Sourcehut’s Third Year | Hacker News Reader

Sourcehut’s Third Year

sourcehut.org

123 pointsdaenney38 comments

Open articleView on HN

I'm a happy Sourcehut subscriber!

I appreciate that:

* anyone can contribute to Sourcehut repos without an account. Just git-send-email it to the list!

* the development is in the open, and the code is open.

* all parts of Sourcehut (vcs, todo, paste, list, ...) are all independently usable

Mailing list development still has a bit more friction than PR-based for me, but I'm glad to see this being improved.

I'm skeptical of Sourcehut having started their own programming language, but... if it gets the job done I guess.

Thanks Drew and co!

Thanks Steve :)

You should be skeptical about the language! It's a difficult problem. But, to clarify, it's not an official SourceHut project per-se, but moreso a project conducted by SourceHut staff during officially sanctioned time spent on free software contributions. SourceHut staff are encouraged to work on their own projects or projects in the community at large under the missive of "make free software better", and this is one such project. Sometimes these projects become SourceHut products, such as the upcoming chat.sr.ht, which is based on Simon Ser's soju and gamja projects. At other times, they remain entirely independent.

Sorry it's really none of my business what tools are used, I was just mindlessly commenting from the peanut gallery. :)

You and Sourcehut have a history of delivering. Thank you for that!

No need to apologize! Just clarifying, we have an unusual approach so the onus is on me to be understood.

> we have an unusual approach so the onus is on me to be understood

Completely off topic but I love this sentiment

Speaking of the new language - how does it compare and contrast with Zig and D?

I'm not taking questions on it at this early stage of development, but you can find a few posts about it on my blog:

https://drewdevault.com

Hope that helps!

There seems to be about 285 posts on your blog (according to `document.querySelectorAll('.article-list .article').length` at least), which makes it really hard to find anything about it.

Could you share at least one direct link to a post about it or the name of the language so we can find it?

There’s a link in the linked article https://drewdevault.com/2021/03/19/A-new-systems-language.ht...

Yep, that's a good place to start. Here are a few more:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/22/Our-self-hosted-parser-de...

https://drewdevault.com/2021/05/24/io_uring-finger-server.ht...

https://drewdevault.com/2021/06/24/finger-client.html

https://drewdevault.com/2021/10/05/Reflection.html

But the best approach may just be to sit tight and wait for the public announcement!

Thanks a lot for at least giving as a glimpse before the announcement :)

I really like sr.ht for all the reasons that people usually like it: lightweight interface with 0 Javascript, the workflow, the design etc.

But beyond that, I love sr.ht because the whole thing: their interaction with the community, the way they promote free software, the ethics behind the software.

I wish there were more softwares like this.

I like alternatives to GitHub/GitLab, 0 JS is also nice. But a bit more styling I would appreciate ;)

You could try the Stylus extension and add your own:

https://add0n.com/stylus.html

On one hand, I really like github and I think they have done tremendous job with popularizing git (and they have not gotten worse after acquisition by Microsoft, which surprised me)

But I’m glad that there is an alternative that is not afraid to be different; gitlab, gitea, etc all basically copied github UX

That being said, the mailing list approach is not working that great for me, I still prefer the github way of doing PRs.

Also; I have been looking for a way to replace Drone (open source Travis/Circle basically), I have looked at what sr.ht has (I forgot the name), and it’s wayyyy too complex for practical usage outside of sr.ht, in my opinion.

Still. I am happy that sr.ht exists, I wish it best luck

I'm surprised that you found builds.sr.ht too complex or unsuitable for practical use outside of sr.ht. It's one of the simplest build systems I'm aware of, and it's used to run builds for dozens of projects which are otherwise hosted outside of sourcehut, including the likes of Zig, Nim, NeoVim, and more, none of which use sr.ht for anything else.

If you ever end up giving it another try, would you let me know your thoughts afresh?

Hello.

Thanks for responding!

To be clear. I wanted to use builds.sr.ht on a self hosted server.

I opened https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/configuration.md and that, at a start, starts with QEMU and KVM. I got too lost in reading that.

Drone, by comparison, is much more easier to set up. (It has some negatives, which I won't get into here. But it is much more easy to set up.)

https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/

https://docs.drone.io/runner/docker/installation/linux/

Maybe I opened a wrong markdown file?

Oh, yeah, it is definitely requires some effort to set up sr.ht for self-hosted installs, though many have managed it. I think NixOS is working on making it easier. In any case, will address this following 1.0, when development will slow down a bit. This is indeed a known defect.

However, I think there is some validity to the idea that we shouldn't make every system as simple as possible, especially given that this one has security implications. I think you should be willing to understand how something works and not to reject anything that isn't plug-and-play. Let's meet somewhere in the middle after the 1.0 release, alright? :)

Thanks.

I got into issue "drone is acting weird because of issue X, how easy would be to fix it vs. migrate to builds.sr.ht?" and it turned out, fixing it was much faster (in the end it was dumb problem with docker networks) than migrating to a whole new system.

I like SourceHut for its non-bloated and minimalistic GUI. This makes it less heavy compared to Gitea, Github or Gitlab. This is really a nice small contender to the large well-known git hosters.

Congrats, Drew! We may not always see eye-to-eye but I have immense respect for you and what you've created.

I'm curious what you envision the end goal of Sourcehut to be? I know it's a living system/business but regardless I'm curious what you envision.

Thanks!

I have plans for many levels of ambition from modest to aspirational, but let's keep them a surprise :) Suffice to say that we'll always keep closely focused on our core mission of making free software better. If it improves free software or free culture, I want SourceHut to do it, and sometimes the only limiting factor is resources.

> reclaimed from the hostile takeover of Audacity

I don't think it counts as hostile if the core developers assented to it. And Tenacity has had exactly one non-admin-related commit to it since the fork.

Anyway it's really cool to see open source software with sustainable financial models like this. The forgeperf comparison page is really cool too.

Free software does not only belong to the core developers, but also to the other contributors, and to the community that uses, relies upon, and popularizes the software.

It belongs to whoever owns the repo, domain, copyright and trademarks. That's usually the core developers.

Users don't own it at all. Not legally anyway. It they're upset about the sale they can fork it if they want - that's one of the great things about FOSS. But that doesn't mean it was a "hostile takeover".

It legally belongs to the contributors, who retain the copyright for their contributions except in case of a CLA - which in the case of Audacity was added later, and never comprehensively covered all of the code written over the past 20 years of the project's life. It also philosophically belongs to the users, as part of the social contract of FOSS.

I strongly object to CLAs for this reason, and encourage you not to contribute to projects which use them. It is a clear signal that the upstream maintainers of a project intend to leverage the FOSS community to build up the product and then take it away from them to build a nonfree project instead.

I wrote about something similar here:

https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/19/Elasticsearch-does-not-be...

> It legally belongs to the contributors, who retain the copyright for their contributions except in case of a CLA

That's true, and those copyrights were not sold.

They broke the social contract. They can make this argument to a judge but they can't make it to the users they betrayed.

Yeah you might be right about that. But that still doesn't make it anything close to a "hostile takeover".

I love sourcehut for their gemini support.

A tiny thing, but it speaks volumes to me.

What is the quickest way to learn about mailing-list driven code collaboration for someone who only knows pull requests?

Try the tutorial:

https://git-send-email.io

I've also made a couple of videos about it:

Comparing with pull requests: https://spacepub.space/w/3JhBcvEYbminv8ji4k84gx

Sending patches via email from the browser: https://spacepub.space/w/no6jnhHeUrt2E5ST168tRL

I've wanted to like Sourcehut, was on a paid subscription and had been tracking its progress until I was made aware of this:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-01-13-regarding-ethics/

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CfaFmBHWTBbMkA...

I'm not from the US nor have I even set foot on it therefore I have zero impact on its politics, but I don't see Donald Trump as a "fascist" nor a "racist" or "white nationalist" despite knowing some of those characters do support him. I support a few of the policies he stood for and am not a leftist (I'm probably center-left when it comes to the US political compass but center-right everywhere else). Given what I know about US (tech-centric) politics what I read there boiled down to me as: "if you want to use Sourcehut you better never speak your mind on your political views".

If you read this Drew and you want to clarify Sourcehut's stance on this: Did I overreact, was the blog's wording at the time maybe harsher than intended because of how the situation looked like at the moment, or am I just unwelcome in Sourcehut for stating that I "support" Donald Trump by some interpretation of the word? What about the people who actually supported/support/will support him (including voting), are they welcome in Sourcehut?

I believe that I addressed this sufficiently in the mailing list post you linked to:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CfaFmBHWTBbMkA...

> I'm not going to ask anyone how they voted. But open support for fascism, or other behaviors indicative of his platform (racism, insurrection, etc), have always been against the terms of service, and will get you booted off the platform.

> There are not going to be political purges of SourceHut users, but we will not tolerate bigotry, and should we discover that any of our users are affiliated with organizations who do not uphold our values, we will ask them to leave.

> Note with all terms of use violations, our policy is not to vanish anyone's account overnight. We will reach out, discuss the issue, and if a resolution cannot be found, we will secure an archive of your data for you and you're free to take it to any other host.

> I'm going to shut down the discussion list for now, because I do not expect this to be productive. If you agree with the virtues we proclaimed today, then please spread the word to others. If you disagree, kindly show yourself the door.

I have nothing further to add.

I'm not really a fan of figures glorified by either the left or right: Obama expanded black sites and took to drone bombings with a glee you'd not at all expect of his campaign platform but no one was excoriated or threatened with bans for siding with him.

This is a world gone half-mad with intolerance on all sides. Tolerance, forbearance and mercy are the values once flown by the left not this cesspit of political pageantry we stew in.

I didn't support Trump but I'd gladly hold out a hand of mercy to one who voted for him and seek to understand them with all the compassion I could muster. That's the stance we should be taking as a community.

Trump provided an exceptional case, and this was published following the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol, which GitHub had responded to by firing a Jewish employee for decrying white supremacy. It was under these conditions that this post was originally written, and these are the issues it addressed.

To be clear, I think that Obama's actions were also horrible. We're not here to take sides, on the left or right or anywhere else, but instead to address problematic behaviors.

Like I said earlier, I think enough has been said on this subject. Let's avoid derailing this thread any further with a laundry list of all of the bad things the powers that be are doing around us and what we ought to think and do about it. The practical questions of what behavior is not considered acceptable, and how we'll respond to such behavior, were answered in the email thread linked to above. I hope that sufficiently addresses your concerns. Cheers!

Drew, I would like to balance the GP by voicing my deep respect for taking a visible stance for your beliefs and voicing opinions independent of the business impact it might have. Fascism and white nationalism are not just slurs to throw at political enemies but very specific behavioral patterns that I think any hacker that cares about free and open systems should recognise as harmful and should take steps to oppose it. Your work was already inspiring, but this just adds to it.

Yikes. That... sounds like a political purge.

I'm not interested in US politics, but I'm also not keen to see that.

On the plus side, if Sourcehut do decide to enact that, people are able to host their own version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com