Engine of forum

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 04:06:38PM +0000, Neia Neutuladh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> I'm a little paranoid about centralized services like Github. I'd
> prefer a federated service for source control / project management,
> where you could easily fork projects from my server to yours and send
> back pull requests.  Then there would be no extra cost for hosting
> your own vs using an existing instance.

In fact, git itself was designed with such a decentralized usage pattern
in mind.  Ironically, people have rebuilt centralized platforms on top
of it, and even to the point of building walled gardens like github.

I don't argue against the usefulness of the features that github
provides, but I'm also wary of the fact that it's basically a walled
garden -- there's no simple way I know of to extract data like pull
requests, comments, cross-references, etc..  I mean, it's *possible* to
write a web crawler that does just that, but such functionality is
second-class, and one might argue, that it is possible at all is merely
a happy accident, since github's very design seems to be geared at
drawing people to centralize everything on github.  It's not quite at
the point of vendor lock-in, but it's certainly uncomfortably close, in
my view.


> I've been low-key thinking about making a federated github, one where
> exporting your data is as simple as a `git clone; git submodule update
> --init`. Probably nothing will come of it, though.

That would be more in line with the decentralized design of git. I would
welcome such a platform, if it ever materializes.


T

-- 
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird. -- D. Knuth