alt Hacker NewsYou appear to have glossed over the two projects in the list that are stuck due to architectural decisions, and don't have any route to migrate off of git-as-database?
Replies
hombre_fatal • yesterday at 7:26 PM
Be more specific because I just see a list of workarounds deployed once they had the scale to warrant them, supporting the OP’s claim.
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jama211 • today at 3:06 AM
It’s a fair criticism, and this article does serve well as a warning for people to try and avoid this issue from the start.
The issues with nixpkgs stem from that it is a monorepo for all packages and doubling as an index.
The issues are only fundamental with that architecture. Using a separate repo for each package, like the Arch User Repos, does not have the same problems.
Nixpkgs certainly could be architected like that and submodules would be a graceful migration path. I'm not aware of discussion of this but guess that what's preventing it might be that github.com tooling makes it very painful to manage thousands of repos for a single project.
So I think it can be a lesson not to that using git as a database is bad but that using github.com as a database is. PRs as database transactions is clunky and GitHub Actions isn't really ACID.