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Comment by thangalin | Hacker News Reader

Since git is decentralized, moving elsewhere is a single command:

    git remote set-url origin <url>

Numerous alternatives exist:

* https://notabug.org/

* https://bitbucket.org/

* https://gitlab.com/

* https://allura.apache.org/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_host...

While GitHub is a massive repository, developers can change the origin with ease if necessary.

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From what I've gathered and seen around the web the problem isn't really that git isn't decentralized, it's that it's purely a code versioning tool. With GitHub you have a community, an issue tracker, a wiki, possibly a website hosted with them and so on. Honestly, the biggest hurdle is just community. By not using GitHub you are losing a ton of potential contributors and users just by lack of exposure. It saddens me a bit, but I can live with it. I host my own Git, am setting up a Drone testing server but still mirror everything to GitHub.

It is unfortunate that project management tools that build on top of git instead of around git haven't really managed to succeed enough on a wider scale to coalesce into a some degree of defacto standard.

It's pretty surprising to me that there's only one or two serious attempts (eg, Fossil) at bundling a bug tracker and stuff inside a DVCS repository, so you keep everything together with the code. I was looking at this a year or two ago and couldn't find anything which met my particular requirements.

It doesn't even need to be standardized, just reasonably portable.

http://sit-it.org/

I haven't kept count, but I think I've seen like a dozen attempts of making git-based issue trackers over the times. Of course it is debatable how "serious" these attempts ever have been.

http://sit-it.org/

> Of course it is debatable how "serious" these attempts ever have been.

I doubt things like this will really gain traction.

I mean, you could always host your own GitLab instance for free if you are worried about GitHub ever going down.

The ergonomics are terrible. For me to submit a bug, are you really telling me that I need to fork a repository, commit my issue and then submit a pull-request? Ughh, pass...

Most in-repository bug trackers have (or plan to have) a way to get bug reports committed to the repository automatically, usually via email or a web site.

So now your decentralized solution requires a server running somewhere.

Why not just install GitLab or Bugzilla on that server?

This reminds me of something someone (forgot who) said, "If it can be built with JavaScript, for better or for worse, it will be."

I think the same thing applies blockchain and edge-computing.

For the same reason that you could use cvs or svn, but choose to use git: if the bug database is part of the source-code repository (or is checked into the repository, which is much the same thing), then it goes with you when you're offline. You might be riding a train through the Rockies, but you can still add new bug reports, and mark existing ones fixed, as part of your normal work and then push those commits to the server when the train stops in Denver.

You probably still have a server holding a copy of the repository that you can push your commits to simply because it simplifies the logistics. Likewise you would want a server hosting a web view of the bug database, because it simplifies the logistics. Think of the layers of management who you would have to teach git commands to, or the QA department who were still using spreadsheets a few years ago.

> You might be riding a train through the Rockies, but you can still add new bug reports

So, you want to loose-out on the many benefits of having <best-in-class> issue system because of that one time you decide to dev on a moving train?

Open up notepad, man. Your next stop is only a few hours away.

In principle there is nothing that you would lose out on. Of course in practice there are several existing bug trackers that have had years or decades of work put into them and therefore have a huge checklist of features. I'll grant you that I've never seen a distributed bug-tracking system with a similarly long checklist.

BTW, this is the same argument that people used to use against distributed version control. Why give up this long feature checklist to get a version control system that works on the train? Because even when you are connected to the internet, every time you wait on a server is time you'll never get back. Even if it's only a hundred milliseconds, your life is too short.

> BTW, this is the same argument that people used to use against distributed version control.

Maybe people do, but it's Apple's and organges. Modifying files locally is the nature of software development. Switching from SVN to git didn't change the actual developer workflow of "make changes and commit", which is just not how issues are dealt with in reality.

Also, what about authentication for the web front-end? Are you going to have a database to manage users? Every use case of a distributed issue tracker just seems to go against the grain.

A better approach would be to build a traditional issue tracker (centralized) that has the ability to use git internally as a database engine for issues only (not users, settings, etc). Commit author names/emails are linked to actual user accounts and users could optionally clone the issues repository, use a cli-tool and push it back up to the server.

This would be to issue trackers what GitHub/GitLab is to repositories.

You already have a database of authorized users of your version control system, even if you're just using ssh.

I think the overall experience is too jarring to catch on. I guess time will tell.

The github monoculture isn't about individuals setting their own repos so much as items like submodules and issues and code depending on github. Go modules use the github url in the import statements. GH is a lot more ingrained in the community than SF ever was

It's not like Go modules must be hosted on Github. You can host Go modules on any domain.

Github is just where most of the community is because of network effect.

Lots of packages are increasingly hosting on their own domain (like go.uber.org/zap) and controlling the mirroring themselves.

Github really is a disaster waiting to happen. It is only a matter of time. With luck, people will have started to migrate away before anything major happens, but I doubt it.

+1 for notabug. I use it everyday and it has always worked perfectly.

gitlab even lets you two-way mirror with github and some other git hosters.

Don't forget Amazon's "CodeCommit". That's what we use because we don't like the insane politics of GitHub.

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