Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Truly decentralized/federated software development platforms?

[אנטולי קרסנר]

Hello,


On 2015-03-17
rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> the Gitlab/Gitorius situation rekindled my interest in what I would call the 
> "next step" in software development management -- a truly 
> decentralised/federated platform.
> 
> First step could be to have different instances being able to "talk to each 
> other", a bit like different Diaspora pods and Friendica servers talk to each 
> other. So as to make pull requests, issue tracking, etc, near-seamless 
> *across* different servers.
> 
> Next step would be to have a truly decentralized solution, a bit like what 
> Twister[1] does for microblogging.
> 
> Anybody heard of anything like that? Anybody doing work in that direction?
> Any projects I should look into?
> 
> [1] http://twister.net.co/
> 



It doesn't have to be fully distributed. Actually it makes sense not to make it
distributed, because the last thing we want is a huge ever growing
"blockchain". What you can safely have is redundancy: distribute copies of the
repo content on many servers, and allow the front server to choose between
them, so it's harder to block/censor/DoS the system.

I think having a DHT for worldwide project and user search is a good idea, and
use local development platform serves which can federate. For example, in a
team of developers works on a project, one of them can host the git server at
home, or some other truly trusted location, and not in the "cloud" managed by
greedy selfish corporations.

So global things like project and user search can use a DHT, and operations
across instances (forking a repo from another server, sending merge request to
a repo in another server, etc.) can work using a federation API, e.g. based on
Activity Streams like Jessica Tallon's plan mentioned already in this thread.



a.k.

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