7 ms·

Blender moves from Phabricator to Gitea

124 points by stephdin 4y ago

cowmix 4y ago
I wonder how Gitea will hold up to all the traffic? Even Gitea hosts their stuff on Github.
- codefined 4y ago
  Gitea is self-hosted, so Blender will be running their own instance.
  - qwertox 4y ago
    That's not what parent means. Gitea is an alternative to GitHub, yet they use GitHub for hosting their code.
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      That kind of makes sense for disaster planning though. If Gitea discovered some massive CVE, and volentarily went dark to fix it... They would want their code and fix hosted somewhere else.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        Mirroring the code to github (or somewhere else) would solve that problem just as well. Not dogfooding your own product seems like a huge red flag to me.
        throwaway894345 4y ago
        There's clearly the intention to self-host, they seem to be waiting for support to ingest data from a GitHub data export which seems pretty reasonable.
        techknowlogick 4y ago
        Yes, this is exactly the case. Lots of data, and low ratelimits don't mix. All except for the main repo have already migrated to gitea.com Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
- stryan 4y ago
  I don't believe Gitea is hosting on Github for traffic reasons but for feature completeness. Relevant issue is here[0]. [0]https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
  - lucideer 4y ago
    That's a great ticket, & also links to a really nice & insightful comment from one of the Fog Creek folk https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe
    - vidanay 4y ago
      I still dream of a world where FogBugz & Kiln gained the respect they deserved. Mercurial was pretty damn nice.
      - slondr 4y ago
        Was? It still is very nice.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Looks like https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165 is the last missing checkbox...
- tylersmith 4y ago
  Gitea does not use Github because the software can't handle their load requirements, but because they started using GH before Gitea had all the features they needed. They are actively working on hosting Gitea on Gitea, with the last piece being an importer to move over all their GH data. Blender seems to have been ok manually migrating some things and abandoning other things, since they weren't likely to ever get a Phab->Gitea importer anyways. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
  - bawolff 4y ago
    How much traffic could they possibly have? Quite frankly either gitea has absolutely terrible scalability or something else is off here. Edit: i misread the parent comment. My bad.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Huh? It isn't because of inability to handle load, that they host on GH. Gitea performs alright. It can serve surprisingly-heavy traffic from a potato-tier VM with a SQLite backend (assuming the host network can keep up with it, anyway). Not Github-scale (but Github has... a lot of traffic, including a whole lot of write traffic) but quite a bit, and that's with basically the worst-possible hosting situation for handling high load.
      - techknowlogick 4y ago
        That's correct. It is not due to load, gitea.com already has most of the projects repos migrated already, just not the main one due to ratelimits and exporting all the issues. Gitea.com has thousands of users, and multi-TB traffic monthly on a fairly modest setup. Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
    - tylersmith 4y ago
      Tbf my comment was phrased a bit ambiguously, but I couldn't think of anything less ambiguous.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Doubt it'll be a problem. Github's scaling challenges have more to do with the write volume than the read volume. Even a project as big and active as Blender shouldn't make Gitea sweat too much on relatively modest hardware. Anonymous clones and such will surely be https, so, quite cache-friendly. I wanna say Gitea has some config options for hosting static files (like releases) on s3-compatible storage then serving directly from there, so even that shouldn't be a problem. But I may be mis-remembering that part. And, again, a CDN or Varnish or whatever would be able to serve those files just as well from Gitea as from anywhere else.
  - techknowlogick 4y ago
    Yup, that's right. Non-repo data (releases, avatars, packages, etc..) can all be hosted in s3-compat storage. If you are interested in some benchmarks that Blender did you can find them here: https://code.blender.org/2023/02/gitea-test-drive/ https://code.blender.org/2023/02/gitea-test-drive/ Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  Hi, I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea. The reason why the project itself is still on GitHub is due to the massive amount of metadata (20K+ issues and PRs, and all the comments, reactions, and other metadata attached to them) around the project, and the ratelimiting that is slowing the export. All the non-primary repos have long since moved to gitea.com.
  - vfclists 4y ago
    I start getting worried about projects when people say stuff like "I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project" How many committees are there and how many people on each committee?
    - jolheiser 4y ago
      The TOC is our owners team, but three are from the company and three are from the community. The reason to say it as a disclaimer is because we are going to have some bias.
  - bastardoperator 4y ago
    You can use the API to export all of the metadata in a single request: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#start-an-organization-migration https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#start-an-org... https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#download-an-organization-migration-archive https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#download-an-... Using a Github App you get 15K requests per hour. Even with pagination(100 records per request) you should be able to get at all of this data within a couple of hours. I suspect you lack reliable transformation tools to take github metadata and convert it to gitea versus the limitations of GitHub.
    - techknowlogick 4y ago
      Thanks, yeah. We have started to look at that alternative endpoint, but it doesn't have the exact data as the api, nor is it always in the exact same format. Although as I have run the migration myself several times to attempt to debug issues, it takes over 24hours due to ratelimiting. Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
rvz 4y ago
Great news for self hosting and not sitting on and going all in on unreliable services like GitHub.
- tylersmith 4y ago
  This is a consolidation of the self-hosting ecosystem because Phabricator is ending support. It's not terrible but I wouldn't call it good let alone great news.
qwertox 4y ago
One note on Phabricator: "Effective June 1, 2021: Phabricator is no longer actively maintained"
- JamesCoyne 4y ago
  There is a phork: https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Maintenance has been picked up by the community under a new name, viz. Phorge.
shapefrog 4y ago
Gitea really really really looks like github.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  I use it at home and for projects with a closed user group. It does everything we need, including CI (I have Drone setup). Very, very, very good for such a small binary.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Looking forwards to gitea Actions, Drone can fall apart in advanced workloads.
lucideer 4y ago
This is an interesting move in the context of the recent kerfuffle around Gitea - context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749757 I wonder whether this was part of discussion on the migrating within the Blender team or whether their migration just started before the Gitea org-change. --- Off-topic but it's also funny that the Phabricator fork is Phorge & the Gitea fork is Forgejo...
- azeemba 4y ago
  The decision to move to gitea was made before that announcement. I wonder if gitea decided to become a company after they saw the interest from Blender. I know blender folks were asking questions about the long term future of the project. For reference, here are threads asking for proposals on solutions to consider and announcement of gitea being picked: - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for-comments-and-participation/23451 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for... - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-choice-for-gitea-reasons-and-timeline/24896 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-choice-f...
- RamblingCTO 4y ago
  On the topic of gitea, I rummaged through the thread and it seems they want to make a decision in the first months of this year. I'm not sure these people are fit to run such a platform if they don't understand the problem with "we'll ban code doing xyz because we don't like it" for such a project. I was really looking forward to codeberg, but I also have a bunch of infosec stuff in my repos, including malware/PoC's etc. but I don't want to risk getting banned. We need something like self-hosted gitea plus fediverse-driven socials mimicking github. /edit: there is actually work being done by forgefed.org, radicle.xyz and forgejo is implementing federation here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
  - lucideer 4y ago
    The comments on codeberg aren't really relevant in this thread - codeberg is a hosting platform, any policies they implemented would apply to accounts on their platform only, not to self-hosting users of gitea/forgejo/whichever. That said, as long as the underlying software is self-hostable, I actually think platforms taking a curatorial approach is pretty cool. E.g. Mastodon instances do this with moderation, but also make it easy to have multiple accounts on different instances for different purposes. I already do this with git hosts so I can see it working well.
sublinear 4y ago
Not to dunk on Phabricator, but did anyone actually enjoy using it? I always thought it was a mess anyway. Jenkins was also... "jankins". Of course this is all hindsight, but wow it doesn't even seem that long ago.
- FrenchyJiby 4y ago
  Considering the alternative at work was an old Bugzilla instance, and code review feedback was done by email, adopting Phabricator was a breath of fresh air: good engineering-oriented tickets (subtasks, task grouping), good code review experience + integration with tickets, a wiki, and a few extra... yeah it really rocked. Of course, if you compare to Jira's ticket-management experience, and nowaday's github code review, sure, it's quite jank. But for a brief moment, in a period of time at work, Phabricator really shined!
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Phabricator's code-review (particularly if you're stuck on SVN) and ticket workflows were both great. Had both a decent command-line and decent web client. A lot of other things were a mess.
- cturtle 4y ago
  I did! I did the Google Summer of Code twice with Blender and ever since I find myself preferring the patch workflow of Phabricator over the merge/pull request found elsewhere. I am comfortable with both, but phabricator just clicked with me better
  - techknowlogick 4y ago
    What was your experience like with GSOC? Gitea has applied to it this year, and are hoping to be able to make it a good experience for any contributor that is matched (hopefully we are accepted as well).
    - cturtle 4y ago
      GSoC was a great experience. It was my first time planning a major contribution to an open source project. It would have been much more challenging for me without the help of my mentor and the other core contributors, so it is important to have a good support system for any involved. My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback. I hope Gitea is accepted!
Scaevolus 4y ago
Is Gitea code review any good? If they cloned Github it's going to be an inferior experience compared to Phabricator.
notepalf 4y ago
Did they consider moving to gitlab?
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  Yup, it was one of the candidates. https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for-comments-and-participation/23451 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for...
thcipriani 4y ago
Makes me wonder what all the other users of phab are doing. I know: twitter, dropbox, freebsd, and mozilla were all using it in some point. I think haskell moved to GitLab, now Blender's on Gitea. I'm curious if people are moving to phorge? Wikimedia still uses phab for bug tracking. Taking a look at phorge Soon™
account42 4y ago
> The Git repositories have changed location. > The development branch is now named main instead of master. If only we could avoid such pointless downstream-affecting changes. Cool URI's shouldn't change. We have the technology. And doing such changes to satisfy manufactured outrage is even more sad.
rurban 4y ago
And this blog post describes their adventure: https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ Which includes the famous start of the gitea shitstorm: "And, quite significantly, we’re in the finishing stages of having a support agreement with the Gitea project to have them support us in our migration by funding work on missing features, code and bugfixes that will be available 100% to Gitea users under Gitea’s MIT license."

124 points by stephdin 4y ago

cowmix 4y ago

I wonder how Gitea will hold up to all the traffic? Even Gitea hosts their stuff on Github.

codefined 4y ago
Gitea is self-hosted, so Blender will be running their own instance.
- qwertox 4y ago
  That's not what parent means. Gitea is an alternative to GitHub, yet they use GitHub for hosting their code.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    That kind of makes sense for disaster planning though. If Gitea discovered some massive CVE, and volentarily went dark to fix it... They would want their code and fix hosted somewhere else.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Mirroring the code to github (or somewhere else) would solve that problem just as well. Not dogfooding your own product seems like a huge red flag to me.
      - throwaway894345 4y ago
        There's clearly the intention to self-host, they seem to be waiting for support to ingest data from a GitHub data export which seems pretty reasonable.
        techknowlogick 4y ago
        Yes, this is exactly the case. Lots of data, and low ratelimits don't mix. All except for the main repo have already migrated to gitea.com Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
stryan 4y ago
I don't believe Gitea is hosting on Github for traffic reasons but for feature completeness. Relevant issue is here[0]. [0]https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
- lucideer 4y ago
  That's a great ticket, & also links to a really nice & insightful comment from one of the Fog Creek folk https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe
  - vidanay 4y ago
    I still dream of a world where FogBugz & Kiln gained the respect they deserved. Mercurial was pretty damn nice.
    - slondr 4y ago
      Was? It still is very nice.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Looks like https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165 is the last missing checkbox...
tylersmith 4y ago
Gitea does not use Github because the software can't handle their load requirements, but because they started using GH before Gitea had all the features they needed. They are actively working on hosting Gitea on Gitea, with the last piece being an importer to move over all their GH data. Blender seems to have been ok manually migrating some things and abandoning other things, since they weren't likely to ever get a Phab->Gitea importer anyways. https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029 https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
- bawolff 4y ago
  How much traffic could they possibly have? Quite frankly either gitea has absolutely terrible scalability or something else is off here. Edit: i misread the parent comment. My bad.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Huh? It isn't because of inability to handle load, that they host on GH. Gitea performs alright. It can serve surprisingly-heavy traffic from a potato-tier VM with a SQLite backend (assuming the host network can keep up with it, anyway). Not Github-scale (but Github has... a lot of traffic, including a whole lot of write traffic) but quite a bit, and that's with basically the worst-possible hosting situation for handling high load.
    - techknowlogick 4y ago
      That's correct. It is not due to load, gitea.com already has most of the projects repos migrated already, just not the main one due to ratelimits and exporting all the issues. Gitea.com has thousands of users, and multi-TB traffic monthly on a fairly modest setup. Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
  - tylersmith 4y ago
    Tbf my comment was phrased a bit ambiguously, but I couldn't think of anything less ambiguous.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Doubt it'll be a problem. Github's scaling challenges have more to do with the write volume than the read volume. Even a project as big and active as Blender shouldn't make Gitea sweat too much on relatively modest hardware. Anonymous clones and such will surely be https, so, quite cache-friendly. I wanna say Gitea has some config options for hosting static files (like releases) on s3-compatible storage then serving directly from there, so even that shouldn't be a problem. But I may be mis-remembering that part. And, again, a CDN or Varnish or whatever would be able to serve those files just as well from Gitea as from anywhere else.
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  Yup, that's right. Non-repo data (releases, avatars, packages, etc..) can all be hosted in s3-compat storage. If you are interested in some benchmarks that Blender did you can find them here: https://code.blender.org/2023/02/gitea-test-drive/ https://code.blender.org/2023/02/gitea-test-drive/ Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.
techknowlogick 4y ago
Hi, I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea. The reason why the project itself is still on GitHub is due to the massive amount of metadata (20K+ issues and PRs, and all the comments, reactions, and other metadata attached to them) around the project, and the ratelimiting that is slowing the export. All the non-primary repos have long since moved to gitea.com.
- vfclists 4y ago
  I start getting worried about projects when people say stuff like "I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project" How many committees are there and how many people on each committee?
  - jolheiser 4y ago
    The TOC is our owners team, but three are from the company and three are from the community. The reason to say it as a disclaimer is because we are going to have some bias.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  You can use the API to export all of the metadata in a single request: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#start-an-organization-migration https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#start-an-org... https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#download-an-organization-migration-archive https://docs.github.com/en/rest/migrations/orgs#download-an-... Using a Github App you get 15K requests per hour. Even with pagination(100 records per request) you should be able to get at all of this data within a couple of hours. I suspect you lack reliable transformation tools to take github metadata and convert it to gitea versus the limitations of GitHub.
  - techknowlogick 4y ago
    Thanks, yeah. We have started to look at that alternative endpoint, but it doesn't have the exact data as the api, nor is it always in the exact same format. Although as I have run the migration myself several times to attempt to debug issues, it takes over 24hours due to ratelimiting. Disclaimer: I'm one of the members of the technical oversight committee of the Gitea project, and am employed to work on Gitea.

rvz 4y ago

Great news for self hosting and not sitting on and going all in on unreliable services like GitHub.

tylersmith 4y ago
This is a consolidation of the self-hosting ecosystem because Phabricator is ending support. It's not terrible but I wouldn't call it good let alone great news.

qwertox 4y ago

One note on Phabricator: "Effective June 1, 2021: Phabricator is no longer actively maintained"

JamesCoyne 4y ago
There is a phork: https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/
zozbot234 4y ago
Maintenance has been picked up by the community under a new name, viz. Phorge.

shapefrog 4y ago

Gitea really really really looks like github.

rcarmo 4y ago
I use it at home and for projects with a closed user group. It does everything we need, including CI (I have Drone setup). Very, very, very good for such a small binary.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Looking forwards to gitea Actions, Drone can fall apart in advanced workloads.

lucideer 4y ago

This is an interesting move in the context of the recent kerfuffle around Gitea - context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33749757 I wonder whether this was part of discussion on the migrating within the Blender team or whether their migration just started before the Gitea org-change. --- Off-topic but it's also funny that the Phabricator fork is Phorge & the Gitea fork is Forgejo...

azeemba 4y ago
The decision to move to gitea was made before that announcement. I wonder if gitea decided to become a company after they saw the interest from Blender. I know blender folks were asking questions about the long term future of the project. For reference, here are threads asking for proposals on solutions to consider and announcement of gitea being picked: - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for-comments-and-participation/23451 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for... - https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-choice-for-gitea-reasons-and-timeline/24896 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-choice-f...
RamblingCTO 4y ago
On the topic of gitea, I rummaged through the thread and it seems they want to make a decision in the first months of this year. I'm not sure these people are fit to run such a platform if they don't understand the problem with "we'll ban code doing xyz because we don't like it" for such a project. I was really looking forward to codeberg, but I also have a bunch of infosec stuff in my repos, including malware/PoC's etc. but I don't want to risk getting banned. We need something like self-hosted gitea plus fediverse-driven socials mimicking github. /edit: there is actually work being done by forgefed.org, radicle.xyz and forgejo is implementing federation here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
- lucideer 4y ago
  The comments on codeberg aren't really relevant in this thread - codeberg is a hosting platform, any policies they implemented would apply to accounts on their platform only, not to self-hosting users of gitea/forgejo/whichever. That said, as long as the underlying software is self-hostable, I actually think platforms taking a curatorial approach is pretty cool. E.g. Mastodon instances do this with moderation, but also make it easy to have multiple accounts on different instances for different purposes. I already do this with git hosts so I can see it working well.

sublinear 4y ago

Not to dunk on Phabricator, but did anyone actually enjoy using it? I always thought it was a mess anyway. Jenkins was also... "jankins". Of course this is all hindsight, but wow it doesn't even seem that long ago.

FrenchyJiby 4y ago
Considering the alternative at work was an old Bugzilla instance, and code review feedback was done by email, adopting Phabricator was a breath of fresh air: good engineering-oriented tickets (subtasks, task grouping), good code review experience + integration with tickets, a wiki, and a few extra... yeah it really rocked. Of course, if you compare to Jira's ticket-management experience, and nowaday's github code review, sure, it's quite jank. But for a brief moment, in a period of time at work, Phabricator really shined!
aidenn0 4y ago
Phabricator's code-review (particularly if you're stuck on SVN) and ticket workflows were both great. Had both a decent command-line and decent web client. A lot of other things were a mess.
cturtle 4y ago
I did! I did the Google Summer of Code twice with Blender and ever since I find myself preferring the patch workflow of Phabricator over the merge/pull request found elsewhere. I am comfortable with both, but phabricator just clicked with me better
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  What was your experience like with GSOC? Gitea has applied to it this year, and are hoping to be able to make it a good experience for any contributor that is matched (hopefully we are accepted as well).
  - cturtle 4y ago
    GSoC was a great experience. It was my first time planning a major contribution to an open source project. It would have been much more challenging for me without the help of my mentor and the other core contributors, so it is important to have a good support system for any involved. My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback. I hope Gitea is accepted!

Scaevolus 4y ago

Is Gitea code review any good? If they cloned Github it's going to be an inferior experience compared to Phabricator.

notepalf 4y ago

Did they consider moving to gitlab?

techknowlogick 4y ago
Yup, it was one of the candidates. https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for-comments-and-participation/23451 https://devtalk.blender.org/t/developer-blender-org-call-for...

thcipriani 4y ago

Makes me wonder what all the other users of phab are doing. I know: twitter, dropbox, freebsd, and mozilla were all using it in some point. I think haskell moved to GitLab, now Blender's on Gitea. I'm curious if people are moving to phorge? Wikimedia still uses phab for bug tracking. Taking a look at phorge Soon™

account42 4y ago

> The Git repositories have changed location. > The development branch is now named main instead of master. If only we could avoid such pointless downstream-affecting changes. Cool URI's shouldn't change. We have the technology. And doing such changes to satisfy manufactured outrage is even more sad.

rurban 4y ago

And this blog post describes their adventure: https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ https://code.blender.org/2022/07/gitea-diaries-part-1/ Which includes the famous start of the gitea shitstorm: "And, quite significantly, we’re in the finishing stages of having a support agreement with the Gitea project to have them support us in our migration by funding work on missing features, code and bugfixes that will be available 100% to Gitea users under Gitea’s MIT license."