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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

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Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#122

Post by rsyring »

gritzko wrote: post #47

I strongly disagree with the assumption that GitHub's alternative is another centralized forge. Git itself is perfectly decentralized, as was the original Linux kernel development process. How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me. Moving the eggs into another bucket is not a solution (like Microsoft is short of servers). The SPoF is the problem. There are plumbing,…

> How people managed to put all their eggs in one intermittently available service is beyond me.

It's beyond me how people on HN can be ignorant to why GitHub gained so much market share. It's because for most dev teams, the things they add to the easily decentralized git core is *very valuable.* Arguing it's not valuable or ignoring that value doesn't help anyone.

If decentralized is really going to win, then you have to have the features and DevX to match the basics GitHub provides. Because that's what people need/want. And not just the candy-ass-not-as-good-as-the-kernel-devs devs. Lots of very talented people and very well engineered projects use GitHub because it's better for what they need. Even with all the outages, people are still there. If it was so easy to move away, people would. The fact that they aren't says something important. Please consider not ignoring it.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#123

Post by zhynn »

rwl wrote: post #99
sssilver wrote: post #56

If only there was a convention for storing PRs and issues and wiki inside the repository itself, similar to how Fossil[1] does it. Then all the GitHubs and Gitlabs of this world would be limited to just providing UI and would be unable to hold our data hostage by design. [1] https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

I started using fossil recently and have been quite pleased with this aspect of it. I miss a few things from the git world (mostly magit and its magical ability to stage individual hunks of a diff) and there are a few rough edges, but I totally agree that having a wiki and issue tracking inside the repository makes so much sense. fossil‘s simplicity is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has to use git from a CLI. W…

I love Fossil, I have been using it for all of my projects for the last couple years. Things that I love include:

    1. batteries included single-file functionality (fossil binary + sqlite file and I have everything!)
    2. Hosting them is super easy, I have a lighttpd server configured to do cgi-bin, and i just pop the project.fossil file onto the server and I have a project.
The biggest friction is managing users across repos. Each repo is its own RBAC, the "zhynn" user in one repo is not the same as the "zhynn" user in another repo. It would be cool to be able to sync users across repos, which should be possible with sql, but I think that it could get weird with repo-specific permissions. Currently I just add my user to each new repo, granting that user setup permissions, and removing the admin before I scp the .fossil file up to the webserver.

In the end though, I intend to use it for all of my personal projects from here out.

I have a pipe dream of turning a fossil repo into a portable distributed more-async-friendly slack clone, where the "chat", "wiki" and "forum" functionalities are all used as the back-end for a responsive UI that basically does the same thing that slack does, but lives in a single sqlite file + binary. It could run mostly offline in a kind of scuttlebutt/limited connectivity pattern (when online push/pull messages, get latest chats/files/etc, go back offline. As you go through the content, make your responses locally, then go back online, push/pull again, repeat.)

I have another pipe dream of making a RedBean APE fossil UI. I think it would be cool to have a single file universal executable that is my project repo.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#124

Post by silverlinex »

icy wrote: post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#125

Post by AndrewKemendo »

techknowlogick wrote: post #97
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #18

I’ve been happy self hosting gitea https://about.gitea.com/

Woo! Thanks for the shoutout. I'm one of the project leads of Gitea, and if you ever run into any issues please feel free to hop into our chat:)

Awesome

It’s my go to now for all my private projects

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#126

Post by icy »

silverlinex wrote: post #124
icy wrote: post #115

https://tangled.org ! Founder/CEO here. We're a new forge building things from the ground up, and are fully federated -- you can host your git repos on your own infra, along with the CI runners. We've also got a pretty neat set of features (if I may say so myself): stacked PRs, Nix-based CI (if you want it), and a fully open protocol ( https://atproto.com ) to for you and your agents. Happy to answer any questions.

[flagged]

It's not crypto anything.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#127

Post by rwl »

sssilver wrote: post #106
rwl wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started using fossil recently and have been quite pleased with this aspect of it. I miss a few things from the git world (mostly magit and its magical ability to stage individual hunks of a diff) and there are a few rough edges, but I totally agree that having a wiki and issue tracking inside the repository makes so much sense. fossil‘s simplicity is a breath of fresh air for anyone who has to use git from a CLI. W…

The workflow is paradigmically different, and that may throw many people off. There's no rebase, on principle. Branch names are permanent attributes of commits. Even abandoned branches remain visible forever. Code review is post-hoc. People who are extremely accustomed to Git workflows may find the paradigm alienating.

Yep, it’s not for everyone, and their docs are pretty clear about that. OTOH those same docs contain a variety of arguments that git isn’t really designed for everyone either and that fossil might be a better fit for projects that have just one or a handful of developers, which AFAIK is the vast majority of projects on Github. My experience is that it is certainly an adjustment but the docs are good at explaining (and justifying) the differences, and the built-in features are very useful, especially for anyone looking to reduce their dependence on a centralized host that’s become unreliable.

Re: Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

#130

Post by melezhik »

plqbfbv wrote: post #37

To all of those proposing self-hosted GitLab: we did it for 6+ years in my company, and it's not always a smooth sailing. We had our own runners and we made it auto-upgrade across docker images daily before business start. It mostly worked really well, except those few times were a Docker upgrade had to be rolled back, or that one time the bundled pg_shared_buffers was set at 1MB by default, making schema upgrades im…

Ok, with DSCI as monolith application where git and CI are the same server, 32GB RAM VM is more then enough , no need to host runners, no need in k8s cluster, no need in dedicated maintain team, so no extra costs on devops tasks ... Also with general programming languages for CI pipeline you are in full control and simplicity ...
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