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Comment by viperscape | Hacker News Reader

The package system for the rust language actually relies on github, as many found out during outage. I don't know if that will change, probably will with a read copy in a different git service.. but I thought it was interesting because I use github for everything save a few private projects, as I imagine most do. I'm not sure what to think of this, it seems backwards and grossly incompetent, yet here we are using it almost exclusively. It might be smart to decentralize some of this with torrents, if that's possible. Even if it was the read portion of a repository, it seems like something to consider, if it hasn't been already

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> The package system for the rust language actually relies on github, as many found out during outage.

This is not quite correct (although close to it). Cargo doesn't rely on GitHub, but it expects that there is some publicly-accessible git repository from which it can pull the source for any crate, and most crates use GitHub. So it's not a particular choice of Cargo, but a side-effect of GitHub's popularity in the community, and the fact that Cargo does not host source code itself.

If crates.io hosted the content themselves, it would just be the same problem, only with a service potentially less reliable than GitHub.

Unless you set up a system of mirrors. There are plenty of examples[1] to draw from.

1: http://mirrors.cpan.org/

Not if they acted like a mirror. Put it on GitHub, Bitbucket, and crates.io

The crates.io index is in a GitHub repository. Does Cargo fetch it directly from GitHub or from a set of redundant mirrors?

You're mixing up cargo features and the crates.io package system. Cargo does allow git dependencies but primarily you're supposed to use versioned crates.io packages, which are indeed provided by crates.io (even if they are actually hosted on S3 or whatever) not GitHub.

Not just rust language, to the best of my knowledge, even packagist, the php package manager relies heavily on github for sourcing its packages. But I think they have other resources too, apart from github.

Ruby's bundler doesn't entirely rely on Github, but pulling from a Github repo is a supported option that many take advantage of.

Rust's package manager doesn't source packages from GitHub (though it will pull packages from a git repo if you ask it to), the source for its index of packages is a git repository on GitHub. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index

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