You're right, of course. This is just a first step.
One interesting followup idea might be that the BitTorrent library I'm using, webtorrent, also works in browsers over WebRTC. But I'm not using that because I wouldn't know what to do with a git cloned repo inside of a browser tab. Maybe someone else will though. :)
GitHub provides: - Repo hosting, - Search, - Community
In comparison to decentralized Search and Community, decentralized file storage is easy. Conveniently, centralized repo hosting is the biggest problem. Not being able to Search / Comment / Report a bug during a DDOS decreases productivity, but not being able to push commits / run CI tools is a productivity halt.
The best next move, might be to focus on decentralized repository hosting, solve that well, and allow users to conveniently mirror the GitTorrent repos on GitHub. Giving the best of both worlds until Search and Community can also be solved well.
This may mean GitTorrent would need some form of post push hooks (i.e. to update mirrors or run CI). Which I'm sure is doable.
Hmm, decentralized search here should probably just use a Kademlia-like implementation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia) where a 'XOR metric' is used to measure distance between nodes. (That way the max number of lookups will be log2(n) where n is the number of nodes (with further optimizations possible))
Obviously someone would need to build a user-friendly interface for all that, etc.
What about using git notes (`man git-notes`) for tracking issues, comments, etc? They are stored as git objects (right?) and could be used for this task?
I thought about using git notes for this and didn't how it is better than adding issues, comments and wiki inside the repo itself. We are used to put documentation and tests alongside the code in our repo, why not add wiki and issues?
You can make an excellent case for that: this would require documentation and tests to be up-to-date before a commit would be accepted by whoever maintains the repo.
You're right, of course. This is just a first step.
One interesting followup idea might be that the BitTorrent library I'm using, webtorrent, also works in browsers over WebRTC. But I'm not using that because I wouldn't know what to do with a git cloned repo inside of a browser tab. Maybe someone else will though. :)