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Comment by moody__ | Hacker News Reader

I really wanted to like sourcehut, the premise of a code forge that you could submit PR's into that had enough-ish traction was nice, even if always a subsection of GitHub. At some point sourcehut had added a 9front runner to their ci system but it was a bit limited and never updated. So I took it upon myself to try and help out and fix this, make things better. Long story short on that was that I got lead on for 8 months with moving goal posts and then eventually told "sorry not interested".

So without the benefit of being able to add code for things I care about, and without an interest in helping more niche software projects the benefits over GitHub seemed to just evaporate.

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It's really a drag. I really really really want to like sourcehut and I like Drew Devault's stance on things, but it seems like it's one of those projects that's almost there but not quite.

Github is great. However, it would be wonderful if there were true viable alternatives, and if the global ecosystem played nicely together. (e.g. sourcehut took in patches from github and visa versa) I idly worry that with the state of things on the internet now, there's gonna eventually be a github-only version of git that ends up drifting and then wham lock-in.

gitea, drone

Gitea is commercial now though. historically speaking, it's likely just a question of time until they switch to a more restrictive licence to extract more money.

They also added their own CI system the other day. Haven't tried it myself, but I don't think drone-ci is necessary anymore.

IMO Gitea is fairly protected against a 'random' relicensing, as the project does not use a contributor licensing agreement.

While license and quality shenanigans can still happen, say if their technical oversight committee went bad, they cant do the same sort of rugpull done by projects that made contributors give all ownership interest to a single party.

GOGS (gitea's origin project) is still around and keeps moving at its own pace, as well.

Forgejo which powers codeberg recently hardforked from gitea and is looking like a nice alternative

maybe, or maybe not. https://lwn.net/Articles/963608/

Reading through all this drama frankly demotivates me from using any of these projects.

I'll stick to pushing to a bare Git repository via SSH for my personal projects. Plain Git works fine for that.

Sad but true.

Drama usually centeres around a certain kind of person after all, and Gitea literally forked with a shitton of drama back in the day.

While the gogs developer only set the record straight and moved on with his life, the Gitea forkers kept drumming up controversy for weeks

Ditto.

An "ssh init --bare" is enough, and after the first pull everything's the same.

But I'm generally of the mind that not everything needs to be public all the time, so I'm OK with not having a wiki and issues on such bare repos.

Gitea is as commercial as sourcehut.

Gitea's CI was marked stable in 1.19 in March 2023.

I'm not trying to start trouble, I'm genuinely interested in hearing why GitLab is not a true viable alternative. I'll be upfront that I'm a fanboi (and now a shareholder) but my question is in good faith since it interests me to hear the different perspectives and requirements

From my experience with Gitlab, it feels like Github but slightly worse so things aren't exactly in the place you expect them to be. Sourcehut is completely different, so (for better or worse) any user knows they have to adjust their approach.

GitLab's free plan is pretty limited; one of the nice things about GitHub is that the free/open source plan is actually sufficient for the vast majority of projects. And with the cheapest plan being $29/user per month that's not really an option for personal accounts or open source projects. GitLab's pricing strategy has been discussed on HN extensively before, and very few people seemed willing to pay that. It's strongly focused on business cases (and even for that, it's actually quite expensive).

Other than that, I think it's "viable" in the sense of "it works", but I hate using it. The UI is SLOW and overly complex. And lots of things don't work well if you zoom things to make text larger. So even without all the pricing plan woes I wouldn't want to use it.

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