9 ms·

Evaluating new software forges

149 points by riidom 3y ago

saurik 3y ago
I was hoping for an evaluation of Radicle--the only forge that seemed to be doing something exciting and "new", and one I haven't had the time to really analyze yet--but... no such luck :(.
- riidom 3y ago
  Wow that looks crazy! Link: https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz But honestly, I also wouldn't write about this without a lot of usage experience. For sure it's different from github/-lab etc. exciting and new, as you say.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  I'm not sure you'd want any forge evaluated by this author: they're extremely caustic, negative, and critical. Jaded people in tech like this I just try and avoid, especially when they come out against unalloyed good tech like containerization. Containers are just namespaces with additions. They've allowed us to narrow the gap of capability between the big three OSes, even if the other two need to virtualize Linux to do so. There's also nothing wrong with LLMs. How you choose to integrate them into your life or forge is a choice but at the end of the day they're just another tool in the toolbelt. Pick what you want or need and leave the rest. I'm not forced to use Copilot but I appreciate it when I need it.
- k__ 3y ago
  There is also https://protocol.land https://protocol.land and https://gitopia.com https://gitopia.com.
  - RealStickman_ 3y ago
    The layout of radicle.land is unfortunately pretty broken on mobile.
    - k__ 3y ago
      Yes, it's only a month old or something. Pretty early project.
    - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
      What is radicle.land? Both radicle.xyz and app.radicle.xyz seem fine for me on Firefox mobile. Did something change in the last few hours?
      - k__ 3y ago
        They probably meant protocol.land.
      - RealStickman_ 3y ago
        I meant protocol.land
  - rapnie 3y ago
    The latter is Web3/crypto la la land, and the former.. dunno, got to read the code, but I would like to know about the project, its goals, and who is behind it.
    - k__ 3y ago
      Both (and Radicle) are web3. So, it's probably not your jive.
    - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
      git is blockchain too
- Klonoar 3y ago
  Wow! So glad someone mentioned this - I’ve been looking for something like it, going to have to set aside time to try it out.
- natdempk 3y ago
  https://pierre.co/ https://pierre.co/ is another interesting one, focused on a product-development workflow.
  - idlephysicist 3y ago
    What is a Product Engineer? Is it just another name for an engineer?
    - natdempk 3y ago
      Yeah, I don't think there is any meaningful distinction there. I think Pierre is just framing things in terms of solving for teams that work with product + design + engineering to ship something to users that involves all of those parties, whereas GitHub has primarily catered to engineering. Today in software companies there is basically a gap where each discipline kinda prefers to work in it's own software silo (eg. Asana / Figma / GitHub), but that doesn't really make a lot of sense from a fundamental standpoint where all of those aspects of a team want to work very closely together. You end up kinda syncing a lot of info/state across the silos, or via meetingss/slack etc, so I think Pierre is trying to bring all that into one tool with some opinionated workflow. Makes a lot of sense from my perspective, curious how it ends up working out.
Klonoar 3y ago
Would’ve been curious for the authors take on OneDev as well.
aulisius 3y ago
Coincidentally, I've been mulling the same idea for a week now. A self-hostable source forge + registry to serve artifacts would be amazing. I think the only thing you'd lose is the 'social' aspects of GitHub, but I believe that can be made up with a combination of rss feeds (?), ActivityPub etc.
- godber 3y ago
  I think we've been thinking similarly. Decentralization will have it's costs. I've been thinking Opt-In centralized search for personal repos, maybe as a gitea (or other self hosted options) plug-in. But as you suggest, maybe existing features can be leveraged to prove the social/discoverability.
Ayesh 3y ago
Having tried GitHub, GitLab, Source Hut, Codeberg, and BitBucket (RIP), I think the only serious options are GitHub, GitLab self hosted, and Source Hut. GitHub owned by MSFT aside, and also putting their AI push _also_ aside, GitHub has things like Sponsors, Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere else. They sure are luring you into ecosystems that require a huge escape velocity, but GitHub serves as less-friction entry point to open source software. GitLab self hosting is also nice and flexible, but it has a more "enterprise open source" feeling to it. Debian and Drupal can take advantage of it, but I don't see myself hosting mini projects like my mini CSS library that is also used by three other strangers. Source Hut is really nice too. Admittedly I don't like email based workflows, so I haven't really thought about moving anything there. But Source Hut has "unlisted" repos, which I thought was really clever and missing from other forges.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  GitHub Sponsors is pretty great. Seems like a perfectly ethical way for open source developers to earn money. Doesn't depend on copyright, artificial scarcity, advertising. I really like it.
- isilofi 3y ago
  > Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere else. Gitlab has equivalents you can enable as CI pipelines.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far. [0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
- mst 3y ago
  Having been using gitea at work for a while as an "internal mini-github" (along with a github organisation for stuff that isn't purely internal or would otherwise benefit for that) I have to say it ... hasn't annoyed me noticeably. So I think I'd put gitea* on that list as well. (I don't think I disagree with your opinions about the ones you -have- listed) * and I mean that to include forgejo, I think, though I haven't tried it so YMMV
dboreham 3y ago
Quick note that Gitea has its own CI (roughly Github Actions compatible) so you don't need to use Drone.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Is not hard for me to see a case being built around the idea of finding value in having code to stay excluded from the surface exposed to AI so it becomes impossible for it to predate it. It's a type of "security" that doesn't find an answer in "better AIs" or "AIs with improved alignment". The value comes out of being safe from the risk that can come out of the humans in control of these AIs. I comes out of staying away and making impossible for any and all AIs to touch it. Like the difference between food from a chef and hyperindustrialized food. What if you want chef food only? In the same way, exclusively human software creations.
- Jgrubb 3y ago
  I like this analogy but I guess I see it more like man inventing the knife, so he doesn't have to rip the animal to shreds with his bare hands anymore.
  - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
    Except the knives do not have the capacity to give parts of the protein to other knives users surreptitiously and it's in AI's very nature to absolutely do that.
- steezeburger 3y ago
  Does the chef not use tools?
  - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
    Robot chefs are tools? Are they chefs?
- ahepp 3y ago
  Shall we call it the "slow code movement"?
  - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
    Nice. You're starting to make me think in how a manifesto should sound like.
btreecat 3y ago
I think it's time we collectively mature past the point where taking unsubstantiated pot-shots at tools we don't "love" is seen as a value add to commentary. In this case calling k8s a "nightmare" is a strong red flag akin to the mantra of "java is slow". It lacks the nuance of hands on XP and reeks of rules of thumb miss applied to the point of catchphrases.
- steezeburger 3y ago
  Sad to see this down voted. I agree. They also sound insufferable. Maybe it's just their writing style, trying to be inflammatory for engagement, but they are not someone I would want to work with.
  - tailspin2019 3y ago
    You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing their opinions on things on their own blog. And yet you're happy to share your own dismissive opinions on the author here. FWIW I find the author's obviously subjective opinions on their tools much more valuable than your obviously subjective opinions of this author.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      > You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing their opinions on things on their own blog At least w.r.t. the original comment, this seems like a misunderstanding. GP was saying that, absent any explanation for why the author came to the opinions they did, the article doesn't say much of value. They don't dislike the author sharing their opinions on the author's own blog.
    - steezeburger 3y ago
      I don't care if the author shares their opinions, but I'm free to share mine as well, and I agreed with the parent comment at the time it was downvoted. I've just been noticing a trend of people, like the article author, who are quick to dismiss things for reasons that are inconsistent and dogmatic. Why be so close minded? I think it's okay to be dismissive of the dismissive. Which, I didn't really dismiss him did I? I read his entire article.
bachmeier 3y ago
If your goal is to put some code out there just to share it with others, any of those will work. There's also Bitbucket, Sourceforge, and self-hosted Fossil. The blog author seems to be looking for more of an "enterprise" open source option. You could even use Gitolite or GitWeb if you're willing to self-host.
- jzb 3y ago
  Nothing says "unmaintained," or inertia, quite still like having a project hosted on Sourceforge. I'm sure there's a few exceptions that are thriving on Sourceforge, but... it's kind of a relic at this point. It'd be cool if it could have a revival, but I think they've tried that a few times and never quite got there. I certainly wouldn't put anything new there, myself.
jmclnx 3y ago
I just went back to kind of "anonymous ftp" via my gemini site on sdf.org. I find it far easier to maintain. When I make a change, a script packages up the change and sends it to sdf. My github repositories were changed to point to it. The latest change by Microsoft made me move, I was considering a move when Copilot became a thing. 2FA got me off my butt to finally move.
- jckahn 3y ago
  What about requiring 2FA made you leave?
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    Microsoft barking orders at you?
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    In my case I had to give them my cell phone, I have multiple platforms and no one M/S recommended solution would not work for all. I would not give MS my cell.
toastal 3y ago
I’ve been moving into a self-hosted direction for a lot of my stuff as a lot of it really wasn’t being used by anyone but myself anyhow. My latest two projects are darcs on my home server using just SSH+Nginx for HTTP with an apply hook that run `nix flake check` & on the server end, a hook that runs `nix build` which not only checks the build, but also has the derivation in Nix store for me to pick up later as that server doubles as a substitutor. Collaboration can still be done via email of patches or DMing a pull request from someone else’s remote repo. It’s crazy how much we’ve been defaulting to tools that are so complicated--especially ones that require accounts to participate & have a social media features tacked on everywhere to cause the sorts of social media anxiety it does everywhere else. When the amount of collaborators is low, self-hosting is hardly a barrier that needs extra scaling. Weird the author said email was a pain, but last patch I received it was as easy as `himalaya read --raw X | git am` to apply & pointing out that modern email clients do a bad job supporting this seems more damning of those clients than the workflow.
- misterio7 3y ago
  You might want to try out self hosting hydra! It's pretty sweet for your usecase (building and caching Nix stuff, in a smart way). It can even run arbitrary commands (e.g. moving a release branch) EDIT: here's how I do it, in case it's useful: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/a74b2ede/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/default.nix https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/a74b2ede/hosts...
  - toastal 3y ago
    Could be useful in the future for sure if I ever get to a point beyond pushing “trunk” :) …It would be great if darcs had Pijul’s channels …or Pijul’s CLI UX had parity with darcs
__float 3y ago
> Rather than needing a complicated YAML file to run a CI system, it’s just cloning Git repos and running commands. How do you define what repos you need and which commands are run? Ah, it is indeed also a YAML file: https://srht.site/automating-deployments https://srht.site/automating-deployments
- ihattendorf 3y ago
  But is it a _complicated_ YAML file?
  - eviks 3y ago
    it's also not "just cloning Git repos and running commands"
  - rco8786 3y ago
    They never start that way, do they?
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It's pretty widely known that you should keep as much stuff out of the YAML as possible, so you can run CI locally. That was definitely the most bullshit criticism in the article. Clearly not even something they actually care about because they settled on Drone CI which is configured in exactly the same way.
    - ahepp 3y ago
      > You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that you don't need to use their little action plugins for everything. Once I figured that out, and figured out how to run CI in a container specified by the repo, I was actually quite happy to transition my CI away from Jenkins (which was always pretty rough, but I knew I could keep the builds running locally that way). I guess the real proof will be if I'm able to ever leave GitHub, but I feel pretty good about the amount of lock-in vs the benefits of the service.
LoganDark 3y ago
I also checked out SourceHut, but they're unfortunately not compatible with my email provider, and after some discussion with Drew (the founder) it started to sound like I'm not welcome unless I bring a real legal name and human identity. I understand how that type of collaboration can be valued and desired, but it excludes me, so I didn't pursue SourceHut any further. Something to think about if you ever consider it - no pseudonyms, no custom emails, use your real name and personal email address, or you'll be actively rejected by their software.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago
  [dead]
- emersion 3y ago
  SourceHut staff here. We don't have any requirement for "real legal" names or anything -- and in fact I find these requirements very harmful in general (glad we finally got rid of them in the kernel). I know multiple people collaborating on SourceHut with a pseudonym and this causes no issue at all. SourceHut does assume a stable email address but that's about it. That's my own take -- for Drew's see https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    It's not a requirement, but I heavily got the vibe that pseudonyms are not welcome. To quote Drew, "You should be using your real email address with the mailing lists, so that people can reach you and treat you as a human being, not as a proxy of one." I'm just not comfortable putting myself out there like that. I get it's not technically against the rules to do it differently, but it's just... frowned upon. Other justifications included that my peers would be sharing their real names and personal email addresses, so I'm being non-courteous by not doing the same... I dunno. It wasn't a particularly productive email chain, but it told me all I needed to know.
    - morelisp 3y ago
RealStickman_ 3y ago
I'm surprised the author rejected using GitLab because of its Open Core model, but decided foe using Drone CI, which appears to be following a similar model.
- steezeburger 3y ago
  The whole article feels really inconsistent on what the author likes and dislikes and his reasonings behind such things. Really off putting article imo.
- pacbard 3y ago
  If drone’s open core is a problem, there is always woodpecker, which was forked from the original drone before they changed their license a few years ago.
- thih9 3y ago
  Open core was one of the reasons. Another was that it’s also “AI-powered”.
- revskill 3y ago
  If the reasoning is "gitlab is bloated" then it's more reasonable to me.
- xondono 3y ago
  What I understood is that the author is not happy about the “Open Core” model and would prefer truly OSS, but the real deal breaker is maintaining Gitlab. My experience self hosting Gitlab was pretty terrible, it requires a lot of attention on your part, and internally the project feels like a bunch of fragile scripts. There’s also little documentation for when things go wrong, with was almost every single update. In the end I switched to Gitea as well and I’ve been happy with it for years at this point.
  - tandav 3y ago
    I found it difficult to find documentation on how to run gitlab in docker without nginx (I use caddy for reverse proxy) and enable the registry. For anyone having the same problem, here's a working Dockerfile. https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516 https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516 I've tried github actions, drone, woodpecker and gitlab. In my opinion gitlab has a much more flexible CI system.
eviks 3y ago
> the email-based workflow was a lot clunkier than I expected > If you want to create a repo for PR’s sake, email me at dev at notgull dot net and I can set you up. So is there no way to allow seamless forking like on GitHub without high risks of abuse?
huijzer 3y ago
You can nowadays use the built-in CI instead of Drone. It’s experimental but has worked fine for me so far.
- Rayosay 3y ago
  It's actually no longer experimental as of the Gitea 1.21.0 release. (It was released in Gitea 1.19.0 as experimental pending some hardening and additional features that they wanted to add, which have now been completed.) It is still under active development, but is a lot more mature now. Like you, I have been using it since it was experimental, and it has been very nice. My only complaint with Gitea Actions was that it required Docker specifically, not other OCI-compatible runtimes, but they recently added support for rootless Podman, so even that is no longer a complaint.
confd 3y ago
It’s a wonder how much freedom can be gained by eschewing the desire to be discovered.
- thih9 3y ago
  The author didn’t eschew discovery - the article mentions mirroring to github to take advantage of their code discovery.
  - confd 3y ago
    And what do you think of that?
    - thih9 3y ago
      At first I thought it was pointless, i.e. to migrate from github only to mirror your code there eventually. But in the end I like it — mirroring self hosted source forges to github seems a good way to raise awareness of github alternatives.
thih9 3y ago
Given the rise of “AI-powered” forges, i.e. platforms that add the source of projects hosted there to their AI models, is it ok to upload GPL-licensed code there?
IshKebab 3y ago
This seems pretty filled with arbitrary back-reasoning for decisions they've already made based on guy feelings. They don't like "AI-powered" because it is a vague, ill-defined term... except it's extremely obvious and well defined what GitHub means by that (and they've even used copilot and liked it!) Gitlab CI is rejected because it uses YAML for config... like every other CI system they mention. Gitlab isn't ok because it's open core, but Drone CI is. Could have been an interesting comparison but it wasn't.
dartos 3y ago
Onedev is pretty good. I run it locally and it’s been grwat
- jamesu 3y ago
  Onedev has pretty good features built-in. They even seem to have a paid option now too which adds some additional features, though I wonder what the division between paid and unpaid features will look like as the project ages. To be fair though, there only seems to be one person consistently working on it. Also there is just something about its sidebar-centric UI I just don't like. It's not as bad as gitlab but still, it bugs me every time I use it.
sebastianconcpt 3y ago
Is Microsoft secretly learning from the secrets in private GitHub repositories?
- bionhoward 3y ago
  No, but Microsoft has an AI term of service which forbids use of Microsoft AI for AI development. “”” AI Services q. AI Services. "AI services" are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence ("AI") system. iii. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service. “”” If you ask GitHub Copilot Chat about the issue, it/they suggest seeking professional legal advice. To use GitHub Copilot. An AI trained on our AI code from GitHub. To write AI code. For paying customers. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIj6-mgyxVRBJNEeVZMV8t8ec2LZQDks/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIj6-mgyxVRBJNEeVZMV8t8ec2L... Satya Nadella is King Midas. I emailed him and their legal team about it many times and he could have personally gone into the codebase and deleted this service term by now. I reported them to the State of Washington Attorney General (you can, too), and to the Federal Trade Commission Antitrust Team (you can, too), and to the Department of Justice Antitrust Enforcement Division (you can, too). Unclear how to report this to the EU Parliament AI Act folks, but maybe they posted new info since I last checked. It’s a single line of text, certainly unfair and unreasonable and almost surely illegal in pretty much every relevant jurisdiction, so there’s certainly no an argument to be made that the fix is too technically challenging, even in light of Microsoft’s historical ineptitude. We could check to see if Washington State has laws against contractual restraint of trade like California does. (Hint, Hint.)
sneak 3y ago
He doesn’t want to use GitHub because it trains Copilot on f/oss code, but then selfhosts and mirrors all his code to GitHub anyway? Why release free software if you don’t want others to use it? Why provide any code to GitHub if you don’t want GitHub to use it? This is just tribalism, the ideology isn’t even consistent.
godber 3y ago
I’ve kind of anticipated this sentiment and have been thinking about providing Gitea hosting. Though I’ve been a little discouraged by Gitea’s release of their own cloud hosting service. This blog post and the revenue growth at Gitlab over the last two quarters appear to be evidence of people wanting to moving away from GitHub (though their earnings report attribute the growth to other initiatives, clearly I had no real insight on this). As an extension of my self hosting of Mastodon efforts from last year I rolled up my other minor hosting efforts into https://hawt.cloud https://hawt.cloud as a place to experiment with providing services like this. This all ties in with the “Open Web” or “Small Web” sentiments I’ve seen expressed recently. The hyperscalers are locking more and more up into their ecosystems but there should still exist small vendors/hosting/service providers. They’ll never scale or be as reliable as the big guys but if they cease to exist a lot will be lost.
bob1029 3y ago
> I hope they haven’t started down the slow and painful process of enshittification by following vague, ill-defined industry trends! Has anyone else found themselves wondering if GitHub switched to a different web framework? I feel like they moved further down the client-side rendering rabbit hole recently. Their UI feels increasingly janky to me. Several times a day I get a view of completely un-styled HTML that eventually organizes itself into the appropriate presentation. For many scenarios, the GH web UI used to be preferable over navigating through visual studio because of how responsive it was. Now, I find the exact opposite to be true. I avoid the GH web UI as much as possible. VS2022 isn't great, but at least it's not implemented using react on top of some bullshit chrome wrapper.
- mwcampbell 3y ago
  Yeah, it's React. It's been a pretty frequent topic of discussion in some corners of the fediverse lately, e.g. https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379 https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379
  - bob1029 3y ago
    Thank you for the link. I've been trying to find any discussion whatsoever. This commentary inspired me to submit a support issue. I intend to start some drama with GH over this. ReactJS will win if we do nothing.
    - mwcampbell 3y ago
      Here's another, older thread, including some inside perspective: https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/111390409414137820 https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/111390409414137820
lucideer 3y ago
This post bothered me. Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, and there's nothing inherently wrong with their final choices, but their criticisms of the other systems alongside their reasons for choosing what they did are contradictory; overall the article was internally inconsistent. Gitlab was dismissed for the SaaS being only open-core, despite opting for self-hosting in the end. Codeberg was dismissed for having limited CI, but in the end they went for a separate standalone CI anyway (& almost the same platform as Codeberg, just with the added overhead of self-hosting).
- philipov 3y ago
  Open-core was mentioned, but was not a dealbreaker. Gitlab was dismissed for just following along with what GitHub does and being "AI-powered"
  - Tadpole9181 3y ago
    No, the parent is right. The very first two reasons given were being open-field and that they "didn't wasn't to be a sysadmin".
- dabedee 3y ago
  Yes, they dismissed Gitlab in part because of the self-hosted argument: "I know I can download GitLab and set it up on my own server. However, I’m a software developer, not a sysadmin. I want to spend my time developing software, not putting out fires and paying AWS bills for the rest of time." Yet they ended up choosing a self-hosted option, Gitea, because it was recommended by an acquaintance and they set up a couple lightsail servers on AWS to run it. It's totally fine for the author to share their preferences; they're just exhibiting the internal inconsistencies and irrational behavior we're probably all guilty of at one point or another.
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  To be honest gitlab can be a very painful beast to maintain if you just want to use it for yourself, especially if it's exposed to the public internet. The update rate is a bit insane, and while the updates are usually easy you still end up having to update almost every week or so, and I think monthly for critical security updates.
lloeki 3y ago
I really wish a cross site standard emerged to enable PRs from one forge to the next without creating accounts: - clone repo from original forge, push on yours - open PR on your forge, kicking in a like-blog-trackbacks-of-yore API so that the PR would be known/opened on the original forge. The thing would really put the "Pull Request" back in PR. Lots of things to define and handle correctly to prevent abuse but it could be a much better distributed experience. I guess big players like GitHub would nit like that too much though as it would fragment their coding social network.
- erlend_sh 3y ago
  That’s what ActivityPub in GitLab and elsewhere aims to enable: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
  - lloeki 3y ago
    Going through that link... that sounds great, thanks! In the discussion I also read about ForgeFed[0], also ActivityPub based, and which Forego is apparently implementing[1]. [0]: https://forgefed.org https://forgefed.org [1]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
- cxr 3y ago
  The PR workflow is already overkill for about 90% of contributors and not what Git was designed for, anyway, so you can just ditch it. You have the repo on your machine, and you have a public upstream. You don't need an third copy on your own server, too—you just need a place to publish what you actually changed.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    > The PR workflow is [...] not what Git was designed for I would agree... in its GitHub incarnation. > You have the repo on your machine, and you have a public upstream. You don't need an third copy on your own server, too—you just need a place to publish what you actually changed. Which is... where? The PR+fork model is what that implements: fork for the always-on storage so that upstream can fetch from it, PR for upstream to be notified about, discuss around, follow subsequent updates of, and track integration of the changeset. The problem in the GitHub model is that it's all happening on a single centralised platform, removing the distributed benefits of Git at great benefit to GitHub through network effects, stifling competition. What I propose is that the always-on storage need not be at GitHub, and there'd be a notification system towards GitHub to point to that always-on storage. Could be a bare GitHub repo with GitWeb (which is something one has to set up) + a curl to an upstream API endpoint, but sooner or later people are going to want to have a bit more than that, so having a forge do that (either a self-hosted one like Gitea/Forgejo or any hosted one like SourceHut/Codeberg/GitLab/Bitbucket) is practical. This essentially makes forges interoperable, restoring the distributed nature of git development that GitHub killed by centralising git hosting. (Of course you can s/GitHub/whatever-derivative/g above, I just focused on GitHub for the sake of simplicity because it's the monopolistic elephant in the room)
rapnie 3y ago
https://ayllu-forge.org/ https://ayllu-forge.org/ > Hyper Performant & Hackable Code Forge Built on Open Standards. Ayllu is a lightweight code forge designed to enable individuals and community projects to develop software in collaboration across open internet standards.
nirga 3y ago
It’s hard to build a community around an open source if you’re not on GitHub imo. And if you’re not building an open source, than iiuc GitHub can’t use your code for copilot training so the main reason for not choosing GitHub according to the post isn’t relevant.
tshirttime 3y ago
There's gitawonk.com, a gitea instance that lets you charge people for your commit history.
easterncalculus 3y ago
One of the things that people should know about SourceHut is that even though it is "Free Software", it is not a very "free" platform. Certain types of projects are a red line to the owner and will be removed[0]. I'll be honest, I do not trust cryptocurrency stuff and don't believe that it has utility. I hold none, I don't use it. That being said, this makes me wonder what the next category of projects that SourceHut will ban is. What is the point of a free software forge if you can't host certain types of (legal) projects? It's hard to take a platform seriously, to move all of your work there when the administrators can (and most importantly, actually do) ban your projects based solely on their personal views. [0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurrency/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
- apitman 3y ago
  This comes up over and over on different platforms. It's sad to me how many services that are built on open source software don't allow you to use a custom domain. It's not that hard. Let's Encrypt makes it almost trivial.
- rodlette 3y ago
  +1. I moved from Sourcehut when it announced IRS change of TOS. I realised I would prefer to support less discriminatory forges. I also have no interest in crytocurrency.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I'm actually pretty fine with this, because they are pretty open about one point: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. First of all, it says that you can talk with a real human about this, second they are very open it. When contrasted with a certain forge owned by Microsoft, which reaps my source code w/o my consent & regardless of its license to train a model which do not approve, Source Hut's stance is much more acceptable. I'm fine with companies having opinions, and I love it when they're open about them instead of being faceless and do unpredictable things to benefit themselves. And lastly, nobody forces you to work with a company you don't agree with. I don't work with GitHub anymore, and you're not preferring SourceHut. That's OK.
apitman 3y ago
> Let me be clear, GitHub is still far and away the best website for open source discover We need to separate discovery from hosting across the web. It's convenient to implement them together, but certainly not necessary. Bring back the link aggregators!
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
This is one of the first times I've seen someone who has casual access to Kubernetes. They spent a lot of the post saying how they didn't really want to run stuff, > However, I’m a software developer, not a sysadmin. I want to spend my time developing software, not putting out fires and paying AWS bills for the rest of time. But then their friend convinced them to "kubectl apply" a couple of manifests & they got a bunch of stuff spin up quickly, on what should be a reliable-ish maintained-by-other-people cluster. This is the first time I've seen a win like this & it feels like such a sweet spot!
flohofwoe 3y ago
The author is too quick to dismiss Gitlab IMHO. I use Gitlab on the job, and Github for my hobby stuff, and Gitlab feels in many ways like a Github for professional use. The Gitlab CI system alone is a difference like night and day compared to GH Actions.
CyberDildonics 3y ago
Is source control now being called a "software forge" ?
- xyzzy123 3y ago
  I'm not a huge fan of the term either but source control is only a small part of the development process. Most of these systems are an amalgamation of scm, ci/cd, issues, wikis, project management, security integrations, static site hosting, review workflows, management of release artifacts etc etc.
greatgib 3y ago
One time I wanted to test some specific flows with Gitlab, so I had the stupid idea to try to run my own self hosted instance on a Digital Ocean pod. It was not really complicated to install but the resources that it is using are insane. First, it would not even start if you don't have a dozen of Gb of ram available. Also, even if completely empty, the thing would take 30 mins to warm up doing I don't know what before being available for initial setup. In honest opinion, trying so much to copy GitHub, Gitlab became a heavy bloated software stack.

149 points by riidom 3y ago

I was hoping for an evaluation of Radicle--the only forge that seemed to be doing something exciting and "new", and one I haven't had the time to really analyze yet--but... no such luck :(.

riidom 3y ago
Wow that looks crazy! Link: https://radicle.xyz https://radicle.xyz But honestly, I also wouldn't write about this without a lot of usage experience. For sure it's different from github/-lab etc. exciting and new, as you say.
emptysongglass 3y ago
I'm not sure you'd want any forge evaluated by this author: they're extremely caustic, negative, and critical. Jaded people in tech like this I just try and avoid, especially when they come out against unalloyed good tech like containerization. Containers are just namespaces with additions. They've allowed us to narrow the gap of capability between the big three OSes, even if the other two need to virtualize Linux to do so. There's also nothing wrong with LLMs. How you choose to integrate them into your life or forge is a choice but at the end of the day they're just another tool in the toolbelt. Pick what you want or need and leave the rest. I'm not forced to use Copilot but I appreciate it when I need it.
k__ 3y ago
There is also https://protocol.land https://protocol.land and https://gitopia.com https://gitopia.com.
- RealStickman_ 3y ago
  The layout of radicle.land is unfortunately pretty broken on mobile.
  - k__ 3y ago
    Yes, it's only a month old or something. Pretty early project.
  - BHSPitMonkey 3y ago
    What is radicle.land? Both radicle.xyz and app.radicle.xyz seem fine for me on Firefox mobile. Did something change in the last few hours?
    - k__ 3y ago
      They probably meant protocol.land.
    - RealStickman_ 3y ago
      I meant protocol.land
- rapnie 3y ago
  The latter is Web3/crypto la la land, and the former.. dunno, got to read the code, but I would like to know about the project, its goals, and who is behind it.
  - k__ 3y ago
    Both (and Radicle) are web3. So, it's probably not your jive.
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    git is blockchain too
Klonoar 3y ago
Wow! So glad someone mentioned this - I’ve been looking for something like it, going to have to set aside time to try it out.
natdempk 3y ago
https://pierre.co/ https://pierre.co/ is another interesting one, focused on a product-development workflow.
- idlephysicist 3y ago
  What is a Product Engineer? Is it just another name for an engineer?
  - natdempk 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't think there is any meaningful distinction there. I think Pierre is just framing things in terms of solving for teams that work with product + design + engineering to ship something to users that involves all of those parties, whereas GitHub has primarily catered to engineering. Today in software companies there is basically a gap where each discipline kinda prefers to work in it's own software silo (eg. Asana / Figma / GitHub), but that doesn't really make a lot of sense from a fundamental standpoint where all of those aspects of a team want to work very closely together. You end up kinda syncing a lot of info/state across the silos, or via meetingss/slack etc, so I think Pierre is trying to bring all that into one tool with some opinionated workflow. Makes a lot of sense from my perspective, curious how it ends up working out.

Klonoar 3y ago

Would’ve been curious for the authors take on OneDev as well.

aulisius 3y ago

Coincidentally, I've been mulling the same idea for a week now. A self-hostable source forge + registry to serve artifacts would be amazing. I think the only thing you'd lose is the 'social' aspects of GitHub, but I believe that can be made up with a combination of rss feeds (?), ActivityPub etc.

godber 3y ago
I think we've been thinking similarly. Decentralization will have it's costs. I've been thinking Opt-In centralized search for personal repos, maybe as a gitea (or other self hosted options) plug-in. But as you suggest, maybe existing features can be leveraged to prove the social/discoverability.

Ayesh 3y ago

Having tried GitHub, GitLab, Source Hut, Codeberg, and BitBucket (RIP), I think the only serious options are GitHub, GitLab self hosted, and Source Hut. GitHub owned by MSFT aside, and also putting their AI push _also_ aside, GitHub has things like Sponsors, Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere else. They sure are luring you into ecosystems that require a huge escape velocity, but GitHub serves as less-friction entry point to open source software. GitLab self hosting is also nice and flexible, but it has a more "enterprise open source" feeling to it. Debian and Drupal can take advantage of it, but I don't see myself hosting mini projects like my mini CSS library that is also used by three other strangers. Source Hut is really nice too. Admittedly I don't like email based workflows, so I haven't really thought about moving anything there. But Source Hut has "unlisted" repos, which I thought was really clever and missing from other forges.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
GitHub Sponsors is pretty great. Seems like a perfectly ethical way for open source developers to earn money. Doesn't depend on copyright, artificial scarcity, advertising. I really like it.
isilofi 3y ago
> Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere else. Gitlab has equivalents you can enable as CI pipelines.
- lolinder 3y ago
  So do other forges: I have Renovate [0] set up on my self-hosted Forgejo and it's worked great so far. [0] https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate
mst 3y ago
Having been using gitea at work for a while as an "internal mini-github" (along with a github organisation for stuff that isn't purely internal or would otherwise benefit for that) I have to say it ... hasn't annoyed me noticeably. So I think I'd put gitea* on that list as well. (I don't think I disagree with your opinions about the ones you -have- listed) * and I mean that to include forgejo, I think, though I haven't tried it so YMMV

dboreham 3y ago

Quick note that Gitea has its own CI (roughly Github Actions compatible) so you don't need to use Drone.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Is not hard for me to see a case being built around the idea of finding value in having code to stay excluded from the surface exposed to AI so it becomes impossible for it to predate it. It's a type of "security" that doesn't find an answer in "better AIs" or "AIs with improved alignment". The value comes out of being safe from the risk that can come out of the humans in control of these AIs. I comes out of staying away and making impossible for any and all AIs to touch it. Like the difference between food from a chef and hyperindustrialized food. What if you want chef food only? In the same way, exclusively human software creations.

Jgrubb 3y ago
I like this analogy but I guess I see it more like man inventing the knife, so he doesn't have to rip the animal to shreds with his bare hands anymore.
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Except the knives do not have the capacity to give parts of the protein to other knives users surreptitiously and it's in AI's very nature to absolutely do that.
steezeburger 3y ago
Does the chef not use tools?
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Robot chefs are tools? Are they chefs?
ahepp 3y ago
Shall we call it the "slow code movement"?
- sebastianconcpt 3y ago
  Nice. You're starting to make me think in how a manifesto should sound like.

btreecat 3y ago

I think it's time we collectively mature past the point where taking unsubstantiated pot-shots at tools we don't "love" is seen as a value add to commentary. In this case calling k8s a "nightmare" is a strong red flag akin to the mantra of "java is slow". It lacks the nuance of hands on XP and reeks of rules of thumb miss applied to the point of catchphrases.

steezeburger 3y ago
Sad to see this down voted. I agree. They also sound insufferable. Maybe it's just their writing style, trying to be inflammatory for engagement, but they are not someone I would want to work with.
- tailspin2019 3y ago
  You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing their opinions on things on their own blog. And yet you're happy to share your own dismissive opinions on the author here. FWIW I find the author's obviously subjective opinions on their tools much more valuable than your obviously subjective opinions of this author.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    > You and the parent seem to dislike the author sharing their opinions on things on their own blog At least w.r.t. the original comment, this seems like a misunderstanding. GP was saying that, absent any explanation for why the author came to the opinions they did, the article doesn't say much of value. They don't dislike the author sharing their opinions on the author's own blog.
  - steezeburger 3y ago
    I don't care if the author shares their opinions, but I'm free to share mine as well, and I agreed with the parent comment at the time it was downvoted. I've just been noticing a trend of people, like the article author, who are quick to dismiss things for reasons that are inconsistent and dogmatic. Why be so close minded? I think it's okay to be dismissive of the dismissive. Which, I didn't really dismiss him did I? I read his entire article.

bachmeier 3y ago

If your goal is to put some code out there just to share it with others, any of those will work. There's also Bitbucket, Sourceforge, and self-hosted Fossil. The blog author seems to be looking for more of an "enterprise" open source option. You could even use Gitolite or GitWeb if you're willing to self-host.

jzb 3y ago
Nothing says "unmaintained," or inertia, quite still like having a project hosted on Sourceforge. I'm sure there's a few exceptions that are thriving on Sourceforge, but... it's kind of a relic at this point. It'd be cool if it could have a revival, but I think they've tried that a few times and never quite got there. I certainly wouldn't put anything new there, myself.

jmclnx 3y ago

I just went back to kind of "anonymous ftp" via my gemini site on sdf.org. I find it far easier to maintain. When I make a change, a script packages up the change and sends it to sdf. My github repositories were changed to point to it. The latest change by Microsoft made me move, I was considering a move when Copilot became a thing. 2FA got me off my butt to finally move.

jckahn 3y ago
What about requiring 2FA made you leave?
- jjgreen 3y ago
  Microsoft barking orders at you?
- jmclnx 3y ago
  In my case I had to give them my cell phone, I have multiple platforms and no one M/S recommended solution would not work for all. I would not give MS my cell.

toastal 3y ago

I’ve been moving into a self-hosted direction for a lot of my stuff as a lot of it really wasn’t being used by anyone but myself anyhow. My latest two projects are darcs on my home server using just SSH+Nginx for HTTP with an apply hook that run `nix flake check` & on the server end, a hook that runs `nix build` which not only checks the build, but also has the derivation in Nix store for me to pick up later as that server doubles as a substitutor. Collaboration can still be done via email of patches or DMing a pull request from someone else’s remote repo. It’s crazy how much we’ve been defaulting to tools that are so complicated--especially ones that require accounts to participate & have a social media features tacked on everywhere to cause the sorts of social media anxiety it does everywhere else. When the amount of collaborators is low, self-hosting is hardly a barrier that needs extra scaling. Weird the author said email was a pain, but last patch I received it was as easy as `himalaya read --raw X | git am` to apply & pointing out that modern email clients do a bad job supporting this seems more damning of those clients than the workflow.

misterio7 3y ago
You might want to try out self hosting hydra! It's pretty sweet for your usecase (building and caching Nix stuff, in a smart way). It can even run arbitrary commands (e.g. moving a release branch) EDIT: here's how I do it, in case it's useful: https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/a74b2ede/hosts/celaeno/services/hydra/default.nix https://github.com/Misterio77/nix-config/blob/a74b2ede/hosts...
- toastal 3y ago
  Could be useful in the future for sure if I ever get to a point beyond pushing “trunk” :) …It would be great if darcs had Pijul’s channels …or Pijul’s CLI UX had parity with darcs

__float 3y ago

> Rather than needing a complicated YAML file to run a CI system, it’s just cloning Git repos and running commands. How do you define what repos you need and which commands are run? Ah, it is indeed also a YAML file: https://srht.site/automating-deployments https://srht.site/automating-deployments

ihattendorf 3y ago
But is it a _complicated_ YAML file?
- eviks 3y ago
  it's also not "just cloning Git repos and running commands"
- rco8786 3y ago
  They never start that way, do they?
- IshKebab 3y ago
  You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It's pretty widely known that you should keep as much stuff out of the YAML as possible, so you can run CI locally. That was definitely the most bullshit criticism in the article. Clearly not even something they actually care about because they settled on Drone CI which is configured in exactly the same way.
  - ahepp 3y ago
    > You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that you don't need to use their little action plugins for everything. Once I figured that out, and figured out how to run CI in a container specified by the repo, I was actually quite happy to transition my CI away from Jenkins (which was always pretty rough, but I knew I could keep the builds running locally that way). I guess the real proof will be if I'm able to ever leave GitHub, but I feel pretty good about the amount of lock-in vs the benefits of the service.

LoganDark 3y ago

I also checked out SourceHut, but they're unfortunately not compatible with my email provider, and after some discussion with Drew (the founder) it started to sound like I'm not welcome unless I bring a real legal name and human identity. I understand how that type of collaboration can be valued and desired, but it excludes me, so I didn't pursue SourceHut any further. Something to think about if you ever consider it - no pseudonyms, no custom emails, use your real name and personal email address, or you'll be actively rejected by their software.

oldpersonintx 3y ago
[dead]
emersion 3y ago
SourceHut staff here. We don't have any requirement for "real legal" names or anything -- and in fact I find these requirements very harmful in general (glad we finally got rid of them in the kernel). I know multiple people collaborating on SourceHut with a pseudonym and this causes no issue at all. SourceHut does assume a stable email address but that's about it. That's my own take -- for Drew's see https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html https://drewdevault.com/2023/10/31/On-real-names.html
- LoganDark 3y ago
  It's not a requirement, but I heavily got the vibe that pseudonyms are not welcome. To quote Drew, "You should be using your real email address with the mailing lists, so that people can reach you and treat you as a human being, not as a proxy of one." I'm just not comfortable putting myself out there like that. I get it's not technically against the rules to do it differently, but it's just... frowned upon. Other justifications included that my peers would be sharing their real names and personal email addresses, so I'm being non-courteous by not doing the same... I dunno. It wasn't a particularly productive email chain, but it told me all I needed to know.
  - morelisp 3y ago

RealStickman_ 3y ago

I'm surprised the author rejected using GitLab because of its Open Core model, but decided foe using Drone CI, which appears to be following a similar model.

steezeburger 3y ago
The whole article feels really inconsistent on what the author likes and dislikes and his reasonings behind such things. Really off putting article imo.
pacbard 3y ago
If drone’s open core is a problem, there is always woodpecker, which was forked from the original drone before they changed their license a few years ago.
thih9 3y ago
Open core was one of the reasons. Another was that it’s also “AI-powered”.
revskill 3y ago
If the reasoning is "gitlab is bloated" then it's more reasonable to me.
xondono 3y ago
What I understood is that the author is not happy about the “Open Core” model and would prefer truly OSS, but the real deal breaker is maintaining Gitlab. My experience self hosting Gitlab was pretty terrible, it requires a lot of attention on your part, and internally the project feels like a bunch of fragile scripts. There’s also little documentation for when things go wrong, with was almost every single update. In the end I switched to Gitea as well and I’ve been happy with it for years at this point.
- tandav 3y ago
  I found it difficult to find documentation on how to run gitlab in docker without nginx (I use caddy for reverse proxy) and enable the registry. For anyone having the same problem, here's a working Dockerfile. https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516 https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516 I've tried github actions, drone, woodpecker and gitlab. In my opinion gitlab has a much more flexible CI system.

eviks 3y ago

> the email-based workflow was a lot clunkier than I expected > If you want to create a repo for PR’s sake, email me at dev at notgull dot net and I can set you up. So is there no way to allow seamless forking like on GitHub without high risks of abuse?

huijzer 3y ago

You can nowadays use the built-in CI instead of Drone. It’s experimental but has worked fine for me so far.

Rayosay 3y ago
It's actually no longer experimental as of the Gitea 1.21.0 release. (It was released in Gitea 1.19.0 as experimental pending some hardening and additional features that they wanted to add, which have now been completed.) It is still under active development, but is a lot more mature now. Like you, I have been using it since it was experimental, and it has been very nice. My only complaint with Gitea Actions was that it required Docker specifically, not other OCI-compatible runtimes, but they recently added support for rootless Podman, so even that is no longer a complaint.

confd 3y ago

It’s a wonder how much freedom can be gained by eschewing the desire to be discovered.

thih9 3y ago
The author didn’t eschew discovery - the article mentions mirroring to github to take advantage of their code discovery.
- confd 3y ago
  And what do you think of that?
  - thih9 3y ago
    At first I thought it was pointless, i.e. to migrate from github only to mirror your code there eventually. But in the end I like it — mirroring self hosted source forges to github seems a good way to raise awareness of github alternatives.

thih9 3y ago

Given the rise of “AI-powered” forges, i.e. platforms that add the source of projects hosted there to their AI models, is it ok to upload GPL-licensed code there?

IshKebab 3y ago

This seems pretty filled with arbitrary back-reasoning for decisions they've already made based on guy feelings. They don't like "AI-powered" because it is a vague, ill-defined term... except it's extremely obvious and well defined what GitHub means by that (and they've even used copilot and liked it!) Gitlab CI is rejected because it uses YAML for config... like every other CI system they mention. Gitlab isn't ok because it's open core, but Drone CI is. Could have been an interesting comparison but it wasn't.

dartos 3y ago

Onedev is pretty good. I run it locally and it’s been grwat

jamesu 3y ago
Onedev has pretty good features built-in. They even seem to have a paid option now too which adds some additional features, though I wonder what the division between paid and unpaid features will look like as the project ages. To be fair though, there only seems to be one person consistently working on it. Also there is just something about its sidebar-centric UI I just don't like. It's not as bad as gitlab but still, it bugs me every time I use it.

sebastianconcpt 3y ago

Is Microsoft secretly learning from the secrets in private GitHub repositories?

bionhoward 3y ago
No, but Microsoft has an AI term of service which forbids use of Microsoft AI for AI development. “”” AI Services q. AI Services. "AI services" are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence ("AI") system. iii. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service. “”” If you ask GitHub Copilot Chat about the issue, it/they suggest seeking professional legal advice. To use GitHub Copilot. An AI trained on our AI code from GitHub. To write AI code. For paying customers. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIj6-mgyxVRBJNEeVZMV8t8ec2LZQDks/view?usp=drivesdk https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DIj6-mgyxVRBJNEeVZMV8t8ec2L... Satya Nadella is King Midas. I emailed him and their legal team about it many times and he could have personally gone into the codebase and deleted this service term by now. I reported them to the State of Washington Attorney General (you can, too), and to the Federal Trade Commission Antitrust Team (you can, too), and to the Department of Justice Antitrust Enforcement Division (you can, too). Unclear how to report this to the EU Parliament AI Act folks, but maybe they posted new info since I last checked. It’s a single line of text, certainly unfair and unreasonable and almost surely illegal in pretty much every relevant jurisdiction, so there’s certainly no an argument to be made that the fix is too technically challenging, even in light of Microsoft’s historical ineptitude. We could check to see if Washington State has laws against contractual restraint of trade like California does. (Hint, Hint.)

sneak 3y ago

He doesn’t want to use GitHub because it trains Copilot on f/oss code, but then selfhosts and mirrors all his code to GitHub anyway? Why release free software if you don’t want others to use it? Why provide any code to GitHub if you don’t want GitHub to use it? This is just tribalism, the ideology isn’t even consistent.

godber 3y ago

I’ve kind of anticipated this sentiment and have been thinking about providing Gitea hosting. Though I’ve been a little discouraged by Gitea’s release of their own cloud hosting service. This blog post and the revenue growth at Gitlab over the last two quarters appear to be evidence of people wanting to moving away from GitHub (though their earnings report attribute the growth to other initiatives, clearly I had no real insight on this). As an extension of my self hosting of Mastodon efforts from last year I rolled up my other minor hosting efforts into https://hawt.cloud https://hawt.cloud as a place to experiment with providing services like this. This all ties in with the “Open Web” or “Small Web” sentiments I’ve seen expressed recently. The hyperscalers are locking more and more up into their ecosystems but there should still exist small vendors/hosting/service providers. They’ll never scale or be as reliable as the big guys but if they cease to exist a lot will be lost.

bob1029 3y ago

> I hope they haven’t started down the slow and painful process of enshittification by following vague, ill-defined industry trends! Has anyone else found themselves wondering if GitHub switched to a different web framework? I feel like they moved further down the client-side rendering rabbit hole recently. Their UI feels increasingly janky to me. Several times a day I get a view of completely un-styled HTML that eventually organizes itself into the appropriate presentation. For many scenarios, the GH web UI used to be preferable over navigating through visual studio because of how responsive it was. Now, I find the exact opposite to be true. I avoid the GH web UI as much as possible. VS2022 isn't great, but at least it's not implemented using react on top of some bullshit chrome wrapper.

mwcampbell 3y ago
Yeah, it's React. It's been a pretty frequent topic of discussion in some corners of the fediverse lately, e.g. https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379 https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379
- bob1029 3y ago
  Thank you for the link. I've been trying to find any discussion whatsoever. This commentary inspired me to submit a support issue. I intend to start some drama with GH over this. ReactJS will win if we do nothing.
  - mwcampbell 3y ago
    Here's another, older thread, including some inside perspective: https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/111390409414137820 https://toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/111390409414137820

lucideer 3y ago

This post bothered me. Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, and there's nothing inherently wrong with their final choices, but their criticisms of the other systems alongside their reasons for choosing what they did are contradictory; overall the article was internally inconsistent. Gitlab was dismissed for the SaaS being only open-core, despite opting for self-hosting in the end. Codeberg was dismissed for having limited CI, but in the end they went for a separate standalone CI anyway (& almost the same platform as Codeberg, just with the added overhead of self-hosting).

philipov 3y ago
Open-core was mentioned, but was not a dealbreaker. Gitlab was dismissed for just following along with what GitHub does and being "AI-powered"
- Tadpole9181 3y ago
  No, the parent is right. The very first two reasons given were being open-field and that they "didn't wasn't to be a sysadmin".
dabedee 3y ago
Yes, they dismissed Gitlab in part because of the self-hosted argument: "I know I can download GitLab and set it up on my own server. However, I’m a software developer, not a sysadmin. I want to spend my time developing software, not putting out fires and paying AWS bills for the rest of time." Yet they ended up choosing a self-hosted option, Gitea, because it was recommended by an acquaintance and they set up a couple lightsail servers on AWS to run it. It's totally fine for the author to share their preferences; they're just exhibiting the internal inconsistencies and irrational behavior we're probably all guilty of at one point or another.
mardifoufs 3y ago
To be honest gitlab can be a very painful beast to maintain if you just want to use it for yourself, especially if it's exposed to the public internet. The update rate is a bit insane, and while the updates are usually easy you still end up having to update almost every week or so, and I think monthly for critical security updates.

lloeki 3y ago

I really wish a cross site standard emerged to enable PRs from one forge to the next without creating accounts: - clone repo from original forge, push on yours - open PR on your forge, kicking in a like-blog-trackbacks-of-yore API so that the PR would be known/opened on the original forge. The thing would really put the "Pull Request" back in PR. Lots of things to define and handle correctly to prevent abuse but it could be a much better distributed experience. I guess big players like GitHub would nit like that too much though as it would fragment their coding social network.

erlend_sh 3y ago
That’s what ActivityPub in GitLab and elsewhere aims to enable: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247
- lloeki 3y ago
  Going through that link... that sounds great, thanks! In the discussion I also read about ForgeFed[0], also ActivityPub based, and which Forego is apparently implementing[1]. [0]: https://forgefed.org https://forgefed.org [1]: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
cxr 3y ago
The PR workflow is already overkill for about 90% of contributors and not what Git was designed for, anyway, so you can just ditch it. You have the repo on your machine, and you have a public upstream. You don't need an third copy on your own server, too—you just need a place to publish what you actually changed.
- lloeki 3y ago
  > The PR workflow is [...] not what Git was designed for I would agree... in its GitHub incarnation. > You have the repo on your machine, and you have a public upstream. You don't need an third copy on your own server, too—you just need a place to publish what you actually changed. Which is... where? The PR+fork model is what that implements: fork for the always-on storage so that upstream can fetch from it, PR for upstream to be notified about, discuss around, follow subsequent updates of, and track integration of the changeset. The problem in the GitHub model is that it's all happening on a single centralised platform, removing the distributed benefits of Git at great benefit to GitHub through network effects, stifling competition. What I propose is that the always-on storage need not be at GitHub, and there'd be a notification system towards GitHub to point to that always-on storage. Could be a bare GitHub repo with GitWeb (which is something one has to set up) + a curl to an upstream API endpoint, but sooner or later people are going to want to have a bit more than that, so having a forge do that (either a self-hosted one like Gitea/Forgejo or any hosted one like SourceHut/Codeberg/GitLab/Bitbucket) is practical. This essentially makes forges interoperable, restoring the distributed nature of git development that GitHub killed by centralising git hosting. (Of course you can s/GitHub/whatever-derivative/g above, I just focused on GitHub for the sake of simplicity because it's the monopolistic elephant in the room)

rapnie 3y ago

https://ayllu-forge.org/ https://ayllu-forge.org/ > Hyper Performant & Hackable Code Forge Built on Open Standards. Ayllu is a lightweight code forge designed to enable individuals and community projects to develop software in collaboration across open internet standards.

nirga 3y ago

It’s hard to build a community around an open source if you’re not on GitHub imo. And if you’re not building an open source, than iiuc GitHub can’t use your code for copilot training so the main reason for not choosing GitHub according to the post isn’t relevant.

tshirttime 3y ago

There's gitawonk.com, a gitea instance that lets you charge people for your commit history.

easterncalculus 3y ago

One of the things that people should know about SourceHut is that even though it is "Free Software", it is not a very "free" platform. Certain types of projects are a red line to the owner and will be removed[0]. I'll be honest, I do not trust cryptocurrency stuff and don't believe that it has utility. I hold none, I don't use it. That being said, this makes me wonder what the next category of projects that SourceHut will ban is. What is the point of a free software forge if you can't host certain types of (legal) projects? It's hard to take a platform seriously, to move all of your work there when the administrators can (and most importantly, actually do) ban your projects based solely on their personal views. [0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurrency/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

apitman 3y ago
This comes up over and over on different platforms. It's sad to me how many services that are built on open source software don't allow you to use a custom domain. It's not that hard. Let's Encrypt makes it almost trivial.
rodlette 3y ago
+1. I moved from Sourcehut when it announced IRS change of TOS. I realised I would prefer to support less discriminatory forges. I also have no interest in crytocurrency.
bayindirh 3y ago
I'm actually pretty fine with this, because they are pretty open about one point: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. First of all, it says that you can talk with a real human about this, second they are very open it. When contrasted with a certain forge owned by Microsoft, which reaps my source code w/o my consent & regardless of its license to train a model which do not approve, Source Hut's stance is much more acceptable. I'm fine with companies having opinions, and I love it when they're open about them instead of being faceless and do unpredictable things to benefit themselves. And lastly, nobody forces you to work with a company you don't agree with. I don't work with GitHub anymore, and you're not preferring SourceHut. That's OK.

apitman 3y ago

> Let me be clear, GitHub is still far and away the best website for open source discover We need to separate discovery from hosting across the web. It's convenient to implement them together, but certainly not necessary. Bring back the link aggregators!

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

This is one of the first times I've seen someone who has casual access to Kubernetes. They spent a lot of the post saying how they didn't really want to run stuff, > However, I’m a software developer, not a sysadmin. I want to spend my time developing software, not putting out fires and paying AWS bills for the rest of time. But then their friend convinced them to "kubectl apply" a couple of manifests & they got a bunch of stuff spin up quickly, on what should be a reliable-ish maintained-by-other-people cluster. This is the first time I've seen a win like this & it feels like such a sweet spot!

flohofwoe 3y ago

The author is too quick to dismiss Gitlab IMHO. I use Gitlab on the job, and Github for my hobby stuff, and Gitlab feels in many ways like a Github for professional use. The Gitlab CI system alone is a difference like night and day compared to GH Actions.

CyberDildonics 3y ago

Is source control now being called a "software forge" ?

xyzzy123 3y ago
I'm not a huge fan of the term either but source control is only a small part of the development process. Most of these systems are an amalgamation of scm, ci/cd, issues, wikis, project management, security integrations, static site hosting, review workflows, management of release artifacts etc etc.

greatgib 3y ago

One time I wanted to test some specific flows with Gitlab, so I had the stupid idea to try to run my own self hosted instance on a Digital Ocean pod. It was not really complicated to install but the resources that it is using are insane. First, it would not even start if you don't have a dozen of Gb of ram available. Also, even if completely empty, the thing would take 30 mins to warm up doing I don't know what before being available for initial setup. In honest opinion, trying so much to copy GitHub, Gitlab became a heavy bloated software stack.