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Comment by dahhowl | Hacker News Reader

Care to elaborate?

Gogs author didn't want to incorporate proposed changes into Gogs, so a bunch of other developers forked Gogs and went on their own promoting Gitea as true open-source by spirit and blamed Gogs author for his inflexibility. I am using Gogs, becuase it has all I need (Gitea is too little added value for me)...

> Gogs author didn't want to incorporate proposed changes into Gogs, so a bunch of other developers forked Gogs

This sounds like a reasonable way for forking though. I mean what is open source for if you can't go and and implement your own features if you so desire. Sounds to me like both sides are at fault.

I don't know enough of the details to really tell you, but it was more hostile then just that. I heard the maintainer went on hiatus and that's when they forked it - like there was some drama going on, it wasn't just a "I'd like to incorporate my changes here" and more of a "HEY LOOK THE DEV LEFT, WE'RE THE NEW GOGS" kinda thing. Check out some of the other comments in this thread, they explain it better.

The problem was/is that on Gogs there is only one person with write access. When Unkwon goes AWOL or on vacation, it means nobody can fix urgend security fixes into master. In that case a community fork would be necessary everytime the main dev is not available but PRs require merging.

I would gladly switch back once Gogs is no longer vulnerable to the Bus-Problem.

That's just not true (or rather not the only reason). The Gogs maintainer went away for months with no sign of life. He also was the only one with write access to the gogs repository on GitHub which often resulted in no progress for months because of his disappearances.

An earlier comment I wrote on this subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13297748

Gitea is however the more active (and quite active) side of the fork so I'd say it was quite successfully. You can easily check this in the contribution statistics on Github for both projects.

More active by commit active and releases.

I evaluated them both again a month ago and found that Gogs is as active or more active than Gitea by actual features developed, they just have less frequent releases.

The project had already forked in the past, but it eventually was deleted and was merged into the upstream because of one very simple reason: Unknwon, the creator of Gogs, came back. The fact that he left again is the main reason why the project forked again.

It's not like other people are mentioning in the thread that "some contributions would not get added" - but rather the fact that he often has really long periods of absence: just take a look at the contributions on his profile https://github.com/Unknwon

And of course, I'm not putting the blame on him - all of us need breaks from time to time - but during these periods where he can't work on the project, the project is essentially brought to a halt, seeing as there is no one else in the community of contributors who is able to merge pull requests - even if they are critical.

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