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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the point for major open-source projects or even company projects to depend on a third-party provider for git services in the cloud that is not on-premise. It's fine if the source code is self-hosted or on premise and the mirror is hosted on some cloud VCS like Github, but not the other-way round, which for the latter you risk getting problems like this.

The case for self-hosting a VCS server for serious projects is made once again.

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Unless you have the (ops) capacity to host it yourself reliably, chances are GitHub will be up more than your self-hosted solution.

As I'm typing this, I'm waiting for GitHub to recover so I can deploy an update to a rather important project for a big client. However, I'm happy it's their engineers to be scrambling to fix their git hosting, instead of me context switching from my work and rushing to duct-tape piece of plumbing I really don't care to think about.

and they rolled out a fix in 45 min which is less time then i took for lunch today.

> Unless you have the (ops) capacity to host it yourself reliably, chances are GitHub will be up more than your self-hosted solution.

For an individual it's absolutely trivial to self-host git over ssh more reliably than github.

It just costs a bit of money.

money is probably the main reason people don't selfhost

> self-host git over ssh more reliably than github.

Host where? That host may be down. If it's local, then you run into other problems trying to access it remotely.

Still, I find github to be down quite a lot lately which is concerning. It doesn't stop me from working, I just can't review PRs and get changes.. but I would be more worried if I were using github actions stopping me from releasing a hotfix.

GitHub addiction is not just about git itself. It's about the entire ecosystem of pull requests, issues, forking, linking to related projects, CI integrations, hosting for docs, and so on, all integrated under one sign-on umbrella. It is awfully convenient. Yes, for sure you can self-host one of the alternatives like GitLab, or assemble an equivalent set of services from smaller parts. It is absolutely reasonable to suggest that people should - I'm even inclined to agree - but comparing against git all by itself is the wrong comparison.

It is indeed convenient but the whole ecosystem now runs the risk of being a single source of failure if even one part of the service goes down and it is out of your control to do anything about it and also defeats the purpose of decentralisation of using git. It may not matter for personal or toy projects, but for company or serious ones, it does.

In the case of other risks of only using GH to host your project, Its like hosting your encrypted private key on Keybase because it is temptingly convenient but both run the risk of going down or getting compromised in a security breach.

Serious projects like the Linux kernel, WebKit and Chromium aren't primarily hosted on Github but have Github mirrors instead which makes more sense.

Having GitHub as the primary repository is OK as long as you do not depend on it for working, testing and deploying.

The issue is that people start using the CI/CD, the PRs, the issues and... yeah.

I can understand this sentiment, but a lot of projects and companies (especially startups) want something that "just works" and not something that they'll need to invest resources into maintaining. Something like this can happen on your self-hosted git server and you won't have an SLA or anything to fall back on.

Github (and gitlab) has a large value add with regard to discoverability, issue tracking, user management, hosting simplicity, and usually solid uptime.

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