* * *

Or get the source code using Git, which actually (by design) guarantees that its checksums are stable.

Downloading a source tarball is significantly cheaper on both sides than git. A source tarball is 100% served from CDNs, whereas I don't believe the same isn't quite true for git (even over https).

That's a good point.

It's way more resource-intensive and much slower, which is why it's not preferred in Nixpkgs, for example.

But it's also vulnerable to the same problem in that your package Manager's build system is still dependent on GitHub. It will take more to screw you up, but a whole GitHub outage, for example, will definitely still hurt.

It's not depending on github-specific functionality tho. You can just redirect it to another mirror of git repo of the project

Of the 11,656 packages in OpenBSD’s package repos, 2,984 are built from source originally hosted on GitHub or Sourceforge. That’s a full 25%.

Moralize all you want about where these upstreams should host their software, but why claim that the downstream package manager is “poorly implemented” to fetch source code from those hosts? Your complaint was not technical—you imply the proprietariness of Microsoft servers is the problem (although open source servers like GitLab also have the problem of unstable checksums)—but HTTPS is HTTPS.

I'm fairly certain that Homebrew wouldn't function without GitHub. The index (and Cargo's index, and probably others) is hard-coded to be hosted on GitHub.

Exactly this.

Tbh, i would expect some developer working on this feature to have an ‘a-ha’ moment: ‘I’m a homebrew user … hey wait a minute’

> Moralize all you want about where these upstreams should host their software, but why claim that the downstream package manager is “poorly implemented” to fetch source code from those hosts?

Because it should validate checksums of content of the tarball, instead of just the outside blob.

Then:

* you don't care about compression method or implementation * you don't care about archive method or implementation * your system works just as well for "download a tarball" as for "shallow copy the remote repo

I am not sure how you could not rely on GitHub when packaging code that is hosted on GitHub.

My personal Gentoo ebuilds for example contain a URI variable that points to the GitHub auto-generated archives for projects that use GitHub for hosting. What am I supposed to do in this case?

The only option here is to setup a mirror and have a backup of the data. Packages that are in the official Gentoo repository do get mirrored, but overlays do not, and most people probably don't have the ability, time or money to setup their own mirroring service.

I agree that relying on GitHub sucks to be clear, but I don't think we can blame package managers for fetching code from it when people are hosting their projects there!

Software Heritage backs up GitHub, they aren't really designed to be a mirror though.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

Some GitHub repos also end up on archive.org, but not systematically.