geteilt von: https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/203881
I’m about to set up a new git forge for my own stuff. Most forges already have the basic functionality I want (nice ui for merge requests etc).
What I’m looking forward to is federation. Create a Pull request for a repository hosted on another instance without needing to create an account over there would be a game changer.
- Gitea had some plans but I don’t see anything happening since three years in their dedicated forum
- Gitlab has a dedicated epic but some official said it’s not a priority last year
- Forgejo has a roadmap and a Federation section in each of their montly reports (latest). However, the roadmaps mentions that Federated PRs are in the far future.
From this it seems that Forgejo is the only one activetly working on Federation.
Anything I’m missing? Anyone involved in any of those willing to tell me more? Especially if all of them are working in a similar direction where not only decentralization but also federation (e.g. between Gitlab and Forgejo) is possible?
On a side note, I found the ForgeFed project which is an ActivityPub extension, not sure if any of the forges wants to implement this. Their example forge Vervis is not reachable.
I’ve been following the software forge federation some time ago, and didn’t feel to pick up even when it was discusssed initially. It is a neat idea on high-level, though it requires forges to implement it, which has a risk of not picking up (just look at how much iterations of social media federation protocols was there, until ActivityPub arose).
On the other hand, all of the forges are based on a distributed technology out of the box:
git. Most of the “modern days” comforts there are, are just built on top, and there are different ways to approach it.As an example, you can send patches directly to the author in email. Is heavily implemented and suggested by https://sr.ht/ (1) — a software forge, which focuses on building a federated workflow by using email for communication (which is federated by design). This way, you can create “Pull Requests” without having account on the forge — all you need to do is just submit a patch. Author is very vocal about supporting it (2), and provides quite useful guides to learn (3), (4)
Generally, I’d say that e-mail is the only federative implementation you can get so far :)
Yeah I guess git via mail would solve some of those problems. Maybe I’d just need to get used to it, but generally I prefer a web ui for those things, including Issue tracking etc - I know there’s tools for that via email and there’s good reasons to use it, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll give Drew’s articles another look, thanks for posting.
The web ui with integration of email ecosystem for all those things are one of core selling points of https://sr.ht/
Indeed, not sure I want do host sourcehut though. Looks like a complicated setup and only supports Alpine but not (Docker) containers.
Don’t expect Gitea to make progress on federation. Forgejo is a fork of Gitea and anybody that cares about federation is probably on the Forgejo side of the fork.
Maybe they’ll use the Forgejo code as most of it should be compatible, but yes, I won’t wait for it.
I haven’t tested radicle too much but you should be able to use your “own account” to open PRs on other instances.
Interesting, I’ll check that one as well!
