I already set up my own forgejo instance and moved my code off of GitHub:
I just set up a private forgejo instance and it was really quick and easy. So far I’m enjoying it.
Yeah. Got a raspberry pi sat by our router, being the home dns server and fileshare. Installing forgejo was a one-liner, configuring nginx to serve it over https took about half a dozen. Very easy, perfectly reliable.
Github will never be the only options there’s always alternatives.
But none that compete properly with it. I’m not a good programmer but nearly every open sourced project I’ve used/accessed was on Guthub
This is mostly due to inertia and, to an extent, SEO.
Most people use github because it’s all they know and its name is almost synonymous with git hosting. Publishing elsewhere leads to people asking you why you’re not on github, how else can we contribute, etc. Moreover, github seems to score better on Google SEO than other platforms.
It was a shit show before GitHub. I used to email code. I used to have to find random IRC rooms, follow random contributor guides, or beg for access. I remember one project required me to download some torrent bullshit just so I can submit my patch.
As a contributor, I can’t go back to creating multiple accounts and trying to figure out how the hell I give you code.
I don’t care if GitHub is the defacto for open-source projects, as long as there are competitors and mirrors.
I understand and agree. My concern is just the gap between it and the competitors.
I believe relying on Github for an account, rather than on a not-yet-existing code commons organization, is the trouble. E-mail accounts are used left and right, and Sourcehut apparently makes it easy to collaborate on code via e-mail. Delta Chat even makes chat and webapps work over e-mail!
E-Mail is an outdated and terrible way of communication. Sure, it’s still present in a lot of places, but no future proof technology should rely on E-Mail!
Do try Delta Chat, and Sourcehut if you have more time. They use e-mail as a transport very well.
Yeah but that’s mostly network effects and free CI, which must cost them a ton of money. I’d be surprised if they’re even profitable just because of that. I mean it’s worth it for Microsoft clearly, but if they ever decide it isn’t and turn the screws, there are at least two good alternatives - Gitlab and Codeberg.
I would also jump ship immediately if there was a platform that properly handled stacked PRs. I literally just want to be able to say “this PR includes this other PR - don’t show that one”. Is that too much to ask?
Forgejo and Codeberg are great (I use both), but only for backups, at least unless you’re already well known. For small developers, GitHub is pretty much the only platform that might let others discover your project.
i’m at the point where i’m so protective of codeberg cause i don’t want awful people on there slowing it down :')
I don’t get the first part on pull requests, you can’t just say:
I’d like to see what other tools people can offer. Perhaps a tool that promotes ensemble working to share the problem solving and context with a larger group.
and then also say:
I do not know what these tools are or what they look like, and I’m not saying Pull Requests are all bad either. But I don’t believe that we’ve found the one-and-only way to work together on a code base.
You have to make a valid proposal to say how the workflow could be “improved” (if it really can be), otherwise we’re talking about nothingness, the draft that is written in the middle is very vague IMO, what I’m really missing is what are the specific problems in the PR process, you say:
Pull Requests are a blunt instrument that puts gate keeping front-and-center
It’s true and I don’t see how things can work otherwise, the point made in the linked article (emphasis mine):
If I am messing about with something I have low confidence in, I will be very explicit in how I ask for help. Preferably at a much earlier stage than in opening a PR. But if I have high confidence in my code change, I would love for you to take a look, but I don’t expect you to spend too much time figuring it all out.
Confidence is completely subjective, some small change that you are confident will touch that place and only that, might well affect other parts of the code that you don’t know about, and who knows about it? The people that have worked on that code. I’ve worked a lot on a codebase where the main developer stepped down from his role to do managerial tasks and he doesn’t perform any code review at all mainly because the company doesn’t value the review process, so there’s no time for it, but also, even if there was, he can’t remember anything he’s written.
So it’s not rare that I touch some code, approve it myself and a user notices that something broke once it has hit production, I was confident in the change I made and I was wrong, I couldn’t have known that because I didn’t have the full knowledge of the codebase.
When I’m not confident, I usually ask and get a little feedback, it usually helps, but it’s not exhaustive, so some issues might crop up anyways, even still, I might be working on something I created and be confident, but my mind was hazy at the time of making the changes, so I make mistakes anyway.
That’s why I believe that a strict review process is always beneficial, even for supposed “stupid” changes, because you’re not editing a document, you’re editing code that will run, a mistake somewhere has effects elsewhere and wrong code has no place hitting production if it can reasonably be prevented, those “small hotfixes” that are urgently needed to fix that broken thing in production will often lead to some other issue somewhere because you were pressured to think fast and get out a dirty solution which will likely cause some problem you hadn’t foreseen in your supposed confidence further down the line.
What do we have on the other side, collaborative editing? A live feed of what the others are doing so anyone in the team can step in to help? That’s spreading the attention of the experienced developers that I imagine would be involved in this collaboration too thin, they would have to waste time thinking what the mental process of the other developer is, even in an interrupted stage, where everything is up in the air, that is huge cognitive load, it makes way more sense to put that load on the single developer that has to refine their work until it’s presentable, then, if they run into some problem midway, they will usually ask questions on logic and architecture, more so than code, and even if it is about code, their current codebase state can be pulled from their repository object of the PR to try outI think once Forgejo gets ActivityPub integration working it will really help for migration. I know federated platforms like Mastodon struggled with adoption because I think a lot of folks struggled to wrap their heads around the fact that there’s no “default instance” and they have to choose their own instance, but hopefully for a programming crowd that won’t be an issue. It would massively help with the “well I could move to a different website but there’s no obvious second choice I can move to” issue; you can just head to any Forgejo instance and interact with any other federated instance.
I have a private instance of forgejo on my dedicated server and use codeberg for public facing stuff. it’s great. I wish MORE FOSS stuff got off github. Like Searxng for example. I have a Searx instance set up also but I can’t add it to the searxng list on github because I refuse to sign back up with them. there are a few others like that.
Also if you have the means to afford it consider donating to Codeberg.
Gitea is awesome and fairly easy to get up and running.
