Why we need tools like git-dit

Right now, github shows you this:

And these things will happen more frequently in future, I assure you!

In the first half of 2017, we already had 3 major service outages, 3 minor service outages and 21 other problems. Yes, indeed, this is very good service quality. It really is. Anyways, it is not optimal. Github advertises itself with 22M developers, 59M repositories and 117k businesses world-wide, which is a freakin’ lot.

I really like github, it is a great platform for the open-source community and individual projects and developers.

But. There’s a but.

Github will not scale endlessly. It will vanish at some point. Maybe not in 2 years, maybe not in 5 or even 10 years. But at some point, a competitor will step up and get bigger and better than github. Or it will be taken down by someone. Who knows.

But when that happens we, as a community, have to be prepared. And that’s why we need distributed issue tracking like we implemented with git-dit.

Yes, it is unfortunate that git-dit itself is hosted on github. And we do not have the issues from github in the repository, yet, as there is no mapper available. But we will get there.

I won’t go into detail how git-dit works here, there’s a talk from GPN17 on youtube about that (in german), where you can learn about these things.

With git-dit, we won’t be tied to github and if github vanishes from today to tomorrow, we would be able to continue development seamlessly because the issues are mirrored into the repository itself. In fact, we won’t even need github in the first place, because the repository itself would contain everything which is needed for development.

But we are not there yet.

If you’re feeling brave, you’re more than welcome to try out git-dit or contribute to the codebase.