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GitHub's down?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: GitHub's down?

#121

Post by mrsirduke »

gibsonje wrote: post #117
danielsamuels wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you switched from one central platform to another singular central platform? Am I missing something here?

This is what I don't get. I trust github as a central platform more than hosting my own gitlab in the cloud. There's a lot of people spreading a holier than thou attitude in this thread.

GitHub is a much larger target, and has many, many more moving parts than your average Gitlab on, say, a Linode virtual server.

Github will probably have more downtime which you can do noting about, than your selfhosted gitlab, which will probably fail because you upgraded something, or tinkered with a configuration.

It's a numbers game. They have more people monitoring, they spend way more money than you do on uptime/services, but such a service doesn't get more stable as it grows.

I trust myself way more than I trust GitHub or other hosted/cloud services because I cannot affect/help them in any way when stuff happens.

Ultimately, I know this, I accept this, and I happily use GitHub, Bitbucket and such all the time.

Re: GitHub's down?

#122

Post by gibsonje »

mrsirduke wrote: post #121
gibsonje wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. I trust github as a central platform more than hosting my own gitlab in the cloud. There's a lot of people spreading a holier than thou attitude in this thread.

GitHub is a much larger target, and has many, many more moving parts than your average Gitlab on, say, a Linode virtual server. Github will probably have more downtime which you can do noting about, than your selfhosted gitlab, which will probably fail because you upgraded something, or tinkered with a configuration. It's a numbers game. They have more people monitoring, they spend way more money than you do on uptim…

I don't know what to say other than I disagree.

Re: GitHub's down?

#124

Post by dalanmiller »

gflandre wrote: post #75
jballanc wrote: post #18

For everyone who is currently loosing productivity, perhaps your time might be well spent reviewing `git daemon`: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Git-Daemon

For everyone who is currently losing productivity, perhaps you should close your HN tab

^ /thread

Re: GitHub's down?

#125

Post by sp4ke »

danielsamuels wrote: post #95
sp4ke wrote: post #20

Funny, I switched our projects to Gitlab a week ago and told the team: Because we should not trust a centrealized platform to keep our code decentralized.

So you switched from one central platform to another singular central platform? Am I missing something here?

Yes exactly, between trusting a third-party centralized platform and trusting my git hosted on my own serve .. I choose my own and everyone should .. this was the original point of creating Git in the first place

Re: GitHub's down?

#126

Post by SilkRoadie »

danielsamuels wrote: post #95
sp4ke wrote: post #20

Funny, I switched our projects to Gitlab a week ago and told the team: Because we should not trust a centrealized platform to keep our code decentralized.

So you switched from one central platform to another singular central platform? Am I missing something here?

Our team did something similar after the problems GitHub had when it came under attack a few weeks ago. We have a team of 20 or so and when GitHub becomes unreliable it becomes a big problem for the team.

Last week we set up the community edition of GitLab on one of our local servers. We then mirror the repository to GitHub. So far so good.

We all like GitHub but after it's recent problems we realised we rely completely on it being up. We couldn't even deploy if it went down.. we still use it for open source things. For our main product it has simply become offsite back up.

Re: GitHub's down?

#127

Post by xiaq »

brudgers wrote: post #113

I read about Github being down and know that it sucks for many people. What I find interesting is thinking about how quickly so many installations of distributed version control adopted a de facto central server. Github is a platform that should not need a particularly high uptime from the point of view of any one user. But of course it does because so much of its utility is that it substitutes for a lower level part…

Although DVCSs don't require a central repo to operate, the most natural workflow for most projects is still to have a central repo where everybody pulls and pushes.

DVCSs still have many merits, even with that central repo. First, when the central repo is down, you still have the whole history in your local repo. You can still view logs, check out an old commit, create new branches and commits, etc.. Second, if that central repo is destroyed, you can trivially recreate it using any update-to-date clone. This is already way more advanced than centralized VCSs.

Re: GitHub's down?

#128

Post by tenfingers »

coherentpony wrote: post #119
brudgers wrote: post #113

I read about Github being down and know that it sucks for many people. What I find interesting is thinking about how quickly so many installations of distributed version control adopted a de facto central server. Github is a platform that should not need a particularly high uptime from the point of view of any one user. But of course it does because so much of its utility is that it substitutes for a lower level part…

> Github is a platform that should not need a particularly high uptime from the point of view of any one user. This is totally false. GitHub doesn't just provide a git server, it also provides ticketing and project management. When GitHub is down, projects that rely heavily on, for example, commenting on issues grind to a halt. Yes, you don't need GitHub to be up 99.999% of the time to do a `git push` every once in a…

And it's a shame this is the case, though.

I do publish projects with github because of the popularity of the platform, but I really don't approve github pull requests, and I also don't like github over-simplified issues. Together, these two features are probably what most projects depend on.

Github pull requests are definitely inferior to the patch-by-mail approach for a conversation within a closed group of people. It's clicky and looks friendly, but you don't have the patch to see in the mail notification (you have to be online), and again it's more convoluted to edit/apply using vanilla git.

Many people don't know, but git makes patch-by-mail handling extremely convenient to handle. In fact, it's more convenient to handle than using the several github command-line interfaces I tried(!). You submit the patch, have a conversation by regular mail, and then either edit the patch or merge it. Everything is always right there. Using github you have several side effects: people often add comments to specific lines in the patch, which will looks like garbage in the generated github notification. People will also naturally edit the comments, which won't generate notifications. I cannot count how many times I have to re-read comments because I had the feeling I missed something (and indeed, some comments were edited). This is bad. It shouldn't be allowed. It cannot happen with email.

Github has the advantage of making the conversation visible. But if you have a developer mailing list for your project, git and plain, regular patches do work really well. It might take a bit more to get used to, but it pays back.

Issues are a different problem, since I still feel the distributed solutions are inferior. I experimented a lot with bugs-everywhere and simple defects (sd), two distributed bug trackers that store the issues in the repository itself. Both are nice, and have distinctive features from each other which I'm not going to discuss much. The main thing is that 'sd', at some point, even supported to sync issues with github, which allowed to have best of both worlds. Unfortunately, it's lacking maintenance at the time, but it would solve ticketing in a distributed way. It looks like there's not much interest in this, as both projects are definitely not as active as the many available github clients which do 1/10 of what these projects offer.

Please, look into these two projects.

Re: GitHub's down?

#129

Post by manojlds »

brudgers wrote: post #113

I read about Github being down and know that it sucks for many people. What I find interesting is thinking about how quickly so many installations of distributed version control adopted a de facto central server. Github is a platform that should not need a particularly high uptime from the point of view of any one user. But of course it does because so much of its utility is that it substitutes for a lower level part…

Every time a Github down article comes on HN (why do they still come and get upvoted?), this is usually the top comment - centralised server for a DVCS.

Re: GitHub's down?

#130

Post by _asummers »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #116
_asummers wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the code it has to build? Where does that come from? What about third party libraries it has to pull in? If the only thing the build server needed to build your code was the build script, this would be easy.

The code is building is coming from the local checkout. As for third party libraries, npm used to be so unreliable that we needed a strategy for that.

Checkout from where? I'm not being dense, but new code has to come from SOMEWHERE. If GH (or wherever your code is hosted) is down, the checkout won't be able to happen. Development isn't generally done on the build box.
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