State of federation in git forges
from tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden to selfhosted@lemmy.world on 26 Aug 13:15
https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/203882

geteilt von: 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.

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.

#selfhosted

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alexcleac@szmer.info on 26 Aug 13:33 next collapse

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 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 :)

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 26 Aug 14:11 collapse

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.

alexcleac@szmer.info on 26 Aug 14:26 collapse

The web ui with integration of email ecosystem for all those things are one of core selling points of sr.ht

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 26 Aug 14:58 collapse

Indeed, not sure I want do host sourcehut though. Looks like a complicated setup and only supports Alpine but not (Docker) containers.

illusionist@lemmy.zip on 26 Aug 13:58 next collapse

I haven’t tested radicle too much but you should be able to use your “own account” to open PRs on other instances.

toot.radicle.xyz/@radicle

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 26 Aug 14:15 collapse

Interesting, I’ll check that one as well!

i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de on 26 Aug 16:12 collapse

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.

tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden on 26 Aug 16:46 collapse

Maybe they’ll use the Forgejo code as most of it should be compatible, but yes, I won’t wait for it.