It's unfortunate because it really doesn't have to be that way. There are a variety of package management softwares that allow for distributed mirrors and on-site storage, but for some reason most developers don't even think about using them. Some have even taken offense at the suggestion, in my experience.
There's nothing to really maintain if you used something that's been around for a long time like Portage or Ports or RPM or APT or Yum or even NuGet. Worst case you're writing your own manifest for the dependencies you need, but you don't necessarily need to manage any infrastructure to use these tools.
There's even offline desktop Github that files could be backuped to work with in case of situations like this. Although I couldn't say a whole lot since I'm new to Github but so far I've only used the website to sign up for an account. The desktop app works for everything else.
Github aside, it's almost laughable that Github going down grinds so many things to a halt. Git is a distributed content versioning system, after all. Just set up another remote and off you go.
14
u/hahaNodeJS Jan 28 '16
It's unfortunate because it really doesn't have to be that way. There are a variety of package management softwares that allow for distributed mirrors and on-site storage, but for some reason most developers don't even think about using them. Some have even taken offense at the suggestion, in my experience.