GitHub Broken Download URLs • Hacker News Board

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#21

Post by floatingatoll » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

junon wrote: post #4

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on... My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in. Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token). However, Communities…

“We” are not piling on; you are.

Please don’t shop unrelated concerns to threads that aren’t about that concern. GitHub breaking release URLs worldwide after a multi-hour global outage has no relationship whatsoever to your problem. I sympathize with your frustration, but pet peeve derails pollute HN discussions about every topic under the sun these days. Submit a post instead, and if it doesn’t get traction, so be it.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#22

Post by junon » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

favadi wrote: post #6

junon wrote: post #4

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on... My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in. Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token). However, Communities…

I still remember the night when logrus's author decided to rename his Github account and broke our production build ( https://github.com/sirupsen/logrus/pull/384 ). Since then, I always vendor third party dependencies.

To be fair, this is a side effect of poor module system design in Go. Not really github's fault here.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#23

Post by _zywo » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

Whether this specific problem is intentional or not, these kinds of problems show the issue with using a single centralized service for distribution of third-party dependencies. But it's just so much more darned convenient than hosting your own Git server! It would be super cool if there was a decentralized alternative to GitHub, that used Git under the hood. Perhaps one would upload their repositories to a node, which would then be synchronized with all other nodes, and all you would need to do to use it is to specify any_node.com/author/project. This would keep GitHub's discoverability, while allowing all the benefits of decentralization.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#24

Post by jeroenhd » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:31 PM UTC

GordonS wrote: post #14

junon wrote: post #4

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on... My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in. Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token). However, Communities…

I don't mean to "victim blame", but I'm curious why you'd choose a username ending in a hyphen in the first place? (I would have thought this wouldn't work on lots of services)

Hyphens and underscores are often permitted characters in usernames, more so than exclamation marks or other special characters.

I don't really see what problem using a hyphen in a username could pose, unless there's some kind of filter being applied that doesn't take into account the previously permitted characters. I'd guess someone applied an [A-z0-9]+ without thinking too much about it because that's what the current username rules are.

I'm more surprised that there's a second authorization endpoint, Github could've just used their existing OAuth2 implementation to log users in if they didn't want to reuse the existing login code.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#25

Post by grumple » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

We ran into intermittent failure with Github download urls around a month or two ago that caused our builds to fail (there was no github status, but we replicated the failure easily manually). In response to the failure, we started self-hosting the dependency.

The fewer external dependencies you depend on at the actual point of builds/deploys, the better. Since you're using a fixed version of the dependency anyway, you might as well self-host or include it in the ami or container.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#26

Post by RedShift1 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

junon wrote: post #4

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on... My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in. Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token). However, Communities…

Have you tried sfc /scannow?

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#27

Post by rement » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #24

GordonS wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to "victim blame", but I'm curious why you'd choose a username ending in a hyphen in the first place? (I would have thought this wouldn't work on lots of services)

Hyphens and underscores are often permitted characters in usernames, more so than exclamation marks or other special characters. I don't really see what problem using a hyphen in a username could pose, unless there's some kind of filter being applied that doesn't take into account the previously permitted characters. I'd guess someone applied an [A-z0-9]+ without thinking too much about it because that's what the cur…

Fun ASCII gotcha: [A-z] includes [ ] \ ^ _ and `

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#28

Post by junon » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:43 PM UTC

floatingatoll wrote: post #21

junon wrote: post #4

Another gripe; unrelated, but since we're piling on... My username ends in a hyphen. Apparently, that's no longer allowed, though my username appears to be grandfathered in. Trying to give feedback about new experimental features lands me on the GitHub communities site, which is treated as a standalone app and thus requires you to log in via GitHub (it doesn't re-use the existing session token). However, Communities…

“We” are not piling on; you are. Please don’t shop unrelated concerns to threads that aren’t about that concern. GitHub breaking release URLs worldwide after a multi-hour global outage has no relationship whatsoever to your problem. I sympathize with your frustration, but pet peeve derails pollute HN discussions about every topic under the sun these days. Submit a post instead, and if it doesn’t get traction, so be i…

> pet peeve derails pollute HN

This isn't a pet peeve derailment. This is commentary on the multitude of issues GitHub has had in recent history, at least from my perspective.

A "pet peeve" is something I find annoying. This isn't that - it's a bug.

Further, my comment doesn't break the guidelines. I'm not commenting on the layout. I'm not flagrantly dismissing someone's work. If you don't like my comment, either keep scrolling or downvote and move on?

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#29

Post by ddtaylor » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:46 PM UTC

framecowbird wrote: post #13

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And does it have an army of highly paid developers and engineers to look after it also? ;)

And does it have a cute animal-based mascot?

If TV commercials are anything to go by then picking a good animal mascot for your company/brand is probably the most important thing!

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#30

Post by dvdkon » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

seoaeu wrote: post #17

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #8

Say what you want about "cloud" reliability, but my little home server in a residential ISP has been up for more time than Github.com in (at least!) the past year.

And if github.com tried to host their website entirely off your little home server, they’d surely have 24x7 outages from being bombarded by too much load. All your anecdote proves is that it is easier to keep a single server online than operate a big distributed system, which has been obvious for quite a while

Obvious, maybe, but there are many who will criticise anyone self-hosting, saying that a cloud solution will inherently be more stable, since it has a bigger ops team.