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0 pointstedivm7y ago0 comments

When Linus introduced git he didn't seem to care at all about decentralizing from a political standpoint, just from a "I can work on this from my laptop without an internet connection" point of view.

0 comments

toyg7y ago

That's the thing - git was fundamentally a tool borne with an asynchronous workflow in mind: I work on X, Alice works on Y, Bob works on Z, and the eventual merging (which might happen days or weeks later) should be as simple as possible - without worrying about who checked out what. Git was dropped in the "distributed VCS" bucket, but decentralization was a secondary effect of the workflow Linus wanted to achieve.

GitHub then took the server-side bits of git, and effectively built a web-based interface with social features on top. Git itself is still very much a decentralized tool (just add a new remote and off you go), only the social GUI is centralized.

It would be cool if somebody could build "Github over P2P" (I guess with a bit of blockchain, because hype). At that point the entire stack would be fully decentralized.

soulofmischief7y ago

A git service built on IPFS or something similar would be wicked. It does take quite a bit of engineering (money) to compete with the big boys, however.

chupasaurus7y ago

The first project provided by DDG to me was Radicle[https://radicle.xyz/]

soulofmischief7y ago

rad project allows you to create, checkout, manage, and publish a project, comprised of issues, patch proposals, and a git repo.

Well hot dog.

And it uses LISP for scripting? Nice.

Interesting approach to saving state, too.:

One only needs the address of the latest input, the "head", to be able to recover the whole log. The owner of a machine uses an IPNS link to point to the head of the list, and the name of this link is then the name of the machine also.

Thanks for sharing that. Definitely going to give it a whirl this weekend.

1 more reply

akavel7y ago

There's a Git application on Scuttlebutt, already used by people in the community - see e.g.:

https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb-intro

soulofmischief7y ago

Your sister comment had another project to share based on IPFS: https://radicle.xyz/

One thing that seems clear is that there needs to be a standard interchangeable format for storing PRs and issues, so that it's not just the point of origin that's decentralized, but the data itself (in case the maintainers vanish).

I'm not really sure how to go about that sort of thing either myself or as a community effort but I'd appreciate any advice from the HN community.

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toyg7y ago

> anybody can push to anybody else's git repository. [...] The nomenclature is to treat the ssb remote as the "true" remote, and work off of a branch called @your-username/master as your own master, emulating a forked repo. This seems to work well: the SSB network thrives off of being a group of kind, respectful folks who don't push to each other's master branch. :)

Uh, thanks but no thanks. I thought we had learnt that the honor system does not scale.

herewulf7y ago

Interesting discussion on this topic from about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498

chupasaurus7y ago

> decentralization was a secondary effect of the workflow Linus wanted to achieve.

Linus didn't want to achieve a change in workflow of kernel development, he just made a tool to make which would ease the pain, Linux development was decentralized since forever.

toyg7y ago

What I said is that the design of git was driven by the requirements of async workflow (“easing the pain”, in your words) more than decentralization as a philosophical objective. I think we saying the same thing with different words.

I still wonder if Larry McVoy feels sore that git basically destroyed BitKeeper and became what it did. “It could have been me” and all that...

amyjess7y ago

0 comments

toyg7y ago

It would be cool if somebody could build "Github over P2P" (I guess with a bit of blockchain, because hype). At that point the entire stack would be fully decentralized.

soulofmischief7y ago

A git service built on IPFS or something similar would be wicked. It does take quite a bit of engineering (money) to compete with the big boys, however.

chupasaurus7y ago

The first project provided by DDG to me was Radicle[https://radicle.xyz/]

soulofmischief7y ago

rad project allows you to create, checkout, manage, and publish a project, comprised of issues, patch proposals, and a git repo.

Well hot dog.

And it uses LISP for scripting? Nice.

Interesting approach to saving state, too.:

Thanks for sharing that. Definitely going to give it a whirl this weekend.

1 more reply

akavel7y ago

There's a Git application on Scuttlebutt, already used by people in the community - see e.g.:

https://github.com/noffle/git-ssb-intro

soulofmischief7y ago

Your sister comment had another project to share based on IPFS: https://radicle.xyz/

I'm not really sure how to go about that sort of thing either myself or as a community effort but I'd appreciate any advice from the HN community.

1 more reply

toyg7y ago

Uh, thanks but no thanks. I thought we had learnt that the honor system does not scale.

herewulf7y ago

Interesting discussion on this topic from about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17234498

chupasaurus7y ago

> decentralization was a secondary effect of the workflow Linus wanted to achieve.

Linus didn't want to achieve a change in workflow of kernel development, he just made a tool to make which would ease the pain, Linux development was decentralized since forever.

toyg7y ago

I still wonder if Larry McVoy feels sore that git basically destroyed BitKeeper and became what it did. “It could have been me” and all that...

amyjess7y ago