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TL;DR : do we need a read-only git proxy

Guys, I just thought about something and this potential gitpocalypse.

There is no doubt anymore that regardless of Microsoft's decisions about Github, some projects will or already have migrated to the competition.

I'm thinking : some projects use the git link to fetch the code. If a dependency gets migrated, it won't be updated anymore, or worse, if the previous repo gets deleted, it can break the project.

Hence my idea : create some repository facade to any public git repository (regardless of their actual location).
Instead of using github.com/any/thing.git, we could use opensourcegit.com/any/thing.git. (fake url for the sake of the example).
It would redirect to the right repository (for public read only), and the owner could change the location of the actual repository in case of a migration.

What do you think ? If I get enough ++'s, I'll create a git repo about this.

Comments
  • 2
    I'm not sure the problem is gonna be big enough to require a solution like this, although it sounds cool.
  • 1
    This could be turned into a collab. What say @react-guy
  • 1
    I see where your head is at, sure.. though I don't think it would be popular. Those of us that care about privacy use VPN services and proxies already, and the extremely paranoid among us use TOR and whatnot.

    While it's a good idea, I imagine most of your target users already use something like that.
  • 1
    @stisch The point is not privacy but reliability, platform-agnosticism, and future-proof dependency management.

    With MS buying github, I anticipate a lot of fragmentation : some will go to Bitbucket, some to Gitlab, some will stay...

    For a library developer, this can become a nightmare to find the new repo of all your dependencies (and their dependencies if the lib is not maintained anymore). If you had a unified domain for OS code, you won't have to care about repositories migrations.
  • 1
    @react-guy most languages have a dependency manager. Php has composer, js has npm, if a library dev decides to move he has just to update the repo link there, or am I missing something?
  • 1
    Like Packagist :p
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