5 ms·

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

by gdsdfe 6y ago

dakiol 6y ago
I agree. I can't believe they are spending so much money and effort to preserve code I don't give a damn now and once I pushed to GitHub. And like me, 99% of the devs I know personally.
- cmrx64 6y ago
  it's probably less effort to just archive the whole damn thing and let the future figure it out than to decide important things to archive and leaving everything else to disappear someday
  - awb 6y ago
    I wonder how much space you'd save if you excluded repos with only 1 star or only 1 commit.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      They’ve excluded pretty much everything below a hundred stars, from what I see.
      - ralph84 6y ago
        The inclusion criteria[0] were: > The snapshot will include every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020, every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot (02/03/2019 - 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars. [0] https://archiveprogram.github.com https://archiveprogram.github.com
  - rezendi 6y ago
    Archive Program director here. One of the most interesting things our advisory committee told us is that it's really hard to determine what's important in advance: history is replete with lists composed by wealthy people of the books they thought most important, carefully preserved for posterity, whereas what modern historians _really_ want is ordinary people's shopping lists, of which almost none survived. That's one reason we cast a wide net and archived millions of repos instead of eg just the most-starred 100K..Even seemingly trivial repos might collectively be the modern technological equivalent of Renaissance shopping lists, for the historians who may take a particular interest in this (possibly) especially wacky and volatile era.
    - cmrx64 6y ago
      thank you so much for doing this work btw, archival is one of my loves :)
cmrx64 6y ago
well in 25 years when the remains of global civilization are pulling the backups out of the ground, maybe you will think otherwise. /s kinda with you on that one. looks cool, plausibly useful but we'll see.
price 6y ago
Take a look at the partners named at the bottom. From GitHub's perspective, this is in part a PR stunt. But the Internet Archive, and Software Heritage, are quite serious. The people in those organizations are there for the mission, and if they're in on this project it's because someone there believes it matters to their mission. You're free not to care about what situation humans might be in in a thousand years or what they might need then. I can't say I spend any effort day to day working with that distant future in mind myself. But I'm glad there are people in our civilization who do.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nomoreservices 6y ago
Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? It's fiction, but I can see this project being important for future civilization.

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

by gdsdfe 6y ago

Am I the only one thinking this is a waste of money and time?! How any of this makes sense, maybe as a weird PR stunt but ... Just strange

dakiol 6y ago

I agree. I can't believe they are spending so much money and effort to preserve code I don't give a damn now and once I pushed to GitHub. And like me, 99% of the devs I know personally.

cmrx64 6y ago
it's probably less effort to just archive the whole damn thing and let the future figure it out than to decide important things to archive and leaving everything else to disappear someday
- awb 6y ago
  I wonder how much space you'd save if you excluded repos with only 1 star or only 1 commit.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    They’ve excluded pretty much everything below a hundred stars, from what I see.
    - ralph84 6y ago
      The inclusion criteria[0] were: > The snapshot will include every repo with any commits between the announcement at GitHub Universe on November 13th and 02/02/2020, every repo with at least 1 star and any commits from the year before the snapshot (02/03/2019 - 02/02/2020), and every repo with at least 250 stars. [0] https://archiveprogram.github.com https://archiveprogram.github.com
- rezendi 6y ago
  Archive Program director here. One of the most interesting things our advisory committee told us is that it's really hard to determine what's important in advance: history is replete with lists composed by wealthy people of the books they thought most important, carefully preserved for posterity, whereas what modern historians _really_ want is ordinary people's shopping lists, of which almost none survived. That's one reason we cast a wide net and archived millions of repos instead of eg just the most-starred 100K..Even seemingly trivial repos might collectively be the modern technological equivalent of Renaissance shopping lists, for the historians who may take a particular interest in this (possibly) especially wacky and volatile era.
  - cmrx64 6y ago
    thank you so much for doing this work btw, archival is one of my loves :)

cmrx64 6y ago

well in 25 years when the remains of global civilization are pulling the backups out of the ground, maybe you will think otherwise. /s kinda with you on that one. looks cool, plausibly useful but we'll see.

price 6y ago

Take a look at the partners named at the bottom. From GitHub's perspective, this is in part a PR stunt. But the Internet Archive, and Software Heritage, are quite serious. The people in those organizations are there for the mission, and if they're in on this project it's because someone there believes it matters to their mission. You're free not to care about what situation humans might be in in a thousand years or what they might need then. I can't say I spend any effort day to day working with that distant future in mind myself. But I'm glad there are people in our civilization who do.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nomoreservices 6y ago

Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz? It's fiction, but I can see this project being important for future civilization.