FFmpeg moves to Forgejo • Hacker News Board

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#171

Post by Aurornis » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:10 AM UTC

picafrost wrote: post #119

It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example. If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "F…

Rejecting useless or white space-only PRs is quick and easy. It’s not as big of a problem as you’re suggesting.

I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#172

Post by jambutters » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:11 AM UTC

picafrost wrote: post #119

It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example. If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "F…

Thousands is quite the exaggeration when there are only 379 on ffmpeg github. If you look through them, its actually 5-10% if not less

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#173

Post by kookamamie » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:14 AM UTC

RossBencina wrote: post #116

tylerritchie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is one where "software forge" is industry specific jargon (similar to "isostaticrebound" in earthquake science and "evapotranspiration" in biology) which the intended audience would tend to know the definition of. that said, it's a fair complaint for the quality of their marketing material (if not their technical documentation). as an aside, i checked and it takes four taps (with an thumb highlight thown in ) to…

Curious, what part of the industry is "software forge" a term of art? I have been programming since the late 90s and have never heard it. Looks like it was popular from 1988 to 2007: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Software+Forge... TIL

It is not a term of art. A veteran programmer here and I also cringed when saw it used in this context.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#174

Post by Aurornis » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #162

The comments on this page are a complete cesspool. A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more. Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at t…

> Self-hosting is generally good

I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.

I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.

With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.

One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.

It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.

I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#175

Post by aaron695 » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:17 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#176

Post by bakugo » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:20 AM UTC

Duralias wrote: post #83

mpalmer wrote: post #60

With the calm, respectful understanding that everything is subjective and there's no accounting for taste - and in my personal capacity - I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site. With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Clo…

It has simply been normalized and for a lot of smaller scale sites, that this was first made for, being a little less professional isn't a problem. But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version. https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

Is there anything stopping anyone from just making a fork and removing it manually?

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#177

Post by Dwedit » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:20 AM UTC

setheron wrote: post #39

Dunno why but lately I can't visit any Anubis protected websites from my phone (Android). Just says Invalid Response :(

Meanwhile, my phone is a potato that is slow to actually solve the proof of work challenges.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#178

Post by jraph » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

RossBencina wrote: post #103

necovek wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you not familiar with SourceForge? Did you know what a (non-software) "forge" is? The term actually predates Git (SourceForge started with CVS and SVN IIRC). I am not saying documentation should not be better — it should — but I am surprised someone in software development would not know of the term. And knowing how good free software projects are at documentation, not turn to searches first (or is it just softwa…

> I am surprised someone in software development would not know of the term. It is not a software development term. Are you trolling? I know what SourceForge is. I had repositories there. I have never heard of a web portal for software project management (SCM front end, issue tracker) referred to as a "forge." Just because a product uses a weird name does not make it a term of art.

It's a widespread term. You just happened to not run into it yet or more likely you never made the connection. It happens. It's fine, but also we can't do much about this.

The GitHub monopoly obviously doesn't help.

Edit: I see your later "TIL" comment.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#179

Post by brookst » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:21 AM UTC

some-guy wrote: post #135

OhMeadhbh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the kids. They all like the anime. Not at all like the serious teams I worked with at IBM and DEC that slapped trek logos over everything.

Define kids? I know plenty of Gen X and elder millennials into anime

There are boomers, and there are kids.

Re: FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

#180

Post by picafrost » Sun, Aug 17, 2025, 5:22 AM UTC

jambutters wrote: post #172

picafrost wrote: post #119

It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example. If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "F…

Thousands is quite the exaggeration when there are only 379 on ffmpeg github. If you look through them, its actually 5-10% if not less

Another way to frame this is that even though the FFmpeg repository clearly indicates it's a mirror repository and has had a single open pull request titled "WARNING: PULL REQUESTS ON THIS REPOSITORY ARE IGNORED" [0] sitting in the pull requests page for 10 years, they've still had to close hundreds of pull requests.

[0] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pull/153