On 12/18/21 11:39 AM, Joshua O'Keefe wrote:
dubious of Microsoft's long term commitment to GitHub
Exactly. It's fine for now, but every day is a new day. Even if github stays up, my account could go bad.
A couple years ago my entire github account was blocked for about a day and all repos were unavailable. Not just locked like I couldn't log in or update, they were all taken down and no longer visible to anyone. Every link I had pointing to the repos was broken.
Thank god for gitlab, no thank gitlab for gitlab, and thank gitlab specifically that gitlab clones the github url structure. If there is ever a lawsuit over that, this is the counter-argument. I was able to clone all my repos from my local copy up to gitlab and then just "s/github/gitlab/g" in documents to convert all the links from github to gitlab and it all worked.
Github fixed it, but they never answered the question "Why did you do that?" nor "What did I do wrong so that I can avoid doing it in the future?" because of course, they didn't do that and they have no idea why it happened, and there IS NO way to deterministically "be good" like in ye quaint olde days of people shaking hands and doing business with each other.
Because, not that they admitted this, but what obviously happened was they have an inscrutable black box AI that just does stuff by magic for unknowable reasons, and you simply have to suffer the friendly fire and hope that when you contact support over it, that they fix it.
And there is no company or service that is any more certain. Even archive.org could go away or go bad, which is why I keep a copy of the original zip in the repo not just relying on a link to the archive.org copy. The best you can do is to just make the stuff portable and easy to copy so that at any given time, many people have done so.
The original zip is exactly that, which is why it survives, while Roger Merchberger's collection does not.
Today I say that a git repo is just about as portable as a zip file was yesterday. Anyone can clone the repo, not only to one of the several other github-like services, but also to several self-hostable systems. gitlab is even self-hostable, so you even retain all the fancy web interface features besides the simple files and revision history.
-- bkw
