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Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

radicle.xyz

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Re: Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

#2

Post by mg »

These days when I collaborate with other developers, we do it all in a git repo that is simply hosted on a VM everyone has ssh access to.

Project management is done in a plan/ directory which has task entries like

    1000-add_logout_button.txt
Where 1000 is the priority.

There is also a directory plan/done/ where tasks go that have been completed. In the plan/done/ directory, the priority gets replaced by the completion date, so it looks like this:

    2024-09-04-add_logout_button.txt
This has a bunch of nice consequences. Some of them are:

Task management does not need any software or logins.

Task management can be done directly in Vim by simply looking into and editing the plan/ directory.

Task history is nicely versioned by git automatically.

All the tooling that comes with bash and git can be used on the plan/ dir. Like finding all tasks that contain the term "rounded corners" in the description is just

    grep -r 'rounded corners' plan/

Re: Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

#5

Post by Jnr »

Would be great if there was a short video/asciinema/charts or some other short form guide on how you are supposed to use it.

It was not clear from the home page what exactly it is and how it works, and I don't really want to read the whole documentation.

For me pesonally Github, Gitlab and Gitea is all about discovery. Their interface is easy to understand, fast to search for repositories and easy to contribute. I am not sure what problem Radicle is solving, other than "reliance on big tech". And it has always been possible to mirror git repos from github and other platforms. You could not mirror issues and CI pipelines, but not sure if Radicle solves that.

Re: Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

#8

Post by XorNot »

Jnr wrote: post #5

Would be great if there was a short video/asciinema/charts or some other short form guide on how you are supposed to use it. It was not clear from the home page what exactly it is and how it works, and I don't really want to read the whole documentation. For me pesonally Github, Gitlab and Gitea is all about discovery. Their interface is easy to understand, fast to search for repositories and easy to contribute. I am…

From the linked page here I couldn't find an obvious link through to the docs except by clicking "Install" which dropped me onto the user guides where I found this[1]. It looks like the main page[2] has the site map but I don't know why that top banner isn't on every page.

The main page[2] seems to be much more useful since it drops you to radicle browser page which is more of showing the actual product as you'd see it in terms of Gitlab/Github.

But I'm just going to say...they really need to drop the blue theming IMO because it's very hard to read and also just...too blue - everything just washes out.

EDIT: Just tried turning off --color-background-default, --color-background-float and --color-foreground-contrast and without changing anything else man does it get so much more readable - black text on white with a pleasant blue high-lighting scheme.

[1] https://radicle.xyz/guides/user

[2] https://radicle.xyz/

[3] https://app.radicle.xyz/nodes/seed.radicle.xyz/rad:z3gqcJUoA...

Re: Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

#9

Post by bongobingo1 »

> For this guide, we recommend installing Radicle under /usr/local. This will require you to have write permissions to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/man. You can give yourself these permission by changing ownership of these directories to the current user and group:

    $ sudo chown $(whoami): /usr/local/{bin,man,man/man1}
Seems kinda weird to chown all that in the install instructions? Or am I the weird one. Edit: This is from the seed guide, the user guide suggests installing to ~/.radicle.

Also booo for using ~/.radicle instead of ~/.config|local|whatever.

Some quirks and bumps, but the software is good at first impression. I really hope something like this can take off. Needs a good (and somehow trustable/authoritative) searchable index though as that's 90% of what most users want from Github I think.

I do wonder if the protocol could be adopted into something like Forgejo to aid adoption of the P2P idea.

Re: Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub

#10

Post by dotancohen »

amiga386 wrote: post #6

Not to be confused with Radicale 3.0 (a CalDAV/CardDAV server) https://radicale.org/v3.html

Thank you, I've been looking for a CardDAV server to replace an entire NextCloud install that was used only for that purpose. Serendipity at its finest!
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