spr VS Gitea

Graphite is neat. If you want something lighter-weight, spr[1] is also worth taking a look at as an entirely client-side "solution" to PR stacking.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to build good code review tooling on top of GitHub due to the severe impedance mismatch between the two models as well as GitHub API limitations and rate limits. That mismatch cannot be fully resolved (branches vs. patches) and results in constant friction, and you end up trusting a third party with full control over your repositories and approval workflows.

Graphite is the best attempt I've seen so far, but it still doesn't come anywhere close to Gerrit[2], which simply uses plain Git commits. Every commit becomes a review, and stacking is accomplished by simply pushing multiple commits. No custom tooling required - just `git push`.

It has very, very good code review UX and allows meaningful and in-depth back-and-forth during a code review, without losing context or having to re-review the entire diff. Once you're past the initial learning curve, it is blissful.

Gerrit is open source and it's what Google uses for many of their public projects such as Chromium and Android, and it is quite easy to self-host. It is entirely built on JGit and even stores code reviews as Git commits alongside the repositories.

If you want to give it a try - there's a well-maintained public instance, Gerrithub[3], operated by Gerritforge. Many open source projects use it.

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

[2]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

[3]: https://gerrithub.io

The CLI doesn't help with stacked commits, though. There's tools like spr[1] but none of them are anywhere as pleasant to use as Gerrit (or Phabricator, I guess).

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub:

- You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with wide-ranging access to your repository.

- GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts!

- Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively...

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

But, probably better to use https://github.com/ejoffe/spr (which I found many months after writing the create-stack script). Though, in this particular PR's case, it would have been a lot of work to preserve the commit IDs in the commit messages thanks to its generated nature; if you have a stack produced by hand, it'd work a lot better because a human is editing the PR and its description.

Another tool to look out for: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

I've heard good things from our customers about spr for GitHub (https://github.com/ejoffe/spr). It extends git with useful commands and hooks directly into GitHub PRs. We'll be adding some direct support for the tool in Reviewable shortly.

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/