

You keep using that word “distributed”… - Harkins
http://avdi.org/devblog/2008/10/08/you-keep-using-that-word-distributed/

======
Harkins
I do sense a bit of fail reading some of these Twitter messages. Pull from
your co-developers, or clone on a shared box somewhere and use it, or use the
hypertrophic patch management. Some guy is editing code in prod? Why, you
can't change one line in your deploy process (config/deploy.rb in Rails) to
point it at your local repo?

GitHub is a success because it's incredibly convenient, but it doesn't add
functionality to git.

------
silentbicycle
Since they make a repo mirror every time they pull, why don't they have a
backup? Do their developers never communicate with each other? (Why are they
using github as their build repo?!)

> Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that git makes hosting your own
> public repository absurdly complicated
> ([http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-
> git-r...](http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-git-repo-
> over-http-flow-chart)) compared to other tools
> ([http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-
> darcs...](http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-darcs-repo-
> over-http-flow-chart)).

With mercurial, you can just run "hg serve" or "hg -p [port] serve", FWIW.
(That's for a read-only repo, though. There's a bit more setup involved before
people can push to an http repo.)

With monotone ("mtn serve", done. Auth is taken care of at the repository
level) and darcs it looks even easier.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
For the record, the author of those flowcharts is completely missing the
point. You can just as easily call `git update-server-info` and copy the .git
from your repo into a web-accessible directory, and just be done with it, the
same as Darcs.

The reason people do it other ways (either via git-daemon, gitosis or ssh) is
because Git uses a special transport protocol that's _far_ more efficient than
a dumb HTTP session. It's not that Git _won't_ work over a dumb HTTP session,
it'll just be a lot _faster_ using it's own server/protocol.

~~~
avdi
All of the alternative tools - bzr, hg, darcs - have highly optimized
protocols as well. This may be a documentation issue - I've never seen
documentation for using a dumb server with git. Also, can clients submit
changesets _back_ via simple FTP? Darcs can, IIRC.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
No FTP support, but that's insecure; what's wrong with using SSH? And there is
documentation on the Git website (and in the source tarballs) on how to set up
an HTTP-hosted repo, and even how to set up for a WEBDAV-enabled push repo,
although I've never attempted the latter.

------
ivey
2 things. 1) many people who use GitHub do not understand distributed VC, and
treat it as a central repo. GitHub is trying to do education here, and has
published the disaster guide sant0sk linked to.

2) GitHub is more than just a git repo. It's a social network. People use it
to find code, explore code, paste code snippets...so when GH is down, a lot of
interaction can't take place.

------
sant0sk1
<http://github.com/blog/175-github-disaster-guide>

------
sant0sk1
It's not tough to heap together a few complaints out of a day's worth of
tweets. The fact is that many GitHub users, myself included, noticed GitHub
was down and went on our merry way coding and working and doing whatever.

This is a non-issue imo.

~~~
avdi
I didn't "heap together a few complaints out of a day's worth of tweets".
That's a single contiguous chunk (spanning less than an hour, as you can see)
of the results for "GitHub" on search.twitter.com yesterday.

------
jamesbritt
Yes, I was annoyed that GitHub was down, and twitted about it. And then a
minute later I was pulling fro a co-worker across the room. (Life goes on;
twitter is fun for near-frictionless griping.)

It's not that a GItHub failure makes everything stop, it's the convenience
factor, and that they are offering this as a for-pay business service, that
makes it irksome.

------
peregrine
I always knew github wasn't as good as its cracked up to be.

I never understood why you need a single site for distributed code.

~~~
silentbicycle
Nah, it's probably just a good sign that some people don't really understand
what makes git different from svn, they just keep hearing it's " _the best_ ",
so they use it.

