I could research this on my own, but was interested in hearing from the community.
Software tends to fall in categories based on who has control, how it is accessed, and who owns the data.
For instance, a FOSS project hosts encrypted user data for free, and the user easily controls who accesses it, but if the server/service goes down, users lose access to everything. Or, a user has their own offline files they control 100%, but sharing is more cumbersome.
Where does git fall in this spectrum? It seems that it’s a mix, where authoritative copies may be offline at times before merging, when it returns to the hosted version. Its hosted, but can be self-hosted, and multiple copies of code canbee offline as well. Does it rely on a central source hosting, and a company willing to support the software?
I’ve never contributed to a project with version control before, though I’ve worked in a few places that used JIRA or git. It interests me how it works, and I’m just curious to read a Lemmy discussion while it’s raining where I am.
(As I prepare to press SUBMIT it occurs to me this is a FOSS question more than a Linux one. If this is a stupid post for this /r/, please report/remove or ask me to and I will.)
I think there isn’t really something “authoritative” in Git. You can upload your changes somewhere or another developer can download changes from you. You can also all make incompatible changes and then you won’t be able to sync it anymore (you’d need to fix that first and manually handle the conflict). There’s nothing authoritive in it. In practice most people choose a central place and all upload their changes there and everybody else regularly pulls them from there. But you could as well directly do it with the computer of your colleague if you have a network connection and access to it. Files including history of changes are the same on every machine and server. (If they’re all up to date). It’s like storing a directory including past versions on 10 different computers.