git@vger.kernel.org mailing list mirror (one of many)
 help / color / mirror / code / Atom feed
From: Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>
To: Sebastian Schuberth <sschuberth@gmail.com>
Cc: "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason" <avarab@gmail.com>,
	"Git Mailing List" <git@vger.kernel.org>,
	patchwork@lists.ozlabs.org
Subject: Re: Pain points in Git's patch flow
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2021 17:49:21 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20210419214921.afurkxy7oru6bny6@nitro.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHGBnuOVmzzhgW6GanHBXNb22UW3P1m3i6PJnOUEhYPO76hH4g@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 07:54:37AM +0200, Sebastian Schuberth wrote:
> > of these proposed alternatives involve moving away from something that's
> > a distributed system today (E-Mail infrastructure, local clients), to
> > what's essentially some website run by a centralized entity, in some
> > cases proprietary.
> 
> That's a good point, I admit I haven't thought of that. Probably
> because I also don't care much. So *does* it really matter? What
> exactly concerns you about a "centralized entity"? Is it the technical
> aspect of a single point of failure, or the political / social aspect
> of being dependent on someone you do not want to get influenced by? I
> guess it's a bit of both.

It's all of the above, and really should not be discounted. Let's take what
Russian government is doing lately as an example. In its effort to control
social dissent, Russian censorship organization RosKomNadzor (RKN) has taken
steps to deliberately break internet operation -- in a very ham-fisted way.
Just a month ago they tried to "slow down" Twitter by blocking DNS queries for
any domains containing the substring "t.co" -- which, hey, broke
gihubusercontent.com among many other sites. There's every reason to believe
that this won't be the only time they do something idiotic like that, so as a
result it is increasingly difficult for Russian contributors to justify
participating in projects that are hosted on GitHub -- one day they may not be
able to reach it reliably (or at all).

(If you think the answer to that would be "just use a VPN", it's one of those
recommendations that are easy to make for someone not worried about their ISP
reporting "sketchy encrypted traffic" to "the authorities.")

Patches sent via email remain immune to this. Even if vger falls over, it's
merely a list service -- there are alternative ways of transmitting RFC2822
messages that don't involve a central host (such as via a NNTP gateway,
publishing a public-inbox "feed", etc). Email remains one of the few protocols
that are designed ground-up to be decentralized and I'm afraid that we are
again finding ourselves in a world where this is increasingly relevant.

> While these concerns could probably be addressed somewhat e.g. by
> multiple independently operated Gerrit servers that are kept in sync,
> I was curious and quickly search for more fitting "truly
> decentralized" solutions, and came across radicle [1]. Just FYI.

I know Radicle folks -- I was on their technical board. A lot of what they
have implemented is very similar to my initial thoughts expressed in
https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/patches-carved-into-developer-sigchains

I have high hopes for the project, but it's not ready to take on the world
until they implement code collaboration aspects (issue tracking, change
requests, etc). It's going to be tough and I really hope they succeed.

-K

  parent reply	other threads:[~2021-04-19 21:49 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 46+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2021-04-14  6:13 Pain points in Git's patch flow Jonathan Nieder
2021-04-14  7:22 ` Bagas Sanjaya
2021-04-14  8:02   ` Junio C Hamano
2021-04-14 21:42     ` Junio C Hamano
2021-04-15  8:49   ` Denton Liu
2021-04-15  6:06 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-04-15 15:45 ` Son Luong Ngoc
2021-04-19  2:57   ` Eric Wong
2021-04-19 13:35     ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-21 10:19     ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-04-28  7:21       ` Eric Wong
2021-04-28  7:05     ` Eric Wong
2021-04-15 18:25 ` Atharva Raykar
2021-04-16 19:50 ` Junio C Hamano
2021-04-16 20:25   ` Junio C Hamano
2021-05-02  5:35   ` ZheNing Hu
2021-04-18  8:29 ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-18 20:54   ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-04-19  2:58     ` Eric Wong
2021-04-19  5:54     ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-19  6:04       ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-19  8:26       ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-04-19 19:23         ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-19 22:34           ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-20  6:30             ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-20 16:37               ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-30 20:45               ` Felipe Contreras
2021-04-20 10:34           ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-04-19 19:36       ` Eric Wong
2021-04-19 19:49         ` Sebastian Schuberth
2021-04-19 22:00           ` Konstantin Ryabitsev
2021-05-08  2:10             ` dwh
2021-04-19 21:49       ` Konstantin Ryabitsev [this message]
2021-04-19 23:03         ` Stephen Smith
2021-05-08  2:08         ` dwh
2021-05-08  4:41           ` Bagas Sanjaya
2021-04-30 20:58       ` Felipe Contreras
2021-04-21  4:46 ` Daniel Axtens
2021-04-26  2:04 ` brian m. carlson
2021-04-26 14:24   ` Theodore Ts'o
2021-04-26 14:36   ` Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
2021-04-28  7:59   ` Eric Wong
2021-04-28 22:44     ` brian m. carlson
2021-04-30 20:16     ` Felipe Contreras
2021-04-30 20:35   ` Felipe Contreras
2021-04-30 21:09 ` Felipe Contreras

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

  List information: http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=20210419214921.afurkxy7oru6bny6@nitro.local \
    --to=konstantin@linuxfoundation.org \
    --cc=avarab@gmail.com \
    --cc=git@vger.kernel.org \
    --cc=patchwork@lists.ozlabs.org \
    --cc=sschuberth@gmail.com \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
Code repositories for project(s) associated with this public inbox

	https://80x24.org/mirrors/git.git

This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).