Fuck. No other source forge supports groups or orgs with hierarchical projects 🫤 Gitea and Forgejo went hard on being github clones, so they’re off the list. Are there any other alternatives? I don’t want to have to bash together scripts to make something…
I looked into it after this year’s massive price hike… There’s no meaningful alternative. We’re on the FOSS version of GitLab now (GitLab-CE), but the lack of code ownership / multiple reviewers / etc. is a real pain and poses problems with accountability.
Honestly there are not that many features in Gitlab EE that are truly necessary for a corporate environment, so a GitLab-CE fork may be able to set itself apart by providing those. To me there are two hurdles:
- Legal uncertainties (do we need a clean room implementation to make sure Gitlab Inc doesn’t sue for re-implementing the EE-only features into a Gitlab fork?)
- The enormous complexity of the GitLab codebase will make any fork, to put it mildly, a major PITA to maintain. 2,264 people work for GitLab FFS (with hundreds in dev/ops), it’s indecent.
Honestly I think I’d be happy if forgejo supported gitlab-runner, that seems like a much more reasonable ask given the clean interface between runner and server. Maybe I should experiment with that…
So… just to repeat myself for the 300th time
This is a good example of why people use GitHub
Because it’s an advantage that it’s hosted by a large company like Microsoft. There’s very little chance it’s going to be shut down or sold off. So developers don’t need to worry about their infrastructure as much
One of our projects failed because we got caught up in infrastructure.
It’s funny though how the people who are the most vocal against GitHub aren’t responding to this post. But they’re happy to make the biggest deal about every little button on it…
Just cause something is owned by a big company doesn’t mean it’ll last forever, example Google and their dead list of products.
Host gitea or forjeo if you really care about your infrastructure and data. If you can’t, make some compromises and pick the next best thing. But owned by big company doesn’t mean lasts forever.
Github is probably the biggest code hosting platform. There is literally no evidence that Microsoft will discontinue it… And they’ve spent a huge amount of time integrating it. It also generates 1 billion in revenue, so why would Microsoft sell it? Furthermore, its free for open source…
Self hosting is part of the reason our project failed… We wasted a lot of time with that stuff. We used Mercurial, whatever the Canonical one was, and git, and we wasted a lot of time.
Github works, and is well integrated to everything
Just pointing out that just cause its owned by a big company doesn’t mean it’ll last forever.
Also the FOSS community is by in large sus of Microsoft cause of their history practice of embrace, extend, extinguish. Which one would argue they embraced FOSS to gain easy access to their projects, the issues, the code, etc to train their models. Which would be OK if all code it generates has to be GPL to agree with the licenses of the collective pool of training data. Either way that’s the topic of debate.
It sounds like you looked into your constraints and github works for you. That’s great! And that’s what’s important.
GitLab still doesn’t even support leaving comments on a commit message. Like, what? GitLab and GitHub have all these fancy shiny features but still suck at offering basic code review functionality.
I never understood the appeal.
I mean, I get it, but that’s also not a thing of git, right? Just because GitHub does something doesn’t mean every other hosting provider needs to. If your code review process is to comment upon specific commits, maybe it’s the code review process that’s wrong?
Git kinda has it? Have you seen git notes? https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes
GitHub doesn’t let you comment on the commit message either. The only one I’ve seen do this properly this is Gerrit. And of course regular old mailing list reviews.
There are so many blogs and posts about writing good commit messages, using Conventional Commits, etc, and the two most popular forges don’t even let you comment in-line on the commit message during a review.
You can not highlight text in a commit message and leave an in-line comment in the same way you can for code changes in the diff.
Ohhhhh you can’t comment on a specific line of a commit message. I see. I mean… yeah I guess not. That seems like a super niche feature though. How long are your commit messages? I’ve never even tried to do that. Commit messages are short enough you can pretty much just write a normal message not tied to a specific line.
There are waaaaay bigger issues with Gitlab. Here’s one I ran into recently, you can’t search for pipelines. It’s got a search box and everything but you literally can’t search; only filter. So stupid.
I actually just went to take a look at Gitlab issues I have commented on to see what my worst ones are. Guess what… you can’t even search for issues you have commented on!!!
Still, overall it’s the best self-hostable option out there at the moment IMO. I guess Forgejo (truly abysmal name) may overtake it at some point.
The chances of a deal are said to be weeks away, if not non-existent.
What kind of non-sentence is that?
FYI you can self-host GitLab, for example in a Docker container.
Much like that comment. Can you give a better example, or express why it’s a bad example? That would bring some quality in.
https://forgejo.org/ here’s a little better example, though you did a great job doing some proposal, gotta love those who do at least some initiative
Gitlab is very complex and a heavy resource hog. You probably don’t need it. Most small to medium enterprises can comfortably host their projects on lightweight forgejo or gitea (speaking from experience). They even have functionality similar to github actions. If you need anything more complex, you are better off integrating another self hosted external service to the mix.
You can also just make bare got repositories on any server you can ssh into.
Coincidentally, this is what git is short for.
Source: “git” can mean anything, depending on your mood.
https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290
