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Comment by vesche | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Gogs for a team of 40 people for over two years. This is the second time I've heard about Gitea, and I know it is a popular fork of Gogs. Can anyone sell me on why it's better than Gogs and why I should switch?

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The biggest difference is the community around them, Gogs is more or less the brainchild of Unknwon and he used to have a tendency to just drop of the planet and Gogs would sit still for weeks (or even months) at a time without anyone being able to do anything about it. Gitea was a community response to this, nearly all the major contributors switched over and I think it shows in terms of features and fixes. Gitea now has well over a thousand more commits than Gogs and a lot more manpower behind it. You can see this by looking at the contributor graph for both projects, Gitea has had a steady supply of contributors and commits in the last release while Gogs has a few spikes of activity.

Also, if you look at the release notes for both of them I think it's fairly easy to see that Gitea is developing at a much faster rate and has more features than Gogs already with a lot of nice features coming in 1.5.

However, I'm fairly biased, I used Gogs for a long time but switched as soon as Gitea popped up for the reasons above. Since then I've contributed a few fixes and features to Gitea as well.

What's some stuff worth getting excited about in 1.5?

Personally:

- Issue due dates (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3794)

- Approval/comments on pull requests (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748)

- Multiple assignees on issues (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3705)

- Dependencies for issues (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/2531)

- CI status on pull requests (https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/2519)

Don't switch.

Long story short: Gogs was slow in committing pull requests. The maintainer says it's because he has specific standards, the community sees it as just slowness. Anyway Gogs was forked into a new version that is supposed to be more active and well maintained.

Well the forking lit a fire under the ass of the Gogs maintainer and he has since become much more active than he was. For a month there there was reason to switch to Gitea as it was adding features that Gogs did not have at a rapid pace, but Gogs is now mostly caught up and there is reason to prefer it. I personally would go with Gogs. 1 passionate person > design by committee of people with shared low responsibility.

+1. About two years ago I switched to gitea but then switched back. gogs has (had?) slightly less features but seemed more polished. No issues since then, I'm glad to run again the original.

A quick question, how simple is it to switch from one to the other? Do you need to ditch all of the metadata each time? (pull requests, issues, users, etc).

(can only tell my past situation, don't know how it is in general and today)

From gogs to gitea all metadata has been taken over (db was identical then). -- For gitea to gogs I read that the two projects have diverted. As I could afford to loose metadata of my not too many projects, I went back to gogs ditching and recreating everything (wrong switching decisions should be punished, don't they;).

i would prefer the original here too. This is a simple enough project that a single maintainer can easily manage the workload of accepting PRS and setting the projects direction. The community forked because they argue that the community can't make changes, however this seems to have changed. So problem solved.

Thank you for that I was wondering about it too. I'm pretty happy with Gogs as it is.

Personally I've found Gitea to have a bit of a quicker pace in adopting new features, though lately there has been mostly a bugfix spree before the release.

If you're comfortable with Gogs you can stay though I do recommend to try out Gitea. IIRC from last time I compared, other than a few minor features they are mostly on part with Gogs.

"Never change a running system", right? Stay with Gogs, it's not worth the hassle. Here are some differences Gitea users colleced https://github.com/go-gitea/website/issues/40 but many of them were implemented in Gogs as well since then. We're using Gogs at work and didn't see a need to change.

I've not used either, but reading their forking announcement (https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/), it seems the main difference is that Gogs is maintained by a single person and Gitea by a team of people.

The comments on that post suggest that Gitea is more actively developed, at least shortly after the fork, but I haven't checked to see if that's still the case.

IIRC there have been comments disappearing on the gogs issue tracker. I'm not sure what was said in them, but I don't find it very comforting

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