I'm not sure I follow where THEY introduced the SPOF. Having a central repo is convenient for many people's workflow so there would probably be a SPOF (In that sense) for the people using github anyway. The difference becomes would you have a team dedicated to maintaining your git repos if you didn't use github?
Is your qualm with the fact that many people share the same SPOF?
Sure Github has their outages from time to time, but it doesn't prevent me from sharing code. Git is still distributed. It might be inconvenient when it is down, but its not a full-out failure of the system.
Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
The problem is that a lot of people who use GitHub because it's convenient stop using git as a distributed VCS. They don't have a backup when it goes down, and their productivity is significantly impacted during those service interruptions. In a way you're right that it's not GitHub's fault, except to the extent that such interruptions seem more common than one might expect. This is often what happens when we use web services to make something more convenient.
What's important is that people should consider this downside along with the upside of greater convenience and operational simplicity. Often they'll choose to forward anyway. More power to them and their providers. OTOH, some would be better served by sticking with a truly distributed alternative.
What about the one or (more often) many local versions of the repository on peoples' computers? You can't stop using git as a distributed VCS. Everyone always has a full copy.
Yes, you can do local/personal work, but if GitHub was your only way to share that work with others, or the only place you had your reviews and bug reports, then all of that comes to a halt during the outage. IMX many GitHub users have forgotten (or never knew) how to email or apply a patch so work can go on. They just get totally blocked. As I said in another sub-thread, that's not really GitHub's fault but it's something adopters should consider and (probably) seek to ameliorate.
Yeah, you're right of course, but what's nice is that it's easy to figure the sharing stuff out on demand. That is, using GitHub doesn't do anything to lock you in from a sharing standpoint - it is just as easy to go figure out how to share your code after GitHub goes down as it is to go figure it out beforehand. Certainly from a code review and bug report standpoint it locks you in, but so does pretty much every other code review and bug report tool. I'd love to see a distributed competitor to those offerings take off. Last time I said that somebody pointed me to fossil, and it looks pretty cool for that, but it also comes with an SCM of its own.
Thanks for this. People seem to forget that most people were using a shared upstream anyway, and github made it easier and more reliable to do so while providing a good code-browsing UI and repository directory to boot.
Is your qualm with the fact that many people share the same SPOF?
Sure Github has their outages from time to time, but it doesn't prevent me from sharing code. Git is still distributed. It might be inconvenient when it is down, but its not a full-out failure of the system.
Escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.