forgefed VS linux

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/

FFS predates FreeBSD and is in some capacity supported by all 3 major BSDs. I'm fairly confident that Linux actually supports it through the ufs driver ( https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs/ufs ); whether the use of different names in different places makes it better or worse is an exercise for the reader.

These are a bit easier to see what's going on:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...

Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.

There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....

> The original less-than check was deemed incorrect

It was only deemed incorrect because of an information leak. Not because it's a valid use-case for user space to copy smaller portions of *hwrpb into user space. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21c5977a836e399fc71...

Correct. And the combined work needs to carry the MIT license text and copyright attributions for the MIT software authors. With binary distribution it must also be overt, not hidden in some source code drop, but directly accompanying the binary.

Many people who talk about relicensing never credit the MIT developers or distribute the MIT license text. "Because it's GPL now."

I don't think that you believe that, but many developers do.

Some don't see the need for source code scans for Open Source compliance, because the license.txt says GPL, so it's GPL. Prime example is the Linux kernel. There is code under different licenses in there, but people don't even read https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING till the end ("In addition, other licenses may also apply.") and conclude it's simply GPL 2 and nothing else.

Also be aware that sublicensing is not the same as relicensing.

> Does he have something against it?

He notoriously hates GNU Emacs, yes.

https://marc.info/?m=122955159617722

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%

[0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...

AIUI fsync is built on futex_waitv which has been upstreamed. So this has to be more than that.

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a0eb2da92b715d0c97b...