This post was written during my trip through Iceland and published much latern than it was written.

When writing my last entry, I argued that we need decentralized issue tracking.

Here's why.

Why these things must be decentralized

Issue tracking, bug tracking and of course pull request tracking (which could all be named “issue tracking”, btw) must, in my opinion, be decentralized. That's not only because I think offline-first should be the way to go, even today in our always-connected and always-on(line) world. It's also because of redundancy and failure safety. Linus Torvalds himself once said:

I don't do backups, I publish and let the world mirror it

(paraphrased)

And that's true. We should not need to do backups, we should share all data, in my opinion. Even absolutely personal data. Yes, you read that right, me, the Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatsapp/whatever free living guy tells you that all data need to be shared. But I also tell you: Never ever unencrypted! And I do not mean transport encryption, I mean real encryption. Unbreakable is not possible, but at least theoretically-unbreakable for at least 250 years should do. If the data is shared in a decentralized way, like IPFS or Filecoin try to do, we (almost) can be sure that if our hard drive failes, we don't lose the data. And of course, you can still do backups.

Now let's get back to topic. If we decentralize issue tracking, we can make sure that issues are around somewhere. If github closes down tomorrow, thousands, if not millions, open source projects lose their issues. And that's not only current issues, but also history of issue tracking, which means also data how a bug was closed, how a bug should be closed, what features are implemented why or how and these things. If your self-hosted solution loses data, like gitlab did not long ago on their gitlab.com hosted instance, data is gone forever. If we decentralize these things, more instances have to fail to bring the the whole project down.

There's actually a law of some sort about these things, named Amdahl's law: The more instances a distributed system has, the more likely it is that one instance is dead right now, but at the same time, the less likely it is that the whole system is dead. And this is not linear likelihood, it is exponential. That means that with 10, 15 or 20 instances you can be sure that your stuff is alive somewhere if your instance fails.

Now think of projects with many contributors. Maybe not as big as the kernel, which has an exceptionally big community. Think of communities like the neovim one. The tmux project. The GNU Hurd (have you Hurd about that one?) or such projects. If in one of these projects 30 or 40 developers are actively maintaining things, their repositories will never die. And if the repository holds the issue history as well, we get backup safety there for free. How awesome is that?

I guess I made my point.

tags: #open-source #programming #software #tools #git #github