Comment by zzzeek

10 years ago

We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now. If you google around for this technology, a lot of nice ideas, many using git itself as transport, were poking around, and around 2009 they started falling silent. Why? Because GitHub started up and everyone just buzzed over to it like so many moths to a flame, having learned nothing from places like Sourceforge about what happens when 90% of the open source world trusts their issue trackers, which is really a huge part of a project's documentation, to a for-profit, closed source platform that does not provide very good interoperability.

If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations, then it's time to pick up this work again. If issue tracking and code reviews were based on a common, distributed system like git itself, then all these companies could compete evenly for features and UX on top of such a system, without ever having the advantage of "locking in" its users with extremely high migration costs.

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zzzeek

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urda  10 years ago

> If GitHub is kicking back and sitting on their huge valuations,

There is no longer an "if". It's absolutely true that GitHub is cruising at this time. For example: They are more interested in hiring community managers / community "heroes" instead of actual engineers in SF.

pierrebeaucamp  10 years ago

This. I'm a big fan of Github, but it bothers me that this single service is the centerpiece of most OSS projects. We see it every time Github goes down and virtually nobody can be productive anymore. I hope to see a version control system on top of IPFS some day.

  • Joeri  10 years ago

    Ironically, git itself is decentralized. More effort should go into decentralized software architectures, especially in the current security climate where having a central point of failure is like having a virtual bull's eye for bad guys. There's no reason you couldn't have a decentralized issue tracker for example.

hendry  10 years ago

Suckless have discussed this several times and have fallen back to an email mailing list.

http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1201/index.html#msg10574

Last one proposed by someone: http://lists.suckless.org/dev/1504/26210.html

aws_ls  10 years ago

>We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now

Distributed is the key word. Blockchain/Bitcoin (not withstanding the hurtful politics ongoing at present) has shown the way, and ideally most shared/social things should work in a distributed, trust-less environment in future. Including Social networks and Search Engines.

So it is quite natural, that OSS developers can pave the way for shared/distributed source control (a protocol on top of GIT. Just like HTTP is over TCP).

Just to clarify, I don't hate github. But it sort of obscures the beauty/advancement that is GIT, over previous version control softwares. Wonder what does the creator Linus think of this?

hk__2  10 years ago

> We need world class, modern, distributed bug tracking now.

Why distributed? You need a central place to report bugs and track them to ensure they’re not duplicated everywhere.

  • monkmartinez  10 years ago

    I am not Michael Bayer (but I hope to be more like him someday)... that said, what I think he means or could mean is that issues would be distributed along with the repo. Maybe something like a git log for issues that are attached to and/or part of the repo itself.

    Thinking about it, something like this would be sweet. I would immediately have a snap shot of things that might go boom when I run said software. eta: Instead, I have to go dig through github itself, which is slow compared to greping through a git log.

  • throwaway999888  10 years ago

    Why distributed version control? You need a central place to pull from and push to, to ensure that forks and patches are not duplicated everywhere... ;)

andreastt  10 years ago

I wrote a little bit about this two years ago: https://sny.no/2014/04/dbts

There’s not necessarily an antagonism between distributed and centralised in this case. You can still have a centralised frontend such as Github Issues, backed by a versioned and distributed backend using i.e. git.