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Comment by deepstack | Hacker News Reader

main reason I use Gitlab instead of GitHub, MS. Won't touch a closed source MS project with 10 foot pole. Not after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel, etc.

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https://sr.ht

really good.

Really opinionated and ideological. Be sure it's what you really want before you commit. Drew writes great code but he's very philosophical about his projects.

> Really opinionated and ideological.

Are you talking about the programmer who wrote the website? If so, OK, I guess.

The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git.

Both. And yes, true, but issue management is entirely via email and mailing lists a la savannah et al. There's no real way to interact with things from the site aside from looking at them. This is a huge hindrance to many users who are not familiar with the more classic way of working. It is certainly NOT a drop-in replacement for GitHub in most cases.

> The technology itself is the opposite of opinionated or ideological. It's just git.

I'm a paying customer because I really like the UI and the base git.sr.ht service. However, hosted Git today is much more than Git. And so my overall experience is similar to the parent, I find it opinionated and stubbornly ideological. I'm close to being fed up with the "my way or the highway approach" at every corner.

Some examples off the top of my head:

1. I'm fine with sending patches via email, not every contributor is. So give me the option to accept pull requests. Instead, you'll be directed to tutorials teaching how to send patches. Needlessly increases the friction for a large portion of my peers.

2. I want to love build.sr.ht too. But, there's no Docker support. Instead you end up in discussions like "what did society do before Docker?". Give me the option to build some of my repos using my Dockerfile. Again, an ideological choice creating friction.

3. I want to use pages.sr.ht with Cloudflare. "Connections from CloudFlare’s reverse proxy are dropped." Why? "Do not help one private company expand its control over all internet traffic." OK.

All these small restrictions and gotchas with the finger wagging tone amount up to a very oppressive experience for the user. At least, that's my experience.

Regarding 2, you can always start Docker manually in your builds.sr.ht manifest, and do what you want from there.

On 3, I agree with you. There is a lot of this sort of thinking within the product.

I don't really see 1 as a huge barrier to entry. SourceHut does have a web UI however for generating a patchset.

Thinking that gitlab is any more secure than Microsoft when the NSA comes knocking isn't comforting. There is no way to know. But really, is your code and access that much of a secret to the government, and if it is, do you really trust "cloud" hosting?

IMHO, Microsoft is absolute trash and their reputation isn't great, but since buying Github there have been very good improvements still being made to Github (CI.. though slowly, UI, etc). Better than being bought by Salesforce......

You can self host gitlab.

And GitHub, if you really want to.

I don't believe that's true, but happy to be proven wrong. How exactly do you self host github?

It’s called GitHub Enterprise Server [0] and has been around for a while. It costs the same as their saas product so there’s not much incentive to run it other than you just really want to host your own stuff.

I haven’t evaluated it in many years but it’s supposed to have all the same features as regular GitHub.

[0] https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overv...

Well look at that. Thanks.

>after the all the backdoor they being putting in NT kernel

Do you have a source for this bold claim?

HN should be for facts, not Reddit FUD.

The OP was probably referencing this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAKEY

You can scoff at the resulting fears, but the variable existing is factual.

I know that one but that was just speculation, there was no proof that having a variable called NSA_KEY in your code is an automatic proof of a backdoor. Heck, I can prefix all my variables with 'NSA' for the shits.

Backdoors do exist but they're usually disguised as bugs, not so obviously in-your-face like that.

You can scoff at the belief in Microsoft's explanation, but the lack of any evidence of a backdoor in surfacing in the past 20+ years is factual.

otherwise, there are gittee etc that way more lightweight where you can self-host.

I don't know if it makes sense to compare a service with a software that could be self-hosted. But if it did, you may want to mention that gitlab can also be self-hosted.

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