from thingsiplay@beehaw.org to programming@programming.dev on 14 Aug 2024 23:54
https://beehaw.org/post/15530389
GitHub, a massive repository for open source software, is currently unavailable.
“All GitHub services are experiencing significant disruptions,” reads the GitHub status page.
The outage started just after 4:00 pm Pacific time when GitHub noted “We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions, Pages and Pull Requests.” Since then, the problem has escalated to the entire website, with the status page noting that GitHub suspects the issue is “a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back.”
At 4:45 pm PST, GitHub noted that it was rolling back the changes it believed caused the current issues and already “seeing improvements in service health.”
It’s a rare outage for GitHub, which is used by millions of developers to host the code for open source projects. Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and it’s only grown in prominence in the six years since.
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But Git is so great because it is so decentralised. Everyone says that. I should use Git, they say, because Git still works offline and it’s so decentralised. And doesn’t depend on centralised servers like ‘the evil SVN’. Then that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone ;-)
Then set up your own server.
Like git.30p87.de
I realise that this is theoretically possible. But I don’t have a problem that I need to solve right now. Others, on the other hand, seem only too happy to make themselves dependent on monopolistic corporations.
I mean… yes those are true? lol.
I can see that.
Git and GitHub are not the same thing
I know. and there are many other ways to host your code. The current GitHub outage shows that most Git users just can’t live without a commercial entity stewarding their code though.
It’s a convenient way to work together remotely. I’m in the US and my partner for a project is in Portugal. GitHub isn’t the only solution, but it’s very convenient.
Yeah, saying “most GitHub users can’t live without a commercial entity” is such a nonsense. GitHub is successful while it works well. The moment it doesn’t, there will be other services.
I don’t see it. How does downtime show that?
The reactions are shocked enough.
Git being useful decentralized doesn’t conflict with the fact that a centralized remote is convenient.
Git repos are still decentralized. It’s just Github was failing, the thing centralized and synced to. The point of Git being decentralized is, being able to take any of the Git repo copies of the current working developer, and host it on a Github alternative. Meaning the code and project did not get lost because of Github. It’s not that such an outage wouldn’t be a problem, it’s just such an outage is still a problem that can be solved and not a showstopper in the longrun.
Even if Github suddenly cease to exist, out of nowhere, everyone who has a repo copy can setup such a server and work on it as nothing was happened (minus the Github features and hopefully nobody uses the Github app). I believe this is not the case with SVN. If the main repo gets corrupted or destroyed, then its an unsolvable problem. Unless you have a backup. And on Git everyone working on the project has basically a backup.
In short, Git itself works offline. But if you are dependent on Github and its features and applications, then it becomes a problem. So I don’t know why SVN is mentioned as the savior here.
SVN has become notably better over the past few years, but let me clarify that my comment was not meant as a reason to use SVN.
You can still push your changes to a different remote on a different service.
Amazing how many replies to your comment completely miss the point
Not surprising me.
Maybe they should have actually made a point then
the biggest problem isn’t that people use github for code hosting; it’s that they also rely on github for hosting releases.
True.
A ton of people using github barely understand the different between github and git and often think they are the same thing or that github and git are somewhat related more than they really are.
SVN is trash and the people who advocate for it over git are probably pretty crappy developers.
Reason being, if they have trouble understanding git, I have little faith in their ability to create competent code.
How is SVN “trash”?
Yes. The fact that git is decentralised means you can still carry on working and making commits while GitHub is down. With SVN your basically have to down tools.
What is your point? All the things you say are true but the tone seems to indicate sarcasm?
Public facing projects are 90% Github.
That isn’t the fault of git but of people who still haven’t learned that you don’t put all your important eggs in one basket.
working now
Oh fuck. I better roll back that last deployment then…
People always make it such a huge deal but that has been pretty normal, since Microsoft owns GitHub we have had a t least 2 if not 4 outages per month.
Yeah it’s nuts. GH used to be the most stable service I used. Bought by MS and it’s now down many many times a month. We have outage alerts for it in a slack channel and it’s literally down multiple times a week in different areas. Of course they’re not complete outages, but we are such a big company every outage affects at least one team.
You make it sound like this doesn’t happen frequently.
Not at this scale. The usual outage usually breaks certain parts of Github, but not everything at once. This time, Github broke completely, not even the homepage was working for a while. This is definitely not the usual outage we know and love.
We need federation… Gitlab ain’t gonna do it, ForgeJo doesn’t seem to have enough people to work on it (programming language is Go, so any takers?), and the only federated / distributed alternative that’s really there seems to be radicle.
Radicle is nice, but very limited at the moment. Discovering other repos isn’t easy (no search), the issue pages are quite plain, but at least everything is stored in git.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Federation is irrelevant. Matrix is federated, yet most communities and users would lose communication if matrix.org got offline.
With, transport-only distributablity, which i think is what radicale offers, availability would depend on the peers. That means probably less availability than a big service host.
Distributed transport and storage would fix this. a la something like Tahoe-LAFS or (old) Freenet/Hyphanet. And no, IPFS is not an option because it’s generally a meme, and is pull-based, and have availability/longevity problems with metadata alone. iroh claims to be less of a meme, but I don’t know if they fixed any of the big design (or rather lack of design) problems.
At the end of the day, people can live with GitHub/GitLab/… going down for a few minutes every other week, or 1-2 hours every other month, as the benefits outweigh the occasional inconvenience by a big margin.
And git itself is distributed anyway. So it’s not like anyone was cut from committing work locally or pushing commits to a mirror.
I guess waiting on CI runs would be the most relevant inconvenience. But that’s not a distributable part of any service/implementation that exists, or can exist without being quickly gravely abused.