I could research this on my own, but was interested in hearing from the community.
Software tends to fall in categories based on who has control, how it is accessed, and who owns the data.
For instance, a FOSS project hosts encrypted user data for free, and the user easily controls who accesses it, but if the server/service goes down, users lose access to everything. Or, a user has their own offline files they control 100%, but sharing is more cumbersome.
Where does git fall in this spectrum? It seems that it’s a mix, where authoritative copies may be offline at times before merging, when it returns to the hosted version. Its hosted, but can be self-hosted, and multiple copies of code canbee offline as well. Does it rely on a central source hosting, and a company willing to support the software?
I’ve never contributed to a project with version control before, though I’ve worked in a few places that used JIRA or git. It interests me how it works, and I’m just curious to read a Lemmy discussion while it’s raining where I am.
(As I prepare to press SUBMIT it occurs to me this is a FOSS question more than a Linux one. If this is a stupid post for this /r/, please report/remove or ask me to and I will.)
When you make a project with git, what you’re doing is essentially making a database to control a sequence of changes (or history) that build up your codebase. You can send this database to someone else (or in other words they can clone it), and they can make their own changes on top. If they want to send you changes back, they can send you “patches” to apply on your own database (or rather, your own history).
Note: everything here is decentralized. Everyone has the entire history, and they send history they want others to have. Now, this can be a hassle with many developers involved. You can imagine sending everyone patches, and them putting it into their own tree, and vice versa. It’s a pain for coordination. So in practice what ends up happening is we have a few (or often, one) repo that works as a source of truth. Everyone sends patches to that repo - and pulls down patches from that repo. That’s where code forges like GitHub come in. Their job is to control this source of truth repo, and essentially coordinate what patches are “officially” in the code.
In practice, even things like the Linux kernel have sources of truth. Linus’s tree is the “true” Linux, all the maintainers have their own tree that works as the source of truth for their own version of Linux (which they send changes back to Linus when ready), and so on. Your company might have their own repo for their internal project to send to the maintainers as well.
In practice that means everyone has a copy of the entire repo, but we designate one repo as the real one for the project at hand. This entire (somewhat convoluted mess) is just a way to decide - “where do I get my changes from”. Sending your changes to everyone doesn’t scale, so in practice we just choose who everyone coordinates with.
Git is completely decentralized (it’s just a database - and everyone has their own copy), but project development isn’t. Code forges like GitHub just represent that.
So even if github and gitlab and similar were shutdown, the data (code) being worked on can live on, and isn’t tied to the platform, right?
Well the bugtracker and additional features are not inside of the git repository. So they’d get lost. But each ‘git clone’ is a complete clone of the (source code) repository including all of the history of changes, the commit messages, dates and individual changes. That’s stored on every single computer that cloned the repository and you have a copy of everything locally. Though it might be out of date if you didn’t pull the latest changes. But apart from that it’s the same data that Github stores. You could just make it available somewhere else and continue.
Thanks for illuminating some black box for me!
The version control system, and all the associated code isn’t tied to any system - yes.