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Comment by AndrewO | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fair to say that Git is going to be a major tool for software archeology and cultural studies of our little subculture. I can almost imagine someone reading through Rails commits in 30+ years who will have no idea what a LOLCat is.

(Although I guess it's valid to wager what will last longer: Rails or LOLCats. IMHO, Rails has a slight edge.)

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You seem to be assuming that git will still be around in 30 years, and that git-hosting sites will still be online with history from repositories that old.

I'm not sure I'd bet on that happening.

I don't think it's unlikely at all. Git might be succeeded by something, but certainly some projects will be around.

For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth. Some of the history is certainly lost due to lossy conversion. RCS and CVS never were very good at tracking it anyway. However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history. (why would you convert to something inferior?)

Furthermore, as git is distributed, the history of a project is fully contained within countless clones. I doubt any sufficiently popular open source project could just disappear from the internet. That's why the hosting sites don't matter either. If one goes down, it's trivial to migrate to another host.

> For example, the Emacs repository (the git clone at least. I haven't checked bzr) has commits dated before my birth.

Given that both the Bazaar and Git repositories are imported from the same source, they should contain the same commits. The earliest commit in Bazaar is:

    ------------------------------------------------------------
    revno: 1
    committer: Jim Blandy <jimb@redhat.com>
    timestamp: Thu 1985-04-18 00:48:29 +0000
    message:
      entered into RCS
    ------------------------------------------------------------

> However, any conversion from git is going to have to retain full history.

Full, except for the bits of it that Git discarded.

I's say it's reasonable to think that it will always be around as long as someone has the code and the ability to compile it. It probably won't be the VCS of choice in 30 years, but for people with that kind of interest, I'm sure it'll be available.

And hey, storage is cheap (and only getting cheaper). Even if Github, Sourceforge, etc are gone, barring a major calamity, I think it's safe to assume there will be a backup of those somewhere, even if it's offline.

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