OpenDev is a collaboratory for open source software development at scale

This seems to be squarely aimed at Gerrit fans, which is difficult for me to wrap my head around. The projects I'm on which are Gerrit-encumbered all seem to regard it as a necessary evil rather than a selling point. Still, the project is well-thought-out and I hope it's successful!

So time for a history lesson.

First, who am I? I'm JayF -- I've been working on OpenStack for about a decade, and am the currently serving TC Chair. This is not an official history, but my attempt to give you the story behind this from my perspective.

OpenDev collaboratory originally started as part of OpenStack itself -- as the team that enabled us to test the giant software suite. When it became clear that the tooling created and used by that team had general interest, it became time for them to spin off into their own group. I'll note that this maps similarly to what happened with Zuul -- a tool created around OpenStack, that was generally useful and split into it's own project. OpenDev was infrastructure services created around OpenStack and for OpenStack, that are generally useful and split into it's own project.

This context is important as to where it puts things on the timeline: OpenDev, and the associated technologies, were not created as an alternative to some incumbant power like Github or Gitlab -- when it was created, there were few, if any, other tools that could operate at that level of scale. (It's unclear to me if Github, as we think of it today, even existed or was at any level of popularity at this point in time.)

So as this thread hopefully picks up steam, lets avoid terms like "alternative to" or things that miss the context. OpenDev has been around, and open, for a long time. It will continue to be around, and open, for a long time. They aren't going to feed your code into an AI to train it, and they aren't going to try and turn your collaboration toolset into a social media platform. It's a tool to get work done, and I've been lucky to work in it for the last ten years.

Some of the folks running this (of which I am one) are going to be talking about it in a livestream in a little over a week: https://openinfra.dev/live/

The UI is much faster than Github, which is great, big selling point for me. The "iterative change" approach is pretty much how companies use Github I think. Contributors are given push permissions for the repo, the main branch being off limits, and PRs are required an approval before they can be merged. The Github model with forks is not great imo, because forks get out of sync pretty immediately.

Some features I would like to see is ranking of repos by popularity, e.g. "Github stars".

Quite the contrary to their claim, we restrict forking on ALL our repos and still have meaningful PRs.

Your assertion is correct that most organizations operate this way.

However, open source is different. Often you’ll have someone fork - hack on it - devise a novel change - and request a PR from their fork:branch to origin:branch.

In this scenario, the fork - and subsequent hacking - are exploratory while submitting the change and PR is distinctive. Not sure how one is supposed to explore and hack and provide PRs in their model as you’re forced to branch. A local copy is still a “fork” but with a separate origin.

You can still do a dual origin setup or do a merge main onto yours but I find this extremely limiting to contributors and overly controlling by project owners. There’s nothing stopping you from enforcing squash on merge or having standards on your SDLC. Enforcing that on everybody else isn’t in our best interest though. A diarrhea of commits is how you end up with spaghetti code.