Re: Lua library bank? (Was: Ruby philosophy vs Lua philosophy

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 5:41 PM, Aaron B. <aaron@zadzmo.org> wrote:

On Sun, 10 Mar 2013 02:00:25 +0900
Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote:

> Just because a package downloader stores the packages to be downloaded
> in github doesn't mean the package developers have to use github or
> git to do their development. You can easily just use github, and the
> git protocol, as a pure distribution mechanism that happens to have
> some nice extra features.
>
> [Even if you use them as a simple distribution mechanism, using GH /
> git has some big advantages (robustness, future-proofness,
> documentation, familiarity, widespread support, tooling, etc) over
> adhoc distribution sites and/or mechanisms, simply because they're so
> very widely used.]

Please allow me to disagree: I've never used git as I never found a
reason to move off SVN (But let's not go offtopic about that.)

My main point is that I don't trust Github to be around
forever/robust/familiar, etc. Even Amazon has had outages.
Remember when Yahoo was the king of search engines?

You do not have to, clone it to your server. Keeping it up to date is trivial.

I still don't see any advantages of Github above a generic tarball
format + URL for distribution.

Git has significant advantages if you are a maintainer. For example in LuaDist I can keep projects that use Git up to date with almost no effort. No application of patches, no tarballs, no need to track who changed what and when etc. I can even merge in patches from other sources if there are more authors or contributors .. it is a blessing. Even more so if there are 10+ maintainers. Projects not on Git are a chore to keep updated.

GitHub in itself is not crucial, it just provides convenient interfaces to manage the 300+ repositories I currently maintain. Critical failure would only disrupt my workflow and bug tracker.

Now, If you can host tar gz files you can also host git repositories and generate the tar gz files from git. GitHub does that for us for free (yes you can download tar.gz files) and with a great track record so far. If you are so concerned about availability please feel free to host a mirror server on your expense.

PS: Keep your projects in git repositories. Thank You!