GitHub, a massive repository for open source software, is currently unavailable.
“All GitHub services are experiencing significant disruptions,” reads the GitHub status page.
The outage started just after 4:00 pm Pacific time when GitHub noted “We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions, Pages and Pull Requests.” Since then, the problem has escalated to the entire website, with the status page noting that GitHub suspects the issue is “a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back.”
At 4:45 pm PST, GitHub noted that it was rolling back the changes it believed caused the current issues and already “seeing improvements in service health.”
It’s a rare outage for GitHub, which is used by millions of developers to host the code for open source projects. Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and it’s only grown in prominence in the six years since.
We need federation… Gitlab ain’t gonna do it, ForgeJo doesn’t seem to have enough people to work on it (programming language is Go, so any takers?), and the only federated / distributed alternative that’s really there seems to be radicle.
Radicle is nice, but very limited at the moment. Discovering other repos isn’t easy (no search), the issue pages are quite plain, but at least everything is stored in git.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Federation is irrelevant. Matrix is federated, yet most communities and users would lose communication if matrix.org got offline.
With, transport-only distributablity, which i think is what radicale offers, availability would depend on the peers. That means probably less availability than a big service host.
Distributed transport and storage would fix this. a la something like Tahoe-LAFS or (old) Freenet/Hyphanet. And no, IPFS is not an option because it’s generally a meme, and is pull-based, and have availability/longevity problems with metadata alone. iroh claims to be less of a meme, but I don’t know if they fixed any of the big design (or rather lack of design) problems.
At the end of the day, people can live with GitHub/GitLab/… going down for a few minutes every other week, or 1-2 hours every other month, as the benefits outweigh the occasional inconvenience by a big margin.
And git itself is distributed anyway. So it’s not like anyone was cut from committing work locally or pushing commits to a mirror.
I guess waiting on CI runs would be the most relevant inconvenience. But that’s not a distributable part of any service/implementation that exists, or can exist without being quickly gravely abused.