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GitHub Broken Download URLs

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Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#41

Post by rightbyte »

seoaeu wrote: post #39
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not "obvious" to everyone at all. You can still see people here claiming that one should move to a centralized provider since they can guarantee nine nines of whatever, and that self-hosting is way too hard to make reliable. (Which is double irony when the centralized provider goes down and then the excuse is "well, that's because they're big!". If only...). In any case, the point was that Github.com just s…

> For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server. I have spent orders of magnitude less time feeding my pet rock than the average dog owner spends feeding their pet. The difficulty of keeping a service online depends on what it actually does. Not to mention, outages are generally caused by making changes. Changes which are required if a service is going to…

If you self-host you are in full control on when to do changes that has potential to mess up and can do them on a convenient time.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#42

Post by Nextgrid »

elephantum wrote: post #9
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.

Did it also handled similar load and feature complexity as well?

Does it need to handle similar load though? It doesn't have to host all the world's open-source projects, it just needs to host the owner's ones.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#43

Post by seoaeu »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #40
seoaeu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the past year, they have been down a couple of magnitudes more time than I have spent managing my server. I have spent orders of magnitude less time feeding my pet rock than the average dog owner spends feeding their pet. The difficulty of keeping a service online depends on what it actually does. Not to mention, outages are generally caused by making changes. Changes which are required if a service is going to…

If you are trying to make the point that Github.com is the only "non-pet-rock" web-based project managament and bug tracking system available (for selfhosting or not), well, that is just false. The alternatives have at least as many features, if not more. Some of them even predating Github.com by decades. If you are again trying to make the point that they have a bazillion times the load, I will say again that it is…

Comparing uptime between comparable services is reasonable. (Though I will say that having used some GitHub competitors, counting the number of features really overlooks the actual user experience between them.)

Comparing uptime between a production service and a single personal server however isn’t reasonable. You haven’t even said what your server actually does, only that it rarely goes down!

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#44

Post by viccuad »

_zywo wrote: post #23

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, whi…

I would love to see a Git+Matrix forge, completely decentralised. With the spaces and the upcoming threads, seems like it wouldn't be so difficult to create a client that exposes that. It would be easier to make it closer to Gerrit than Github review process, which would be a step up!

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#45

Post by nshntarora »

viccuad wrote: post #44
_zywo wrote: post #23

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, whi…

I would love to see a Git+Matrix forge, completely decentralised. With the spaces and the upcoming threads, seems like it wouldn't be so difficult to create a client that exposes that. It would be easier to make it closer to Gerrit than Github review process, which would be a step up!

Gitlab is uniquely positioned to do this

Activity Pub integration issue on Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/21582

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#46

Post by TobTobXX »

adeelk93 wrote: post #31
_zywo wrote: post #23

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, whi…

Breaking changes aren’t only an issue with centralization. A breaking change with git itself would mess up your decentralized scenario as well.

Maybe for one or two minutes, but if it costs more time, I'd just rollback my git installation.

Good Luck rolling back GitHub.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#47

Post by practice9 »

_zywo wrote: post #23

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, whi…

Radicle is trying to build something similar to what you described https://radicle.xyz/

Discoverability will probably need more work though

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#48

Post by 13415 »

belter wrote: post #11
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 am surprised a Microsoft MVP Certified Professional expert did not pop up yet in the newsgroup, asking you to reboot your machine and review the steps in a certain technote ;-)

They usually recommend to reinstall the whole operating system, though. Because people have time for this...

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#49

Post by KennyBlanken »

the_duke wrote: post #7

At least now I know why my nix builds are failing... Odd for something like this to slip through and not be rolled back immediately. Unless it was intentional, in which case it would be even more odd to not communicate this widely beforehand.

If Github doesn't at least monitor their 404 error rate for large-scale spikes, whoever is in charge of SRE should be fired.

With no announcements and no response to a now two day old bug report, I see two possibilities:

1)Their monitoring of their infrastructure and monitoring of issues is shockingly incompetent for a company of their size and importance (the fact that it is a US holiday is irrelevant.)

2)This was 100% intentional and they're purposefully looking "incompetent" to get people to shift to using other services for downloads.

My money is on the latter, given others in this discussion are reporting random download link failures starting a month or two ago. A huge number of projects seem to use GitHub as a sort of free file hosting service. I imagine the opex for both storage and bandwidth is a not insignificant amount of money and someone has been told to shoo the freeloaders off the grass.

Announcing they're ending free file hosting for unpaid projects would generate a lot of noise and PR. Instead they just make it unreliable, and people go elsewhere. Multiple people in this discussion have described moving downloads of Github in response, which is exactly what Github likely wants.

Re: GitHub Broken Download URLs

#50

Post by KennyBlanken »

junon wrote: post #19
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)

I signed up to GitHub almost 11 years ago, and someone else already registered the username I used for everything. So 11-years-ago-me tacked on a hyphen as I had seen a few other people do it, too.

> I signed up to GitHub almost 11 years ago, and someone else already registered the username I used for everything. So 11-years-ago-me tacked on a hyphen

"I purposefully chose to create a nearly identical username to an existing user" isn't a great defense to someone saying the problem is between the chair and keyboard.

At best you didn't think of the possible confusion you'd cause.

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