Less puckishly: in general, as a movement/culture/economic ferment, we probably should have been more hesitant to introduce a de-facto single-point-of-failure into, like, all the things.
I mean, nothing _mandates_ that NixOS packages pull their source from github (or any other git hoster) but the standard practice is basically just this.
The nix cache will prevent the impact from this specific disablement from being, well, disabling, for most folks most of the time, for a while at least, but caching, by definition, is ephemeral storage, and sooner or later, it, ah, ephemes? Is that a word?
There are also a lot of packages that have to be built locally, e.g. nonfree packages like nvidia drivers; at least _one_ of these packages (how popular? how critical?) will probably fail to build on this account, and this in turn will cause a certain (unknown) quotient of misery. Somewhere, some lights are going out. (How many? How soon? With what mitigation?)
Anyway. Nix is obviously not the only product to rely on github as a de facto backing store, so
Yes! There are alternatives to Github, people! Diversify! Switch to Sourcehut or Gitea or Gitlab or even DIY with Gitolite. git is a decentralized peer-to-peer system, we shouldn't let Microsoft have a monopoly on its use.
> Just adding variety reduces the chance of having all the important repos up at the same time.
this, sadly, is correct, and the solution you propose is also correct.
The only other option would be for the NixOS Foundation to mirror the git repo of _every single important package_, and I know they're already struggling with the prohibitive cloud costs of hosting just the build objects. :/
I think this attitude really underrates the network effects of GitHub.
I personally am okay making an account on another forge to submit a bug report or patch, but most people aren't. And so I keep my repos on GitHub.
I do plan to soon set up mirroring to another service though. I haven't found a great zero-effort solution to mirror repos from an entire organization though, including ones that are created after mirroring was initially set up. Do you know of any tools which have that functionality? (If not I might write my own at some point.)
I mean, nothing _mandates_ that NixOS packages pull their source from github (or any other git hoster) but the standard practice is basically just this.
The nix cache will prevent the impact from this specific disablement from being, well, disabling, for most folks most of the time, for a while at least, but caching, by definition, is ephemeral storage, and sooner or later, it, ah, ephemes? Is that a word?
There are also a lot of packages that have to be built locally, e.g. nonfree packages like nvidia drivers; at least _one_ of these packages (how popular? how critical?) will probably fail to build on this account, and this in turn will cause a certain (unknown) quotient of misery. Somewhere, some lights are going out. (How many? How soon? With what mitigation?)
Anyway. Nix is obviously not the only product to rely on github as a de facto backing store, so