
GitHub flags repo, breaks Julia ecosystem, Github CEO fixes within the hour - yarapavan
https://twitter.com/Viral_B_Shah/status/1241847951443492865
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rvz
> It is appalling that @github flagged the JuliaImages org without any prior
> warning. This has broken the #JuliaLang ecosystem in a pretty bad way
> because many packages depend on Images.jl.

Well they control the platform and its Julia's fault for choosing them and
hosting the entire repository and essential ecosystem on GitHub instead of
self-hosting the essential repositories themselves. This already happens to
all Github-hosted projects in general.

Ideally, in a self-hosted environment involving open-source projects, a
trusted sys-admin of the project would be on-call and step in to fix the
issue, rather than wait for support or even the GitHub CEO to step in and fix
it for you.

Platform-wise, congratulations to GitHub for showing once again why free and
open-source projects should be self-hosted using either GitLab, Gerrit, cgit
or Gitea instead of being centralised in one platform.

~~~
ViralBShah
We certainly are grateful to Nat Friedman for stepping in and fixing this.

We have been aware of the centralization issue generally, and in fact just
this weekend, we released Julia 1.4, which has redesigned the internals of the
package manager such packages can be served from our own infrastructure.
There's already a plan for migration away from Github as the source that
serves packages. For Julia 1.4 it needs to be turned on by the user, but going
forward, the new infrastructure is likely to be the default.

We imagined many reasons for needing to do this to safeguard the long term
stability of the Julia ecosystem. For example, an author may delete a key
package they own, accidentally or for their own reasons (like the lpad case in
javascript), or as we learnt in this case, packages can get accidentally
flagged and break things.

Thankfully the Pkg team has been one step ahead on this.

