6 ms·

No thats not a strange decision. self-hosted git servers disappear all the time, it's better to have everything unavailable at once when github is down than suf

by klntsky 29d ago

No thats not a strange decision. self-hosted git servers disappear all the time, it's better to have everything unavailable at once when github is down than suffer whenever either of the sources goes unreachable. Non-developers view git availability as a simple utility, they don't attach a value judgement to git being usable with any remote.

steinwinde 29d ago
> suffer whenever either of the sources goes unreachable This is not the way Palomar works. From the About page (https://palomar-registry.org/about https://palomar-registry.org/about): > Palomar does keep a public preservation fork of every registered source, solely as a backup for the registry in the event that the original repository disappears. The decision to limit git sources to Github is likely in order to be able to use Github's fork mechanism. Palomar could still offer to take a copy of the relevant commit of non-Github repositories.
- fuglede_ 29d ago
  And since all they need is a particular folder structure, you don't really need anything Git at all. Any kind of blob would do, cf. e.g. how Zenodo works.
crote 29d ago
The main reason Github is in the news these days is due to its unreliability. If availability is your main concern, Github would be a very odd choice for your One Blessed Source. Besides, it isn't "self-hosted basement Git server VS Github". There are plenty of other large and reliable forges out there, such as GitLab, Sourcehut, Bitbucket, or Codeberg. Considering how many people - from individual devs to major open-source projects - are abandoning Github, launching a new project in 2026 which only works with Github is a rather odd choice. It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective. Git has a standard protocol it uses for cloning repos. You have to go out of your way to make it not work with other forges. And if reliability is critical, surely you'd just mirror it locally? Heck, why not make use of Git's inherent distributed nature and allow defining multiple upstream sources? Integrity is already handled by the commit hash itself, so it doesn't matter if you fetch that commit from Github, GitLab, or some guy's basement server - just take whichever one happens to respond the fastest.
- YetAnotherNick 29d ago
  > Considering how many people That is a terrible metric to look into. Github being down is news, but on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better. It's just they are in news less often.
  - steinwinde 29d ago
    > on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better I suspect the same. But do you have any evidence for this? The status pages of Github and Gitlab (more precisely their history pages) don't seem to be a good starting point for comparisons. Anything I find online are people reporting their own experiences, and it's difficult to tell how accurate they are, how many users were truely affected etc. The only thing I can vouch for is that Github has got more unreliable - adding to the hearsay myself...
- orochimaaru 28d ago
  This is for mathematicians and not software engineers. You look for ease of use and familiarity with tooling. If I was a mathematician looking for a simple solution, I would go for GitHub too. Software engineering concerns don’t really apply here.
bebimbop 29d ago
I don't know if I'd consider GitLab, Bitbucket or any of the other git repo hosting services to be much worse than github in terms of availability or reliability.

by klntsky 29d ago

steinwinde 29d ago

> suffer whenever either of the sources goes unreachable This is not the way Palomar works. From the About page (https://palomar-registry.org/about https://palomar-registry.org/about): > Palomar does keep a public preservation fork of every registered source, solely as a backup for the registry in the event that the original repository disappears. The decision to limit git sources to Github is likely in order to be able to use Github's fork mechanism. Palomar could still offer to take a copy of the relevant commit of non-Github repositories.

fuglede_ 29d ago
And since all they need is a particular folder structure, you don't really need anything Git at all. Any kind of blob would do, cf. e.g. how Zenodo works.

crote 29d ago

The main reason Github is in the news these days is due to its unreliability. If availability is your main concern, Github would be a very odd choice for your One Blessed Source. Besides, it isn't "self-hosted basement Git server VS Github". There are plenty of other large and reliable forges out there, such as GitLab, Sourcehut, Bitbucket, or Codeberg. Considering how many people - from individual devs to major open-source projects - are abandoning Github, launching a new project in 2026 which only works with Github is a rather odd choice. It doesn't even make sense from a technical perspective. Git has a standard protocol it uses for cloning repos. You have to go out of your way to make it not work with other forges. And if reliability is critical, surely you'd just mirror it locally? Heck, why not make use of Git's inherent distributed nature and allow defining multiple upstream sources? Integrity is already handled by the commit hash itself, so it doesn't matter if you fetch that commit from Github, GitLab, or some guy's basement server - just take whichever one happens to respond the fastest.

YetAnotherNick 29d ago
> Considering how many people That is a terrible metric to look into. Github being down is news, but on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better. It's just they are in news less often.
- steinwinde 29d ago
  > on a long enough time horizon Gitlab or other provider isn't significantly better I suspect the same. But do you have any evidence for this? The status pages of Github and Gitlab (more precisely their history pages) don't seem to be a good starting point for comparisons. Anything I find online are people reporting their own experiences, and it's difficult to tell how accurate they are, how many users were truely affected etc. The only thing I can vouch for is that Github has got more unreliable - adding to the hearsay myself...
orochimaaru 28d ago
This is for mathematicians and not software engineers. You look for ease of use and familiarity with tooling. If I was a mathematician looking for a simple solution, I would go for GitHub too. Software engineering concerns don’t really apply here.

bebimbop 29d ago

I don't know if I'd consider GitLab, Bitbucket or any of the other git repo hosting services to be much worse than github in terms of availability or reliability.