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Evaluating new software forges

notgull.net

81–90 of 138 posts

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a requirement, but I heavily got the vibe that pseudonyms are not welcome. To quote Drew, "You should be using your real email address with the mailing lists, so that people can reach you and treat you as a human being, not as a proxy of one." I'm just not comfortable putting myself out there like that. I get it's not technically against the rules to do it differently, but it's just... frowned upon. Other ju…

Pseudonyms are fine, hapaxnyms are what's cautioned against. Given that you use "Logan Dark" in several places surely you recognize why this is useful?

What is a "hapaxnym"? I can't find a definition or even any results for this word online.

And it's not "Logan Dark", it's "LoganDark".

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#82
post #53

I'm surprised the author rejected using GitLab because of its Open Core model, but decided foe using Drone CI, which appears to be following a similar model.

What I understood is that the author is not happy about the “Open Core” model and would prefer truly OSS, but the real deal breaker is maintaining Gitlab. My experience self hosting Gitlab was pretty terrible, it requires a lot of attention on your part, and internally the project feels like a bunch of fragile scripts. There’s also little documentation for when things go wrong, with was almost every single update. In…

I found it difficult to find documentation on how to run gitlab in docker without nginx (I use caddy for reverse proxy) and enable the registry. For anyone having the same problem, here's a working Dockerfile. https://gitlab.tandav.me/tandav/notes/-/issues/5516

I've tried github actions, drone, woodpecker and gitlab. In my opinion gitlab has a much more flexible CI system.

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#83

If your goal is to put some code out there just to share it with others, any of those will work. There's also Bitbucket, Sourceforge, and self-hosted Fossil. The blog author seems to be looking for more of an "enterprise" open source option. You could even use Gitolite or GitWeb if you're willing to self-host.

Nothing says "unmaintained," or inertia, quite still like having a project hosted on Sourceforge. I'm sure there's a few exceptions that are thriving on Sourceforge, but... it's kind of a relic at this point. It'd be cool if it could have a revival, but I think they've tried that a few times and never quite got there. I certainly wouldn't put anything new there, myself.

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#84
post #18
post #13

I just went back to kind of "anonymous ftp" via my gemini site on sdf.org. I find it far easier to maintain. When I make a change, a script packages up the change and sends it to sdf. My github repositories were changed to point to it. The latest change by Microsoft made me move, I was considering a move when Copilot became a thing. 2FA got me off my butt to finally move.

What about requiring 2FA made you leave?

In my case I had to give them my cell phone, I have multiple platforms and no one M/S recommended solution would not work for all. I would not give MS my cell.

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#85
One of the things that people should know about SourceHut is that even though it is "Free Software", it is not a very "free" platform. Certain types of projects are a red line to the owner and will be removed[0].

I'll be honest, I do not trust cryptocurrency stuff and don't believe that it has utility. I hold none, I don't use it. That being said, this makes me wonder what the next category of projects that SourceHut will ban is.

What is the point of a free software forge if you can't host certain types of (legal) projects? It's hard to take a platform seriously, to move all of your work there when the administrators can (and most importantly, actually do) ban your projects based solely on their personal views.

[0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#86
> Let me be clear, GitHub is still far and away the best website for open source discover

We need to separate discovery from hosting across the web. It's convenient to implement them together, but certainly not necessary. Bring back the link aggregators!

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#87
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It's pretty widely known that you should keep as much stuff out of the YAML as possible, so you can run CI locally. That was definitely the most bullshit criticism in the article. Clearly not even something they actually care about because they settle…

> You don't have to make Gitlab/GitHub YAML files complicated if you don't want to. The "script" section can be just a call to a normal shell/Python/Typescript CI script. It took me an embarrassingly long time to learn that you don't need to use their little action plugins for everything. Once I figured that out, and figured out how to run CI in a container specified by the repo, I was actually quite happy to transit…

> to run CI in a container specified by the repo

Would you happen to have an example YAML at hand?

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#88
post #43
post #5

Having tried GitHub, GitLab, Source Hut, Codeberg, and BitBucket (RIP), I think the only serious options are GitHub, GitLab self hosted, and Source Hut. GitHub owned by MSFT aside, and also putting their AI push _also_ aside, GitHub has things like Sponsors, Dependabot, and code scanning that you won't find anywhere else. They sure are luring you into ecosystems that require a huge escape velocity, but GitHub serves…

> and Source Hut Not a very serious option if you're looking for anyone from the 21st century to contribute to your project. No, the email workflow doesn't get better by just screaming "it's not that bad!" over and over again. I'm looking forward to the federation work that is being done for forgejo, that will be big if it works out as it seems like it will.

Also, the founder has an unfortunate history of just up and abandoning his projects when they stop being fun for him. I used his media host/imgur alternative in the past, and it spontaneously just disappeared one day. I'd rather that not happen to my source code

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#89

This post bothered me. Perhaps I'm being too nitpicky, and there's nothing inherently wrong with their final choices, but their criticisms of the other systems alongside their reasons for choosing what they did are contradictory; overall the article was internally inconsistent. Gitlab was dismissed for the SaaS being only open-core, despite opting for self-hosting in the end. Codeberg was dismissed for having limited…

To be honest gitlab can be a very painful beast to maintain if you just want to use it for yourself, especially if it's exposed to the public internet. The update rate is a bit insane, and while the updates are usually easy you still end up having to update almost every week or so, and I think monthly for critical security updates.

Re: Evaluating new software forges

#90
post #60

> I hope they haven’t started down the slow and painful process of enshittification by following vague, ill-defined industry trends! Has anyone else found themselves wondering if GitHub switched to a different web framework? I feel like they moved further down the client-side rendering rabbit hole recently. Their UI feels increasingly janky to me. Several times a day I get a view of completely un-styled HTML that eve…

Yeah, it's React. It's been a pretty frequent topic of discussion in some corners of the fediverse lately, e.g. https://mastodon.social/@bendelarre/111585575314778379

Thank you for the link. I've been trying to find any discussion whatsoever. This commentary inspired me to submit a support issue.

I intend to start some drama with GH over this. ReactJS will win if we do nothing.

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