From the FAQ, forˈd͡ʒe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo", Esperantese for Forge. A fork of Gitea [0] but managed via a non profit, no premium upsells, all freely licensed [1](GPL) etc.
Good to see their community outreach is via Matrix and Mastadon. My kind of nerds.
Apparently this is what Codeberg is running out, if you click . Looks like gitea/github to me, nothing wrong with that [2] source code is available from the little branch icon in the top right corner, hosted on codeberg which TIL is a forgejo instance [3]
[0] https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/
[1] https://forgejo.org/2024-08-gpl/
> no premium upsells
So.. like gitea?
From my understanding the fork was done because gitea created a company to build custom-features for companies if they ask. Not really many indicators for a rugpull
I was kind of passively wondering the other day what the main differences were between gitea and forgejo at this point, since they've been separate projects for a bit now. It seems there aren't any direct comparisons I could find, though.
It's more like "forge place" in the same way that kafejo (cafe) is "coffee place".
That's English for you, same word is usable for describing action, place and the furnace.
I got curious about why Forgejo split off from Gitea, and it seems like yet another case of broke FOSS creators/maintainers getting screwed from above (and maybe below too).
From the Gitea incorporation announcement (below), it looks like they couldn't pay their bills as FOSS, and there were wealthy free-riders (which the MIT license allows).
> "Over the years we have tried various ways to support maintainers and the project. Some ways we have tried include bounties, direct donations, grants, and a few others. We have found that while there have been many wonderful individuals, and a few corporations who have been incredibly generous, and we are so thankful for their support, there are a few corporations (with revenues that are greater than some countries GDP) are building on Gitea for core products without even contributing back enhancements. [emphasis added]
I'm not a fan of Bruce Perens, but he kind of nails the problem when he says:
> "We have a great corporate welfare program, our users are the richest companies in the world. Indeed, we've enabled companies like Google to be created.
> "In contrast, if our developers aren't working for those companies, they probably go un-compensated."
----
On the flip side, the community rebelled when the creators formed a company, but not supposedly because they formed a company, but because that co held the domain and trademark. Seems like a small hill to die on to me, but I don't know the details.
Regardless, it looks like exhibit #187 of FOSS failing for anyone outside of hobbyists and FAANGs.
FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom. Nowhere in "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" does it say "and we should be able to pay a few developers a salary for their work towards that fundamentally ethical goal". Under the original paradigm and goals, any income streams are just cream on top of doing the right thing.
According to the OSI's history of itself [0], at some point people got it into their heads that the open development model was inherently a good one for business, too—Netscape jumped on board, and then some people got together and decided to rebrand Free Software:
> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
The word FOSS reminds me a lot of American corporate Buddhism—mindfulness and meditation totally removed from its original deeply religious context and turned into some sort of self-help program, with the result being something that would be barely recognizable to the original practitioners. Free Software was never about sustainable development. It was about doing the right thing—enabling user freedom—because it is right. Everything else was just means to that end, but at some point along the line the means became the end and we started wondering why FOSS wasn't paying the bills like it was supposed to.
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...
> FOSS isn't a business model. It never was and never will be.
This seems an interesting point and one I share. Yet it seems equally unethical to enable the corporate extractavism that we now see. It's time the "users should have the freedom to do what they want with software" be updated to something like 'users and makers should be free of coercion and exploitation by software.' What, after all, are the grounds for such freedoms? Are they issues of property? Or are they ones of the dignity of the persons involved? It doesn't seem controversial that we tend to find it problematic if another uses us as means to their ends without our consent. In personal actions, many act as if they believe this. Yet corporations consistently do not act with those values. You're right: we should strive toward a system not in which it's viable to create businesses out of FOSS but in which both users and developers are not exploited or used unwillingly.
Sometimes I wish I could upvote twice in replies like this.
> What Free Software always was is an ethical movement—one which didn't need to prioritize income streams because the point wasn't sustainable development, it was user freedom.
This actually illustrates the key flaw in Stallman's understanding. To him, "user" encompassed both humans and megacorporations. But a corporation is an abstract legal convenience, cannot feel the pain of being "thwarted" in its use of software, and thus, want freedom. Freedom is only an ethical good for humans.
Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself. Encouraging otherwise borders on encouraging exploitation.
tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time, and encouraging THAT is unethical.
Well, stallman would probably advocate for the AGPL in such cases, which the megacorps are still wary of.
Many open source developers has misread the room and thinking the environment is still like it was 15~20 years ago where open source software were the works of hobbyists who has a well-paid day job and only here for street credit.
You know who read the room correctly? GitLab. They've found a balanced way to offer their product under an open source scheme while keeping their lights on. They've earned trust as well as income, that's a job well done.
If one wants to live off of their open source work, then they need to run it as a business and perform appropriate business tricks. Otherwise their own effort may one day become their own rip-off. Not saying anything sinister, but fairness is a balancing game, if you hard work don't treat you well, then it's unfair too.
GitLab has collected a few severe CVEs. I would choose "v4 final final actually final" folders as a versioning scheme before I used them. It is surprising to me that they have any users at all.
Copyleft licenses are supposed to prevent to an extent this sort of free riding, but they are no longer "fashionable".
I don't see the point of refusing to add additional (copyleft) terms to a license, only to end up hoping companies act as if the terms existed out of good will.
Companies like Google love the permissive licenses, and go as far as to sponsor MIT/BSD-licensed replacements to common building blocks like toybox.
EDIT: I see that Forgejo v9+ is indeed GPL-licensed.
I agree that copyleft is less fashionable these days, but I think big companies have figured out all the tricks they need.
Case in point: Amazon offers a hosted Grafana service, which is AGPL. They may not be able to meaningfully change the code in secret, but they can still impoverish the actual Grafana creators trying to sell Grafana as a service.
This paints it as if Gitea was not a fork of Gogs specifically to turn a profit out of something they did not make on their own. I might be more sympathetic if they'd created Gitea, but given it's a fork of another project, it looks a lot like they're playing the same game that beat them.
I don’t think this is quite correct. Gitea was a community fork from Gogs, because Gogs was limited by its single maintainer. See https://blog.gitea.com/welcome-to-gitea/
FOSS is a distribution strategy, not a business model.
It's not that FOSS fails, it's that unethical corporations worth billions of dollars go unpunished for abusing it (because the law exists to protect them).
FOSS is fundamentally anarchy (the good kind that shows that human beings are not all pieces of shit). Anarchy can't exist in a capitalist society because it shows people that they don't HAVE to live like slaves. They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
So as always the organism is originally healthy and successful until the parasite that is capitalism spreads and suffocates it for its own reproduction.
> They can live as members of tribes, as evolution intended for us.
Please, quit the cheap sophistry.
Evolution doesn't intend or plan anything for us, and you will have a very hard time convincing people that we would be better off living in a tribal/clan society than whatever we have today.
Evolution intends in the sense that it follows an abstract fitness function. I didn't think I'd have to explain that here. I know how to implement evolution algorithmically.
And no matter what you think about tribal societies, we still live in tribes every day. You and your close friends are a tribe. Your family is a tribe. Forums and now social media communities are tribes. HackerNews is a tribe. Open source projects are tribes, indeed they fork over ideological differences all the time. Political parties are tribes, indeed they split and antagonize each other all the time. Nationalities are tribes. Companies are tribes. Social classes are tribes. Subcultures and "identities" are tribes.
We are not built to handle global contexts, so we collapse them into tribal ones. We do that for everything. There's always an in-group and an out-group and a hierarchy if we're talking about a cluster of people.
A tribe assumes a strict hierarchy and mobility only though power and violence.
I can agree with you about the issue of societies failing to organize themselves past a certain scale, but this is not a problem with "Capitalism".
Fair, I used a very loose definition then.
My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts: that profit is the driving force behind action; that short term effects are prioritized over long term ones; and that global markets operate at a scale that does not allow individuals to have any real agency in their environment due to the points outlined in the previous comment.
It just fosters the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be according to my understanding of the conditions in which we thrive.
i.e. it turns people into selfish venal assholes and it destroys our chances at a better future with each passing day
Perhaps I'm also using a wrong definition of anarchy then. But it's honestly the closest label I know for this concept. A less centralized society.
But profit _is_ the driving force of human action. Doing anything voluntarily is by definition profitable, otherwise you wouldn't do it.
This smears out the definition of profit beyond usefulness.
I can pretty much guarantee hunter-gatherers hunt to not starve, children play for sheer joy, and nobody's thinking of profit.
There are better psychological/anthropological terms to apply to human drives than calling them "profitable". That's weird economist thinking, trying to bring everything under their purview.
Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.
At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.
"My issue with capitalism is fundamentally split in three parts", then you go on to describe things that are not exclusive to Capitalism AT ALL.
Again, please quit the cheap sophistry.
> the kind of behavior that goes against my idealized version of what society should be
Are you listening to yourself? You sound like a college sophomore who is sure has a solution to all of humanity's problems...
> turns people into selfish venal assholes
... and can only assign blame on others.
I can bet you nourish some well-developed fantasies about what you would do if you were given enough power over any "less centralized society", and they are a lot more about imposing your view over everyone than ensuring your small community can prosper and be happy.
What is unethical about the actions of the corporations who use the software? They did so in accordance with the license.
The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take. It doesn't have to be written in legalese somewhere, it's the spirit of what makes Open Source what it is.
And I'd argue that doing something for profit is also against the spirit of open source, but that's a different argument. The thing is that open source is for the most part an effort from hackers, hobbyists and professionals who want to foster a positive ecosystem for people like themselves. To make their passion better and simpler and more fun and more accessible and more interesting and safer and more efficient and more general... So that more people might fall in love with it.
It's not to push a product or to convince people that they need it. And that sentiment comes from the fact that open source is the reason many people got into programming in the first place! Thanks to all the free resources out there. So they want to give back to the community. That's how I feel about it at least.
But then again, when huge corpos contribute to open source it's great because they have a lot of inertia. So I think that's a good thing, it's a positive feedback loop. My previous point is not black and white, even though I am obviously bitter about a lot of things.
I'm sympathetic to some of what you're saying, and I believe the original hacker ethos spurred some of the original FS impulses, but...
FOSS licenses don't, and can't, embody anarchism (or any socialism) because they make no distinction between humans and capital-holding entities, lumping them all under the term "users".
An interesting aspect of Forgejo is ongoing work on forge federation
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59#issuecomment-...
In an ideal world github and gitlab would also support federation, but I guess that's probably not going to happen.
An alternative solution in the problem space would be going p2p, e.g https://radicle.xyz/
It's a shame "federation" these days basically just means "implement activitpub". So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals....
Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs). Nobody needs federation between Forgejo and Mastodon - what would that even mean??
> So many projects get caught up in the complicated mess of mapping their data model onto AP, debating about how exactly to map things and writing standard extension proposals....
Well, you either use an existing standard so you can federate with existing implementations, or you come up with a new standard and ask others to implement that. Seems they chose the simpler way, thankfully.
> Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs).
What about federation between more software than just your own? Once you've done those things, you basically end up with another spec (but informal instead of formal) that others also need to implement. So instead of going the informal way, they aim for the formal one. That does sound appropriate to me.
Slightly besides the point, but for someone who dealt more with decentralized/distributed systems than bloated authentication systems, it seems both simpler and easier to map+implement ActivityPub than implement OIDC+"a few webhooks", but that might just be because of my familiarity.
I'll say that ActivityPub is a pretty simple standard though, compared to what's out there.
> Useful federation between Forgejo instances could be solved with little more than OIDC and a few webhooks (cross-instance collaboration, forking, and PRs).
That would only solve the problem of "I don't have an account on this forge yet". The much more relevant problem is identity + reputation. With ActivityPub-based federation you can use your domain-bound identifier to contribute to various projects across servers and gain reputation and trust. If we use OIDC, then it is a lot less clear if the server, you authenticate with, is hosting the real franga2000.
I tend to agree that ActivityPub seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider). At least it works, though, and is implemented by a large amount of different projects and not owned by any single one.
> seems pretty horrifying to work with (as an outsider).
As someone who both made my own implementation + hacked on others, what was/seemed to be the horrible parts? It's a pretty simple standard that is basically RSS with some added stuff (very simplified of course, before I got jumped) for facilitating the federation parts.
It's already awkward just between Lemmy and Mastodon.
I guess Lemmy could be in the form of issues on the repo and Mastodon would be thumbs up emojis and/or "starring" the repo.
Yeah I wish there was a different protocol if we are jamming everything on top of it.
Over the years I've come to the conclusion that all these UIs on top of Git make little sense. Git itself is already distributed, which goes beyond federation. Exposing a Git repo over the network is trivial with HTTP or SSH. It supports code review workflows via email, though I really like the approach of storing reviews inside the repo itself via something like git-appraise[1]. Integrating it with CI/CD pipelines _can_ be simple, if the pipeline can be triggered by pushes.
Instead we've created these centralized UIs over Git, and are trying to get them to integrate with one another. This seems backwards to me since Git is already decentralized.
I suspect the reason is the same as the use of local git GUIs and TUIs; git has a terrible CLI, so everyone uses its plumbing, but not its porcelain.
Yeah, there's a reason why stuff like the git manpage generator (https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/) is funny, and it's because git's CLI doesn't have a learning curve. It has a learning brick wall that you smash your face into.
Hehe. Yeah, I can't think of another tool that's simultaneously popular enough, and painful enough, to warrant a site like https://ohshitgit.com
I needed something like this 16 years ago at work to manage shared code, tickets, and code review of private code across a team of engineers. Code review for formal quality assurance was the most important need. I started with trac, then Phabricator, then GitHub enterprise. I just checked out git appraise to see how my nuclear and mechanical engineer friends would like it, and from what I see, I'm guessing they would not. We were using eclipse back then so maybe if that eclipse UI plugin still works it could work.
Really looking forward to the federation, hosting Forgejo for my own stuff while having discoverability/issue tracking with other instances would be the best of both worlds. As of now I'm mirroring stuff across self-hosted forgejo/github.com/gitlab.com where the forgejo instance is just part of my self-hosting hobby and not "load bearing".
I think that Gitlab Cells[1] might go into the same direction, there is a mention of federation in the design document.
[1] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/architectur...
Gitlab has experimental support for activitypub: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v17.1.0-ee/doc/d...
See also: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/11247#why
The federation page on the Forgejo Web site (https://forgejo.org/2023-01-10-answering-forgejo-federation-...) is out of date and most of the links don't work. They also used to publish annual progress reports until 2023 (on a Web site that no longer seems to be accessible: https://web.archive.org/web/20240830030315/https://forgefrie...).
Although the last mention of federation in a monthly update was in October, where they stressed that federation was and is their 'highest priority'.[0]
[0]: https://forgejo.org/2024-10-monthly-update/#:~:text=Forgejo%...
FYI: Just last Friday there was a call/meeting to coordinate and build out the federation efforts in Forgejo. More work is coming and more help is appreciated! There will be a presentation at FOSDEM on this topic and there is a matrix room dedicated to Forgejo Federation.
I would expect Gitea to merge back in federation functionality once it's stable if they get some help with it. IIRC that initiative started in gitea and I'm not aware of that level of animosity or divergence of goals between the two?
I’ve migrated over the years from Gogs to Gitea to Forgejo. It’s such an excellent piece of software.
90% of the time, I can get by with hosting my personal git repos on an SSH server I have. When all I’m trying to do is put my Chezmoi repo somewhere that all my computers can access it, Forgejo and friends don’t add much to it. For the 10% of the time when I want to share my code privately with some friends it’s brilliant (and free beats a GitHub paid plan). And if I’m going to have it running anyway for those 10% projects, might as well use it as my personal git repo of record for everything else, too.
I initially had a Gogs install, but moved to GitLab because of GitLab CI and some other features. It was a bit too heavyweight in comparison and the updates became difficult to keep up with, so I eventually moved over to Gitea and Drone CI (some might also like the Woodpecker CI project).
Honestly, my eventual next move will be either Forgejo with their Actions https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/ for CI/CD or maybe going off into the deep end with moving back to Jenkins.
For me GitLab CI is a reason to move _away_ from it.
Really? What’d you dislike the most about it? In my experience, the syntax was actually more user friendly than that of GitHub Actions and the file based approach a bit easier to carry across projects than what Jenkins and the likes do.
Drone CI and Woodpecker both felt similar in that regard, at least to me. Though the docs of GitLab CI definitely make me consider it for group projects across an org.
For my projects I have been using Onedev https://github.com/theonedev/onedev which has also kanban and code editor
You run that locally on your own machine, or you host it yourself somewhere? If the latter, you just stop programming fully if the internet connection for whatever reason doesn't work?
I'd never consider running my code editor as infrastructure, but certainly interesting to see that others seems to do.
> If the latter, you just stop programming fully if the internet connection for whatever reason doesn't work?
It's privilege and probably a dose of luck but I can tally up on one hand the number of hours my house and/or phone hasn't had internet in the last 5 years, including total power losses. I also wouldn't run my editor as a hosted service but I can understand why someone in a similar position might take that gamble. It's certainly no bigger of a risk to me than being limited to working on something physically at a workplace and needing to rely on transportation to get there, which also has maintenance concerns and infrastructure congestion and reliability issues that have caused more productivity losses to me than my utility providers ever have.
I just install the container remotely, cicd remotely etc and code locally. My use case is the opposite, I might need to do some adhoc support and not have the laptop with me so then I use the online code editor
I've used Github's built in VSCode for quick one-line PRs or docs cleanup. I'm lazy enough to appreciate the feature even if I would never do deeper work in it.
Did you notice any important differences between gitea and forgejo (besides ideology)? Although it seems like forgejo has added actions in the meantime
Gitea also has actions.
Gitea actually got actions before Forgejo did. That was part of what motivated Forgejo to become a hard fork instead of just a rebrand—there was some sort of disagreement about the way in which actions were rolled out and Forgejo decided from there to stop trying to be fully compatible.
https://forgejo.org/2024-02-forking-forward/#the-hard-forkin...
I've missed that part. AFAIK both are forked from nektos/act and can't be dramatically different. All this story is an unnecessary dichotomy for me. Still hosting production code on a Gitea instance and will happily pay a dime but didn't get why yet.
I probably worded that wrong, but that was my point. Forgejo didn't have actions for the longest time, so I was wondering if it "caught" up with gitea
The Fedora Project (Linux) is switching to this, FWIW https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-moves-towards-forgejo-a-un...
this is big!
The tag line isn't the most informative. It took me a scroll or two on the main page to figure out its purpose. (Self hosted GitHub alternative). I'd suggest making that clearer earlier as the word "forge" in terms of software could have a variety of interpretations.
"forge" has been used since "sourceforge" if not longer to describe these kind of hosting-packages.
I guess technically you could have called Redmine, and other systems at the time, forges I think the term took off after that.
The only time I ever see Sourceforge mentioned is in advertisements on /.. I think most young developers today have no idea what it is, if they even know what /. is.
Young developers are still learning the ropes :)
Calling it a software forge is the correct form. Even if the term isn't that well known. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to popularize Forgego.
Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub" doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g. certain adult entertainment website is also using it.
> SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use...
Not trying to be contentious, but I've got a 5-digit slashdot ID and I've never heard that phrase explicitly used in my entire life as a term of art by software devs, including at or around 1999.
Definitely not saying that nobody was using the term, but "widespread use" is a big claim that requires some substantiation. It absolutely does not align with my lived experience of the time.
Funny that you mention /., I just mentioned it in another comment. Sourceforge bought /. and advertise there heavily - I very much associate the two.
"Software forge" has a certain explanatory ring to it, but approximately nobody has any clue what SourceForge is, or even less, what it represented back in its heyday. The kids know github, many don't even know the difference between github and git, or slighly less concerning, assume git is a tool from github.
You're objectively wrong in this case - look at all the comments in this thread. Clearly "forge" is not a well known category defining term.
It very much used to be, before Github delivered where SourceForge couldn't (and still doesn't). But the history is still written in project names like GForge, FusionForge; and of course the contemporary SourceHut refers to itself as a "hacker's forge".
I know whatever's written in Wikipedia doesn't necessarily have to be authoritative, but it's worth to check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)#History
Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is".
Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream is a not a great way to makes its own identity.
Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”.
Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
Forgejo is a GitHub clone. No one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
Why Github and not Bitbucket?
Maybe because Github was there first. BB was created as the GH clone, for mercurial repos.
Both launched in 2008.
And then all software revision control systems / forges have more or less the same conceptual model for their platform, and just adding their specific sauce and some tailoring to specific needs. Some more innovative and deviating platforms from this more-of-the-same approach are Sourcehut (brutal minimalism) and Gitlab (enterprise dev lifecycle, process support). And then there's the general trend for these platforms to become one-stop-shop maximized lock-in walled gardens, aiming to support the entirety of software development practices (while they seem open and gratis).
PS. This trend for one-stop-shop platforms will also see their owners start to monetize the absolute hell out of their existing (and often vast, take Github) 3rd-party vendor ecosystem via plugin marketplaces, app stores, and their platform API's and SDK's, which many of these vendors now think bring along on a free ride.
It’s clearly a self hosted GitHub alternative and that’s IMO the way to talk about it. And per other comments, it’s obviously this once you start using it - it’s basically the GitHub interface and it’s great that it is - it’s very familiar and easy to use
After my struggles with trying to keep Gitlab CE (Community Edition) up and running (it needs a lot of CPU and memory) I switched to Forgejo and have not been disappointed. It runs as a rootless container and uses almost nothing, memory and CPU wise. Updating it has been a simple podman pull that JustWorks(tm).
It now also runs actions that keep my static websites updated by running Jekyll etc.
I really like it to have my own forge that can import repos, issues etc from other forges like GitHub, Gitlab etc. and I am looking forward to the upcoming ActivityPub based integration to the wider fediverse.
Having a decentralised, but connected approach to code hosting is what I always wanted to have and now it’s (almost) there.
What is the status of federation support? I imagine cross-instance pull requests and bug reports would make collaboration effortless.
I think this is a great peace of software, though i think its mostly tailored for the single dev, or business case for closed source software, but much less a software peace that allow for great community building. I think this is because of:
a) The network effect that you inherently get with for example github b) The barrier to create accounts on yet another platform to contribute.
In that regards i find the original way of just using email's to send patches just such a brilliant idea, because at least it eliminates my second point completely. That's why i think sourcehut [0] is such a nice idea at least in theory. Though now you have to teach people not only how to use "git" but also how to use "git" via email :D
Can anyone who migrated from Gitea to Forgejo explain the differences in usability? I understand the fork was driven by licensing/project ownership concerns but it's not clear to me from reading the website how different the end product is now. I believe Gitea is still being actively developed.
I host a private Gitea instance (mainly to mirror all my GitHub stuff) so wondering if it is worth migrating.
I evaluated it again a couple of weeks ago and there are basically no differences right now (besides a few cosmetic ones) because the hard fork happened just a few months ago. Stick on 1.22 for the time being, it's the last version from which Forgejo supports in-place upgrades. You'll have to transfer data half-manually or perform deep surgery on the database if you upgrade past 1.22 and then decide to switch forges.
Although the next version of gitea should include support for full mirroring from GitHub (so periodic synchronization of new issues, PRs, etc), not just (code mirroring XOR one-off full copy) like it does right now. This might be of interest to you.
They have a FAQ (https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/) TLDR: Forgejo is free software, prioritizes security and stability over new features and is actively developing the federation module (thus working to enable communities of federated forges)
It's not clear from the landing page whether it's a git code platform / mercurial / entirely new VCS. I wish it was clearer (looking at the Readme, looks like it's indeed a git hosting platform).
I don't really care about the governance model as a user seeing this landing page for the first time, so I wonder why it's so prominent, vs telling me what the actual product is.
Can anyone comment on the code review experience? (I assume similar to Gitea but I haven't tried either).
I recently did some moderately serious code review in GitHub and discovered it's a baby's toy version of a code review tool. It seems it would be unusable for serious engineering work unless you totally design your source control model around making that work, at the expense of all the other things that influence how you wanna manage your history.
I am mostly used to Gerrit which has a very reasonable basic model but a lot of rough edges and some performance issues.
Suddenly I realised I don't think I've ever actually used a review tool I really like! I wonder if our industry is just getting by without one?
IIRC the Gitlab one was slightly better than GitHub but I can't remember too much about it.
I've used Phabricator and GitHub to design nuclear power plant design code... seems pretty serious. Can you tell us more about what's missing in your opinion from making the reviews usable? Curious what I've been missing out on!
Have you tried Codelantis? It's a review tool for GitHub
Q: “What is Forgego?”
A: “Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.”
?
Without mentioning GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/etc., how would you describe what they are?
Collaborative development platform with Git repository hosting, CI/CD, and project management features.
I.e. a software forge.
I do think it would be good to have a link or something to explain what a software forge is to people who don't know.
If it doesn't support SVN or Mercurial I don't see a need to try and be abstract. At a minimum it needs to use the word Git because that page is inscrutable.
Also a features page would really help
Great! Now let's see if someone really cares enough to make a pull request or whether these complaints are just superficial to have something to complain about.
Source code hosting and version control platform?
I don't see why it's so critical to not mention Github. That would instantly convey what it is to basically everyone, and it doesn't mean it doesn't have its own identity or anything.
By describing what they do (also, there is no rule you can't mention github)
"Forgejo hosts source code repositories, lets you track and manage issues (and review code changes), and provides all the integrations you'd expect with CI/CD and similar tooling."
This seems to be a good tagline for a HN audience that kinda clicks a link blind and wants to figure out what it is quickly and move on. But it’s unclear to me why the Forgejo website should care about this type of visitor? Being a “forge” is likely well understood by anyone that is interested in installing this type of software (or they will figure it out because of the context that linked them to the page). None of the features you mention is a good discriminator, as essentially all forges have these features in one form or another, so an interested use will have to look at the details anyway. Being: “self-hosted, lightweight, easy to maintain” those are very important quick discriminators if you are looking at this type of software.
"A platform to host your git repositories including collaboration features like issues, discussions, and a projects page to track important parts of your code base. All able to run on your server local and private."
Git hosts with proprietary features
Repository Hub
Their communication really is all over the place. Even the name is really awkward in English.
(And yes, not everything should be forced to be English and it's apparently supposed to be Esperanto; but nothing else on the site is so that's not how most people will parse it).
I wish they would have chosen a better name. Honestly if I have to install a Git server one day I’m gonna install Gitea, not a tool I can’t even pronounce.
Names are important, this is why I also don’t use DuckDuckGo.
The reasons for forking from Gitea were also a bit weak in my opinion.
Clearly Postgres is not a good database and you will wisely use any other. I can see real advantages to this. It saves you so much effort and time. In fact, it allows you to make no effort at all.
> Names are important, this is why I also don’t use DuckDuckGo.
You won't use DuckDuckGo because of the name? DuckDuckGo is so tricky to write on mobile that I copy pasted from your comment, but that doesn't stop me from using it. For me, googlability of names is important, but otherwise I don't care.
I'm really curious about your reasoning. Does it offend your aesthetic sensibilities? Do you think people who would choose such a name can't be trusted with search? Or something else entirely?
Use ddg.co on mobile.
It redirects to DuckDuckGo, the name is still written full size, and their stupid logo is still there.
Give me ddg.co or duck.com with no redirect, no branding and no logo and I’ll use it.
So what search engine without branding and logo do you use?
Or ddg.gg - quicker to type.
duck.com too
a phisher's dream: anything remotely related to ducks might be a real domain
> Does it offend your aesthetic sensibilities
Yes. I’m completely aware it’s irrational and probably a bit dumb, but I don’t want to use something with a name I actively hate. Some names are "meh" or boring and that’s ok. But for DuckDuckGo and Forgejo I have a visceral reaction against their name.
DuckDuckGo is an even worst offender because their logo is ALSO dumb and terrible, and I don’t want to see it.
> a tool I can’t even pronounce
jazzyjackson provided the pronunciation guide in a comment above:
> forˈd͡ʒe.jo, to my midwestern ear, "4 Jay yo"
It's totally OK for a project to use words from a foreign language. "Linux" is derived from Finnish Linus (/ˈliːnʊs/) and pronounced /ˈlɪn.əks/, unlike the English Linus - /lɑ́jnəs/.
IMHO Forgejo should have the IPA pronunciation spelled out on the landing page.
> this is why I also don’t use DuckDuckGo
Just how silly "Google" sounded when it first popped up? How Torvalds joked that he named "git" after himself? "Bash" is a play on "Bourne" and "born again"? Silly names are a part of the hacker culture, remaining playful despite the product having huge impact brings color to people's lives.
off: google translate English lady pronounces it as "4 Jay ho" with an H. That isn't how a native English speaker would attempt to pronounce Forgejo, is it?
Honestly, who cares?
I pronounce it Forge-oh. I don’t give a crap if it’s “correct”.
Well, language nerds do, myself included. Also honestly, I don't care when people mispronounce words, as long as they can convey the meaning clearly enough.
> I can’t even pronounce
Even if one is somehow monolingual, forgejo is a perfectly fine word in English. There are even multiple ways to make it sound funny (forge-joe, forge-yo, etc).
for-get-hoe
That's a weak reason and you know it.
It might not be a very strong reason, but quite enough to pick the original project which also has more development effort behind it (and is still used by Blender FWIW, I don't think they have any plans of migrating). I understand your first language is German. Figures. The name is unpronounceable and feels weird to me also. If we ever migrate from gitea (although I currently see no reason to do it), I'll have to pick some generic term and introduce it to others under that name.
> I understand your first language is German. Figures.
I assume your argument is: “Everyone who had to learn English as a second language is so used to completely random pronunciation that they won’t complain about anything anymore”.
It's just that German is close enough to Esperanto that I'm personally not particularly interested in what a German speaker thinks about the name. Ask a Mandarin/Japanese/Arabic/Ewe/Telugu/etc. speaker what they think.
(My first language is quite far away from both English and Esperanto, probably should have mentioned that in the original message.)
Maybe, but the pronunciation of the forge part is essentially just the English one (at least much, much closer to an attempted German pronunciation).
The jo part is close to German though, so maybe this is why it’s not too bad for someone who knows English and German. And everyone else gets to dislike at least some part of it :-)
I know. But I don’t want to use something with a naming sounding weird that I actively hate, especially when there are alternatives with a better name.
I think they don't.
Checking out https://v10.next.forgejo.org/explore/repos , the main thing I notice in comparison to GitHub is how fast this is. I wish GitHub was so fast.
There are only five pages of repositories there, so it's no surprise it responds quickly. We've been running gitea for several years, and when you put enough data into it (repositories, issues, comments, etc) it doesn't feel as fast anymore, although most pages still render within 500 ms. For example, opening large-ish issues can stall the server for a second or two (it reports rendering time in the footer, so I'm sure it's the server).
Click on any repo from: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos
It's very speedy. Not as much as sourcehut, but you get a nicer UI. Github is becoming slow enough to meaningfully detract from productivity.
I have around 1.2 GB of compressed git commits on disk, still fast on an ancient Intel E3 1275-v6 with 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB Intel P3520.
Version 10 also now without any startup errors due to slightly wrong sqlite database structure.
Together with vscodium a joy to use.
I don't know if that's the whole story? Sure, GitHub has more data to process (and way more compute), but even when switching between tabs within one repo (going from code to pull requests, for example) GitHub is still much slower even though its query shouldn't be affected by the number of repositories it has.
Now picture it running on-prem !
Ex-meta engineer here. I miss their internal GitHub which is a mercurial fork. They have so many awesome features like layered PRs.
That is something I have not seen anywhere .
Does this have a CI/CD solution? I don't see anything from skimming the user docs.
It does, called “Actions”
Neat! Thanks. I see this is located in the docs between "comment via email" and "message templates". If the devs see this, perhaps adding more buzzwords would be helpful to discovery.
Yes, you need to spin a forgejo runner
they are currently developing Forgejo Actions[0], or you can use the existing Woodpecker[1]
[0] https://forgejo.org/docs/next/user/actions/
[1] https://woodpecker-ci.org/docs/administration/forges/forgejo
It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.
The term is decades old at this point. It doesn't seem to play well outside of the older open source communities, now that github has xeroxed.
It is not new. I have heard that word for more than a decade already.
I guess you need to know about the foss ecosystem to know it.
Once upon a time, a lot of software was released/available through "source forge", which is pretty self-explanatory in the context of software publishing. Then a decade ago, SourceForge shit the bed and destroyed its reputation. I'd bet that most of the developers saying they've never heard of "forge" in this context have entered in the industry in that time.
I also knew it but look at the number of comments saying "what is a forge?" here - it's clearly not a good description.
Yeah, it is funny to read all the assertions that everyone knows what a "forge" refers to in the middle of all the threads wondering wtf a "forge" is...
It is not new, but also not ubiquous enough to express something everyone understands.
Trying to get "forge" across as some kind of defacto term just adds noise to the product description, I think.
Ever heard of Sourceforge?
This is a bad association even for people that recognize it. Presumably there were good years but most will probably remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads masquerading as fake download links.
This is such an interesting thing of generational difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the crazy era of so many ads.
I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good UI.
I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software forge".
> Ever heard of Sourceforge?
Yup! That clears it up. It’s the site that serves lots of ads and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the last time I looked some years ago.
Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to self host, but to each their own.
The first time I heard that word was in Sourceforge, decades ago.
It’s not new, it’s outdated and they’re trying to make it come back.
Looks interesting but I’m not quite sure exactly what it is based on what I am seeing on the front page.
The project is amazing
The name of the project is horrible
can anyone share what the benefit is over using a self hosted repository host over a service like github/gitlab? obviously you get more power over the interface & such but are there truly any gains over using the larger platforms?
A self hosted repository host gives you the ability to develop software projects without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Aside from the whole self hosting ethos, if you are hosting it from a home server and you are the primary user, you will get a nice performance boost. Downloading binaries, cloning repositories will be instant. If you use CI, it will be running on an actual machine rather than 10% of some 2GHz cloud CPU.
I regularly have to upload multi GB images to a VPS and it's very annoying when it takes like 10 minutes.
It's very useful for companies - more control, don't have to host your code externally, and you don't have to pay (well, ish; we ended up paying for Gitlab Premium, but that doesn't exist for Forgejo).
From the top of my head with dozens of others:
- Not all projects are suitable for hosting by third parties (you may not want to give away the special sauce behind your wannabe next trillion dollar company, or you may be handling sensitive or confidential data like medical records, etc)
- You are immune to the trending process recently referred to as enshittification that consists of providers in a consolidated market like this one giving you an increasingly worse experience to compel you into more expensive plans, i.e. you gain independence and control
- It might be a competitive advantage to your business to still have the lights on when inevitably the centralised platform becomes unavailable to most (think of trading and events like crowdstrike)
You just have to pay for the hardware instead of going onto crazy expensive fee schemes.
Maybe privacy, outside of that, same client, so not much.
Downtime when you can afford it (for us it's in the middle of the night, and very rarely), not in the middle of the working day when GitHub fucks up yet again.
we are considering moving from gitlab to forgejo. it's not a immediate concern but i think the days of gitlab are numbered with recent change in top management.
Been using forgejo for years to maintain mirrors of GitHub repos I like.
Works great. Easy to set up (especially on nixos)
I did my Github -> self-hosted Gitlab -> Gitea -> Forgejo journey over the years, and I haven't looked back.
Forgejo is great and it's probably going to become even greater once federation is done (having distributed forks and PRs across multiple instances solves the fragmentation problem of self-hosted solutions).
And I lost my trust in Gitea once it spun off a for-profit branch backed by VC money (which was exactly the reason why it was forked into Forgejo).
The only thing I lost from Gitlab is the out-of-the-box CI/CD platform. But I could migrate my pipelines to Drone CI and trigger them via webhooks. Just keep in mind that, depending on the complexity of your Gitlab pipelines, this may not always be an option. Anyway, for me hosting a Gitlab server that hogged up 5GB of RAM to serve a couple of small projects was a big no-no. Forgejo takes 500MB of RAM at peak.
Is fogejo the platform that codeberg uses?
Yes
Who owns the Forgejo domains and trademarks? > The Forgejo domains are in the custody of the non-profit Codeberg e.V..
And vice versa. Codeberg is the official host of the sourcecode
The fact that Open Source is about sharing, and they don't share. They only take.
Please explain. Not clicking those links.