know it you are compiling patches from source, ... You can get 5 years security updates support with Ubuntu Server LTS and you can set up safe unattended updates[1] with email notification if anything ever requires your attention. If you set your backups right as well, you…

Sorry, but there is no such thing as "safe unattended updates" when you have anything more complex than your home desktop box. There's way too much that can and will go wrong to be that naive.

there is if you're only using your vps for git over ssh which was my point that started this whole thing.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#86

Post by tptacek »

icefox wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not. Github is on a path to become the market leader, has a critical mass of customers, and has a business model that harnesses those customers to benefit from network effects. This idea is akin to building a business offering private white-label Stack Overflow clones. Key point: the actual software is not what makes Stack Overflow and Github valuable. Simpler reaction: Github:FI is already priced at a round…

Guess the real question is why do people keep upvoting the first comment?

Probably for many of the same reasons they tended to vote up the "I could clone Stack Overflow over a weekend" comments. I wouldn't confuse karma with market research.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#87

Post by statictype »

tptacek wrote: post #74
icefox wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do people really think of this idea? Would you buy it? I have written a web interface for managing git repos called GitHaven (my personal home install is here: http://git.meyerhome.net:8080/ ). It has the usual goodies, private/public repos etc. I have some friend's companies that run it in the cloud already. Do you think it would actually make money i.e. Would you be willing to join me in a startup on it (in bo…

Probably not. Github is on a path to become the market leader, has a critical mass of customers, and has a business model that harnesses those customers to benefit from network effects. This idea is akin to building a business offering private white-label Stack Overflow clones. Key point: the actual software is not what makes Stack Overflow and Github valuable. Simpler reaction: Github:FI is already priced at a round…

Github:FI is already priced at a rounding error for the kinds of companies from which most of the revenue in this space will originate.

How many of these companies do you think have developers using git in the first place (As opposed to subversion or [wait while I assume a look of sufficient disgust] visual source safe)?

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#88

Post by jamesbritt »

bitserf wrote: post #44
jamesbritt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is the only reason I decided to use Github after avoiding Sourceforge and their ilk for the past decade and a half." But why github? Why not gitorious.org? If github goes away, I still have my code, but I lose any issues people have filed on the site, and I lose being able to easily check on forks of my projects where people might be doing interesting stuff. I had been using gitorius.org, but moved to github fo…

There is the Github API, so you could backup the non-repository data as well by writing a couple of scripts, if you were so inclined.

Right, and I should probably set up something to auto-snag that stuff where it counts, but having to do that is the sort of thing you have to so for any non-git-based site.

It'd be nice of all those related items were also in a repo, easy to pull.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#89

Post by saurik »

wfarr wrote: post #81
saurik wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes web services go down for good. Again, this is an understood tradeoff, and I'm not arguing that. What I do argue with is that "git is distributed" does not cancel out this particular tradeoff, which I'd the statement that was made by the person I am responding to. An actual solution used by many other services is "let me use my own hostnames with this service", which GitHub does not support for your repo…

I would venture to say it does. You can't really fault Github for individual teams not opting to host their code in more than one spot online, even if Github doesn't offer the capability for users to use their own domain name for seamless switching of git hosts. Does Github encourage keeping everything centered at Github? Perhaps implicitly. But they certainly don't lock anyone's data in, so blaming them for their cu…

You are conflating "hosting in multiple locations" with "claiming to be a canonical URL". If I choose to host my repository at git.saurik.com, but want to be able to use GitHub's repository browsing features, social timelines, etc., I may choose to /also/ host a copy at GitHub.

However, people are now going to copy/paste the GitHub repository URL and use that to clone my repository, and that URL is going to end up as a large number of peoples' origins. Even worse, that URL may end up in third party projects as a submodule (which is much more difficult to retroactively change).

Again: the problem here is not that GitHub is somehow encouraging people to keep things at GitHub "centrally": it isn't, and the goal is not to have your data in multiple places.

In fact, that's what you need to /avoid/: there should be a single URL for "this is the git repository that we consider to be the official, canonical source for our (distributed) contributions to this project".

That URL should be one that you feel comfortable you can maintain for a long time, as that URL can end up baked into a lot of things. Some of them are theoretically easy to change (the million users who are pulling from that URL, assuming they know how to do that without just re-cloning), and some of them aren't (usages of your project as submodules in other peoples' projects).

To quickly put this in another, maybe simpler manner: the problem isn't that people aren't choosing to /also/ put their code in places other than GitHub, it is that putting you code /also/ in GitHub undermines your git repository URL.

Re: GitHub major issues - repos have "lost" commits and site is erroring

#90

Post by andrewljohnson »

andrewljohnson wrote: post #31
wizard_2 wrote: post #29

Just posted to the support page. "Sorry guys, there was a Javascript error displaying an error when there was none. We've deployed a fix for this and everything should be good to go."

This seems to be fixed now - for my repo at least. The GitHub guy saying it was a "JavaScript display error" is incorrect though. I was pulling a repo and getting an old version. EDIT: I'm not getting the javaScript display error, but I'm still missing my commit, so I guess these errors are unrelated :/

This was my fault. GitHub was never messed up.
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