why dont we have a P2P transfer platform for this (modulo security)

lol I see this as I plan on using Git for my thing store. https://github.com/blue-monads/potatoverse

YOLO software engineering, the hallmark of the 21st century

seems like the issue isn't with using git as a database, but using github as a distribution mechanism?

Since ~2002, Macports has used svn or git, but users, by default, rsync the complete port definitions + a server-generated index + a signature.

The index is used for all lookups; it can also be generated or incrementally updated client-side to accommodate local changes.

This has worked fine for literally decades, starting back when bandwidth and CPU power was far more limited.

The problem isn’t using SCM, and the solutions have been known for a very long time.

This is why I don't use programming languages that do that.

These are actually all problems with using Github as an ersatz CDN.

Not sure I can agree with the takeaway. It works well at first, but doesn’t scale, so folks found workarounds. That’s how literally every working system grows. There are always bottlenecks eventually. And you address them when they become an issue, not five years earlier.

The conclusion reached in this essay is 100% wrong. See " The reftable backend What it is, where it's headed, and why should you care?"

>With release 2.45, Git has gained support for the “reftable” backend to read and write references in a Git repository. While this was a significant milestone for Git, it wasn‘t the end of GitLab’s journey to improve scalability in repositories with many references. In this talk you will learn what the reftable backend is, what work we did to improve it even further and why you should care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UkonBcLeAo

Also see Scalar, which Microsoft used to scale their 300GiB Windows repository, https://github.com/microsoft/scalar.