forgefed VS Gitea

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/

Create a system service. Download the file and save it to /etc/systemd/system/ or view the raw file in a browser and replace the URL with the version of Gitea you installed. You can find the list on https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/release/v1.22/contrib/systemd/gitea.service:

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

Same [1]. Zoom being outsourced to the implementing platform is one major pain-point. That example from us has grown in size.

We are clearly using the wrong tool for a diagram of this complexity, but the practicality of seeing commit changes in the diff, what property was changed by whom and instantly having the visual feedback in the Pull Request is just way too useful to use a "proper" tool.

[1] https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/25803

It's a tangent, but I think it's interesting that Gitea started trying to self host in Feb 2017 (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029) and hasn't got there yet (based on how active the github issues/PR page are).

https://about.gitea.com/ offers me a "free cloud trial" and otherwise sounds very like other web front ends to git. So like github, except they don't trust it themselves.

In contract forgejo has "Self-hosted alternative to GitHub" written in big letters on the landing page. https://codeberg.org/forgejo is indeed self hosted.

Gitea is a versatile tool for creating and managing git-based repositories, streamlining Code Review to enhance code quality for users and businesses. It integrates a CI/CD system, Gitea Actions, compatible with GitHub Actions, allowing users to create workflows in YAML or use existing plugins. Gitea's project management features include issue tasks, labeling, and kanban boards for efficient management of requirements, features, and bugs. These tools integrate with branches, tags, milestones, assignments, time tracking, and dependencies to plan and track development progress. Furthermore, Gitea supports over 20 package management types, such as Cargo, Composer, NPM, and PyPI, catering to a wide range of public or private package management needs. This comprehensive suite of features makes Gitea a powerful platform for managing development projects and packages.

Golang has a ton of single binary websites out there. The two that come to mind off hand are Gogs/Gitea only because I contributed to them

https://github.com/gogs/gogs

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea

My problem with Fossil is that it is a "one solution for all problems". Fossil packs all solutions together while the Git ecosystem provides several different solutions for each problem.

When you want to do things that Fossil is not meant to do, then you're in trouble. I have no idea on how to do CI/CD and DevOps with Fossil and how to integrate it with AWS/Azure/GCP.

I find that the whole ecosystem of Gitlab/Github and stand-alone alternatives like Gitea [1], Gogs [2], Notion, Jira and others is way more flexible and versatile.

[1] https://about.gitea.com/