forgefed VS cicada

If you don't mind me asking since you're here: will you be implementing ForgeFed in Gitness [0]? My sense is that federation is our best hope for breaking GitHub's network effects, and I'd love to see more projects like yours join the protocol.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

From the comments, Forgejo is also already working on implementing ForgeFed, an ActivityPub extension specifically designed for software forges [0]. Judging from the issue, it looks like they're well on their way [1].

I have to say, I'm not super into the idea of social media, but this is a use for federation I approve of wholeheartedly. The friction of having to create accounts on X forges (where X is the number of projects that self-host GitLab) is a huge moat for GitHub, and federation could solve that very handily and create an environment where FOSS projects can feasibly host their own code away from Microsoft's control without horribly inconveniencing everyone who wants to participate.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59

> I agree that e-mail is not perfect, but... how is GitHub better?

Please look at my comment again. I prefer email to locked in forges.

> Devs like new shiny toys, and e-mails are old technology

There is one aspect where such forges have an advantage over email - a better user experience. Aerc and the likes all good - but Github and others provide a good user experience over a tool that everyone uses - the web browser.

> we should have something better than e-mail in 2023

We really should have something better than email. I'm saying this as someone who operates a personal mail server and a bunch of desktop services for it. It's really hard to get the setup correct.

In that context, it's worth looking at forgefed (https://forgefed.org/). It's a protocol for federating forges like Gitea and Gitlab. It's built on top of ActivityPub - which behaves a bit like email (it has inboxes and outboxes for every user). From the spec, it seems like pull requests happen by sending patches to the destination forge.

> Nobody takes the time to try the e-mail workflow (even though it's really two git commands)

Email workflow seems simple. But there are two things that make it complicated:

1. The patches don't specify the commits they apply to. It's simply assumed that they apply to the head of the main branch. The commits have to be carefully rebased on the main branch before sending the patches. It could otherwise lead to conflicts and a lot of wasted time.

2. Each commit/patch is send as a single email. Developers usually make frequent commits when they develop. Such patches can be confusing and hellish to review. A sane patchset requires the developers to edit the commit history, usually using interactive rebases. Each commit should contain a single feature and shouldn't break the build.

I consider both the above to be good development practices and follow them even on my personal projects. However, this is an additional barrier to entry. In fact, this may be a bigger problem for many than setting up git for email.

Another interesting topic to look into is forge federation. Forgejo [0], the code forge on which Codeberg is based is one forge software that intends to federate their repositories between server instances over the network using ActivityPub protocol extensions such as ForgeFed [1] and F3 [2] specifications.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://forgefed.org

[2] https://lab.forgefriends.org/friendlyforgeformat

> If you want to look into people who disagree with you: https://forgefed.org/

Not sure if related, but recently read about https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada which looks like to abstract GithubCI and GitlabCI.

LICENSE AGPL

https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/blob/main/LICENSE

I.. wouldn't use to build commercial software.

I'm guessing it's this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35364146 although it didn't seem to get much traction other than the one comment that matches what I found while trying to read up on it:

https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada/blob/main/docs/ci-...

> create a file _anywhere in your repository_ ending in .ci

uh-huh

> Note that you cannot use the pipe operator (|) with the shell command, only one command can be executed at a time

uh-huh

> To make sure that your workflow works, try pushing to your repository

so, no local runner for this, either. fantastic.

So instead of using Starlark, which a non-trivial number of folks already know, there's already editor support for, and is obviously designed to be embedded, they decided that what the world needs is another DSL. Got it.

Hi HN! My name is Logan Hunt, and I am the founder and CEO of Cicada. Cicada is a self-hostable CICD platform that integrates with GitHub and Gitlab, allowing you to write workflows without caring about the underlying implementation details of the platform you are using. Source code (AGPL-v3 licensed) is available here: https://github.com/Cicada-Software/cicada and the live site is available here: https://cicada.sh

With Cicada you build automation workflows using our custom DSL (domain specific langauge), built specifically for writing automation workflows. The Cicada DSL is a fully functional programming language, meaning you can use variables, if statements (coming soon!), and execute shell commands without having to write a single line of YAML. And, best of all, these workflows can work with GitHub and Gitlab without any modifications.

One of the best parts of GitHub Actions (IMO) is the ability to easily trigger workflows from many types of events such as git pushes, opening/closing pull requests, or creating a new release. With Cicada you will be able to fire off workflows for all of these events, no matter what platform you choose. Say good by to vendor lock-in!

Having used GitHub Actions, Gitlab CI, and Azure DevOps at my previous job, I found that these tools where good at describing basic automation tasks, but failed whenever you wanted to do something complex. In addition, these platforms all use YAML for configuring their workflow files, which means you need to write a shell script for anything more complex than basic linting or testing. Another inherent problem with these solutions is that they all use different YAML formats, making them incompatible with one another, further locking you in to their platform. Cicada solves that by making a single, unified format that works no matter what platform you use, and converts all the platform-specific events types into one platform-agnostic type. This means that a git push event coming from GitHub will look identical to a git push event coming from Gitlab.

Cicada is in the early stages right now. A working MVP is up and running, but it is far from complete. I've been holding off open-sourcing Cicada until later, but given the recent GitHub outages this week, I felt this would be the perfect time to do an initial "launch".

Currently Cicada is running on a small Linode server, and the workflows are ran using Docker. I've removed the white-list so anybody can run workflows for the time being, though I expect it will get swamped rather quickly, in which case I will re-add the white-list. Also, getting GitHub permissions right is hard, so for the time being, you must push to GitHub repositories that are on your personal account (and are an owner of).

Let me know what you think!