FFmpeg moves to Forgejo
code.ffmpeg.org
code.ffmpeg.org
If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "FFmpeg contributor" on their CV (or whatever).
My only contribution to node-grpc fixed missing quotes, but only because that produced real crashes.
In my current company nobody cares. It can be seen in the whole code quality. Full of smaller and bigger bugs as well as horrible hacks. It can be seen whether coders look twice or more at their own stuff before putting it to review or not, just trying to avoid ridicolous comments. It's a whole attitude. I write good code in a messy source base is unlikely to work in practice.
That said, I have submitted cleanup commits to open source projects only in the same MR with a real code change I wanted to make and only in vincinity of that change.
I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
I want to believe some people just want to send small patches to projects when they notice something (I tend to do the same for projects I use) but my impression is a lot of them do it so that it shows up as "contributions" on the GitHub profile which they can then add to their resume (or get some other kind of street cred).
At least typos are actual fixes, far more often you get complete spam (people copy-pasting the contents of PRs and issues from 5 years ago, sending bizzare pull requests with hundred of commits as a merge commit, leaving cryptic comments on 5 year old commits). The spam reporting process on GitHub is kind of annoying to go through, but I trudge through it every time we get one of these PRs. There was one year of Hacktoberfest where some streamer told people that if they just spammed projects with 5 PRs they would get a free shirt and every open source project was DoSed by hundreds of garbage PRs made by accounts created the same day.
Personally as a maintainer, if someone is fixing one typo in order to "get started" contributing to a project I would prefer that they go through and check for any other instances of typos in the project to make a more complete fix (or even better, add a CI job that runs codespell or similar spell checkers). That feels more like someone actually interested in fixing something about the project, as opposed to sending a one-line drive-by patch to pad their resume. (I'm still happy to take the patch of course!)
I have to disagree, changes to development processes are the worst kind of drive by contributions. I don't want CI jobs contributed from someone who isn't going to maintain them.
But even if adding CI jobs is not the preference of upstream, I would prefer that the contributor runs codespell locally and fixes all of the issues rather than just sending one-line patches. And I can imagine much worse forms of drive-by contributions than CI jobs that you can easily disable in the future.
I feel even less qualified to contribute corrections on GitHub mostly for the same reasons mentioned above. Staying anonymous prevents anyone from thinking I’m attempting to capitalize on low hanging fruit.
There’s also a couple of video tutorials that show how to make a pr, using node or nom on GitHub, and people just follow the tutorial verbatim, not thinking about what they’re actually doing.
Unfortunately not my experience everywhere.
> Only go with a blank PR description and it’ll come across as arrogant and spammy.
Not at all what I was doing when I triggered the open source maintainers I was talking about.
No, it really is draining.
> I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.
It's frustrating when people make "contributions" that take more effort to review than they put in and then get mad when they don't get thanked for it. This attitude is exactly why dealing with drive by pull requests is not "quick and easy" - suddenly you need to do social and public relations stuff when all you want to do is code.
I think you’re definitely right that being a massive project on GitHub that accepts PRs there would be a nightmare though.
Tools like OpenAI Codex, which can connect directly to repositories, are likely to amplify this problem even further.
That said, this is also the real measure of the actual value of LLMs and coding agents: the day we see top open-source projects having dozens of bugs effectively fixed per day by LLMs, we’ll know they’ve matured into a solid, reliable resource.
> Contributing
> Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.
An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patch and mailing it but it's a major pain for most human developers. Furthermore they can ban source email addresses and vet potential contributors before letting them in the mailing list.
Or is this because most developers got complacent in only using GitHub and similar?
one local repo per developer (or more repo if they wished so),
one central shared repo,
push a feature branch to the central repo,
somebody pulls the branch, reviews the changes and poss the merge them in the preproduction branch, or go back to the developer,
some test build deploy procedure,
acceptance tests, pass or go back to development,
merge in the production branch,
test build deploy.
I think the main pain points are:
* unfamiliarity -- if you're not already set up then it's extra admin work. And the "obvious" approach (paste the patch into your usual email client and hit send) generally mangles the patch.
* developers are no longer largely using local plain text based email clients -- if you are already doing email that way then sending patches like that is a natural extension. If your email client is gmail, or worse still some Microsoft mail server, now you have to figure out how to send email in a way that's not html and doesn't get mangled by your mail server.
* how to set it up is not a single well documented path. Github has an incentive to do a decent tutorial/docs, and how to create an account and send a patch is the same for everyone. Using git send-email, there's a lot more variability: how to install it depends on your OS, and how to configure it to talk to your mail server depends on your mail server. In these days of two factor authentication and app specific passwords, it's no longer as easy as "put the server name and your account name and password into the config file".
This has got better in that now you can point people at e.g. https://git-send-email.io/ which has info on e.g. setting up gmail app specific passwords and what kind of authentication to use.
If you're a regular developer on a project, this is a one-time pain and thereafter sending patches is straightforward (assuming you're not totally allergic to the command line). But for one-off or first time contributions it can be a barrier.
Tried refreshing, opening in a private windows, same thing.
EDIT: tried it again and got to "Making sure you're not a bot" with the same cringey anime girl, then the site loaded without CSS. Tried one more time, finally it loaded.
EDIT 2: clicked on a link and I'm back to "Oh Noes!...".
Plus, I did manage to pass it once at least.
(PoW is fine, just wish it didn't spin it as an anti-AI thing.)
This is exactly what makes this cringy. There is no reason to anthropomorphize your shitty anti-bot scripts. It's just as annoying as when software goes "oopsie woopsie" when there is an error.
I understand where they’re coming from with all the choices made, but honestly I suspect the anubis anime girl and associated sporadic failures (that I’ve seen, too, despite having a rather standard environment) functioning as a filtering mechanism that attracts a certain in-crowd person and makes a lot of others uninterested in staying around, and I think that’s intentional.
and in my personal capacity -
I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.
With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
The obvious positive reading of the GP comment is that they disagree anime characters make it not "sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne".
You seem to be unnecessarily pedantic too, while being wrong at the same time (I would get those relationships wrong sometimes if I thought it was clear enough).
They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments
Otherwise, it's MIT licensed software. You can remove it all you want, but I will use that as a signal to focus my time and energy as I see fit.
I have been reading your stuff for a while, and if anything disproves my original point, it's your published output. cheers -
> People have sent me horrible things because of this.
That sucks, and I see how it makes my (somewhat) measured reaction scan differently.
> Just please take one femtoiota of care that the other side is also a human being with thoughts, feelings, and that they may just be incredibly tired of hearing people complain about something.
Your shit rocks, your stuff on Tailscale in particular inspired me greatly, and I'm sorry you caught me seeing orange.
Is pretty damn rude. It's the kind of thing you say online but would never say face-to-face.
Hastiness and inelegance tends to happen when you want to trip over yourself to make a point on this site, which we're now both guilty of.
Fwiw I like the mascot but I also don't associate this username with my actual identity because I draw anime style pixel art, so I get it.
Like... imagine Anubis, but with the "anubis is overdrawn" meme.
Unbelievable.
But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.
I guess the main point is branding clash if you're a large company website (most companies care a lot about how their brand is shown, if they care about spacing/padding around their logo they also care about what pictures are shown when joining), hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art. (though resentment could build up if actual humans get frequently unexpectedly rejected as bots by this system, not sure if this actually happens however, didn't ever for me at least)
The approach they took here looks very reasonable from that standpoint indeed.
The resentment point is a fair one! If that happens and maintainers care about public perception of the mascot, I can imagine them wanting to change it somewhat.
> hopefully nobody is triggered by this kind of art
I’ve known at least one person who genuinely seemed triggered by anime-like visual style.
Apparently a good chunk of HN is. Anubis-tan seems to me the main reason that this comment section about FFmpeg and Forgejo has devolved into a debate about Anubis; more than the intersitial page itself.
OSS projects are mostly done by people on their free time, they can do whatever they want with their mascots/branding/project. And those OSS projects tend to be significantly more respectful of users than the average modern software so on my side I tend to see those kind of harmless personal touches quite positively, sign of software that is made with the user in mind.
* use it
* don't use it
* use something else
* pay to change the picture
Easy.
> fetishes
And what fetish would that be? That's just a picture of a girl (maybe? Not sure they were ever gendered) holding a magnifying glass, if that's improper I'm not sure what is proper.
It's just art style.
Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.
> classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions
Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.
At least that's the spirit, of course someone will eventually just use random strings as user agents, but then again this is all a tragedy of the commons anyway.
I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)
"Cassiopeia is down" - emotional event, especially if she never comes up again. AWS instance 54653-345r3453-34234, meh. Sure, we got more nines, but at what cost?!
I think perhaps you might be overestimating how popular anime is with Americans because of how popular it is on the Internet.
My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.
It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.
Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.
> It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them
uh... no, not in my case at least.
It'll be like insisting YOLO[1] renamed and presentation video changed up. We all kind of deserve a right to say so, and insisting anime is unprofessional and must be removed don't look that way yet, but IMO it very well could be considered insane talks in 5-10 years.
It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.
> very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"
I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)
Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...
I'm not throwing shade at Forgejo or anything like that, I'm genuinely curious if there's anything about Forgejo that made it a better alternative than the other options.
I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.
If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.
What missing sdlc features are going to take them a decade to write?
When I'm interacting with a maximalist system designed to be everything to everyone, I still only want to have to worry about the things I care about.
They do seem to hold this as a value, but it's secondary to the maximalism.
In general, the documentation and UI were painful, and trying to figure out how to do something usually took me to a GL issue that would describe my problem but either be closed (with little indication of whether the feature was added or what form it had taken in the end), or open with no discussion apart from a bunch of comments from a community manager saying "a bronze supporter said that this is a blocker for them". Trying to figure out where features or configuration lived in the UI was also like pulling teeth, especially with GL's love of icons to explain what everything is.
So it's not that the features are missing, it's that they're all half-baked, and it would take Gitlab another ten years to polish them off and round them out.
all well and good to host your own code. but from a contributer's point of view, it is between managing dedicated accounts per project you want to participate in...or sign in with github [1]
openid exists, and is arguably older, but odds are most people would not be using it to begin with.
A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more.
Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at that can be unplugged if necessary.
I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.
And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.
I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.
With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.
One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.
It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.
I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.
As a positive side-effect, a contributor is compelled to write a reasonable explanatory message to maintainers and keep the patch minimal and contained (compared to a typical Github PR with a dozen of commits mixing together fixes, features, newlines and indentation changes all over the place).
[0] They did not invent it, obviously—it is what Linux kernel, the origin of Git, had (has?) been doing for a long time!
Welcome to DE, where _every_ page takes several seconds to load.
That's a typical experience when the chosen solution doesn't match the available resources and desired scale. Projects like WordPress and GitLab may work for large enterprises, or when you add in enough caching that you don't have to do the large computation (generating one page) most times, but they don't work so well when you're wanting it to just work without custom solutions as a small team on a small budget
Forgejo doesn't seem to have this issue as far as I've noticed. I've hosted the predecessor (Gitea) on a potato. It's so easy to host, I think it's actually still running but forgotten about. I should check if it needs updating at some point..
If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.
It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.
This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.
> immature
Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.
25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.
Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.
Maybe they are. But, in this case, nobody cares about the "artist's frame of mind". We care about accessing a website that has nothing to do with art.
Maturity is FFmpeg moving to Forgejo knowing and weighing the tradeoffs.
I'm fairly confident in saying that self-expression is the #1 motivator here and the commercial offering was an afterthought.
I don't have a marketing degree, but I'm pretty sure that if selling your software to professional businesses is the goal, making the non-commercial version feel extremely unprofessional is really not the best way to do it, considering most people are likely going to find out about the project's existence by seeing it, and it won't leave a good first impression.
If that was the goal, this wouldn’t be an OSS project, would it?
When we are talking about FOSS, the goal is to keep the project alive and sustainable without burning out or starving. There are various ways people do it (such as making it your side project in addition to the day job, charging for bug fixes and features, etc.), and this one doesn’t strike me as the worst—making it partly your self-expression creates that extra bit of motivation to keep going, and if it serves as an incentive for people who find it otherwise good (some of which may in fact not mind the default style personally but wouldn’t go for it at their place of employment) to become paid customers then all the better!
FreeBSD because of the cartoon devil? Bash because of the GNU goat with the facial expression that could be read as smug or stoned? Google's logo is some printed characters in primary colours, is that too childish?
Nah, that people have such a visceral reaction to the anime girl is not just because it's "childish" as so much else of our industry is "childish" and passes without comment, or sometimes even causes criticism when it gets taken away for blandness (see all the complaints when projects redesign their logos to Helvetica work marks)
I think it's cute. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't cute. It's inoffensive and doesn't get in the way of the software serving its function, the only critique I could do if I wanted to is people unfamiliar with the project would get a bit confused if they only saw the character for a split second: https://anubis.techaro.lol/
I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it, that would be a nice UX improvement.
Otherwise, agreed about self-hosting and the ability to choose whatever platform aligns with your goals the closest to be a good thing!
> And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.
A part of me doesn't like the churn of new CI solutions coming in all the time. On the other hand, after learning GitLab CI, I'd generally prefer it to something like Jenkins, it just feels more pleasant. But with something like Drone CI or Woodpecker CI my non-work needs are also covered wonderfully, especially with a lot of the software I build being packaged in Docker containers, which further simplifies and somewhat standardizes things! A lot of the time I can also encapsulate most of the logic in shell scripts that are easy to run regardless of the environment (CI server or locally), which makes it even more portable.
It was pointed out elsewhere in the thread that they also sell an unbranded version for companies: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
Cool way to make money, to be honest!
Not if you have the right fingerprint - then you're not even aware the site is using CF.
I live in Eastern Europe, so for reasons beyond me that's never the case.
Either way, if I have to stare at something, I'd very much like to understand what it is: the difference between a CMD window popping up when you start your computer for a split second, vs it sticking around and you seeing that it's AMDAutoUpdate that you can track down to scheduled tasks and "C:\Program Files\AMD\AutoUpdate\AMDAutoUpdate.exe".
I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards.
I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.
Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases with each project not picking it because of the weaker network effect?
The cloud companies do not want you to selfhost. It is good that Ffmpeg did not experience a DDOS attack yet, because that's what happened to someone who moved his email to selfhosting. We are living in a time when companies have become like mafia.
I don't think this is it and I would not want to dismiss individual spontaneous, genuine feeling too early.
Since you're ignoring the reasons by calling them unreasonable, the armchair psychology alternative won't help get you what you love
Yeah, I wouldn't say it triggered me but we should definitely have flagged the angry comment and moved on, as per the HN guidelines. I was negatively surprised, I'm not usually surprised by comments on HN.
In the end, all these comments were flagged and downvoted to death anyway.
In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.
I'm thinking of setting up mirrors for my stuff for this exact reason. Now that codeberg exists, that could be the solution and why not accept contributions from codeberg too if it doesn't make the development process too messy.
OTOH GitHub is a huge SPOF. I also trust that my stuff that matters is checked out by other people who will reupload somewhere else should something happen.
This obsession with saving everything forever leads to information overload. In 20 years the github namespaces will be so full that finding good name for a project will be impossible. People often bring up social media but i think that's even worse. If you like some of photos just keep and save them yourself. I don't think it's healthy to be randomly reminded (what facebook does) about what somebody was doing 8 years ago on this day. People are unable to forget and forgive. We should allow for this to happen automatically like our memories.
https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper
But, Anubis uses the plain MIT license, so you can modify it to remove the branding yourself: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE
If Anubis used a license with that mascot requirement, it would not be free and open source.
I personally couldn't give a rat's ass how it's hosted. Still uses a protocol there's open source clients for? Cool. Not that I have pulled the ffmpeg source more than once in my life (which I suspect's the same for 99% of the people here). I'll continue to get it packaged for me by somebody else, who will pull it from wherever it's hosted, however they can. I'm just glad it still exists.
There's nothing wrong about critical and opinionated but respectful, but the comments that are now flagged, and some of the downvoted ones are very low quality, not just critical and opinionated.
Just shove the issues into Git itself. That's what Fossil does for its wiki and issues, while GitHub only does it for its wiki. There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.
Yes but that's also the problem. What's the point of doing it in git if whatever choice you make is incompatible with most clients?
> That's also the problem.
There's no way to please some people.
TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.
What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.
The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.
A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.
(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)
Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.
Having an anime girl show up 99% of the time one visits due to AI bot protection is not the best experience no matter how much I love anime. Saying to “get over it” is dismissive to a large group of people who disagree with you.
The comments are not a cesspool but standard hn being critical.
- How self-hosted is it? Is it on somebody's computer at home? A colo? One of those university linux servers that runs for decades? Hetzner? Is there any redundancy?
- How are the costs and responsibilities for the hardware broken down?
- How is admin and patching handled?
I'm actually very curious about that stuff, but nobody's really talking about it here
Just says Invalid Response :(
### July 22nd, 2025, Modernization of contributions
The project is modernizing its contribution methods and switching to a software
forge.
We have setup a platform on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/). The new
process features continuous integration on all commits and merge requests,
labelling for categorization, conflict resolution, and logging in via OpenID or
Github.
The main repository will become
[code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg](https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), with all
others being mirrored to it. Users are encouraged to begin using it, effective
now.
Mailing lists have supported our development for nearly 25 years, but as more
and more contributors started to become involved, the ratio of merged patches to
total mails begun falling. Mailing lists became a source of friction, with
discussions frequently stalling and uncategorized noise drowning out patches by
bumping them down in inboxes.
Although [patchwork.ffmpeg.org](https://patch.ffmpeg.org/) was set up to track
submissions, it was less than reliable, with many patches and mails slipping
though. Since its activation exactly 9 years ago, it recorded 54,476 patches,
with 53,650 patches having the state of not archived. In comparison, the mailing
list has had a total of 150,736 emails during the same time period.
Additionally, new users have frequently encountered difficulties with mailing
list development. From finding out the correct SMTP login details, configuring
git send-email, new email security mechanisms interfering with mailing list
operations, and finally not having a comfortable workflow to review patches.
After years of discussions, and a vote, we officially announce the new platform,
[code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/), running
[Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/). Documentation will be updated to reflect the
change.
Mailing lists will continue to be monitored, and used for project discussions
and other topics better discussed elsewhere, but traffic and noise should become
significantly reduced over time.
Bugs/issues will be accepted on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/),
alongside with [trac.ffmpeg.org](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/) for the time being.
We are also hoping that this will significantly reduce the amount of unmerged
patches. If you submitted a patch which received no replies or conclusion, we
apologize, and you are encouraged to resubmit it on the new platform.Moving to a modern platform with real collaborative development features is a mature move.
I am like, whatever.
A couple weeks back someone was arguing that websites these days are too slow. So slow that it took them minutes of waiting time to order something online. Then they revealed that they were using a computer that was nearly two decades old and didn’t even have enough RAM to meet the requirements of a modern OS and browser. “But it should work!” was their refrain.
Once I reach the $5000 per month goal across all funding platforms, features currently exclusive to the private fork of Anubis for corpos (including changing the images and soon HTML templating support: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper) will be merged into the open source repo.
I love the idea of Anubis, but in practice, it has turned more than a few sites that I visit into sites that don't work without javascript. So instead of being happy to see it, I find myself disappointed and frustrated, often deciding not to bother with the site after all.
It's off by default while the false positive, true positive, true negative, and false negative rates are being evaluated. This is how you make changes like that without breaking user expectations.
Thanks for fighting the AI bots.
You get some hate for this anime girl image but this paid white label thing is a good idea I think. It's nice we have alternative ways of funding free software that doesn't involve ads and tracking and thank you for choosing this path.
A third of a junior salary is not much but I guess it could help with at least turning a full time position into part time.
> I remember being told that monetization model as a joke and figured this would be one way to test it
Ah ah. Awesome.
It has happened to me once or twice that I jokingly share an idea, and it gets picked up seriously (in a professional setting). "But it was a joke! Too late. Oh no." - I guess it's not too bad in the end and shouldn't be fighted too hard. I guess I'll just make sure that if the idea is horrible, I don't make the joke if I think people around could seriously pick it up.
It filters out people with issues.
Seems like it doesn't like users who take privacy enhancing measures.
Surprisingly there was no problem for me with Servo and Links. Which browsers are not working?
Why would anybody open a bug report?
(Even/odd confusion of number of negations maybe:) )
I guess it became clear from other comments that disabling JavaScript causes the problem. An experimental fix exists for that.
If you're one of those NoScript people you'll probably end up stuck unless site admins enable the meta refresh challenge. If it proves effective, that may get turned on by default in the future, though, which would solve that problem too.
self hosting could drain too much resources I fear.
IMO a list of recent commits would be more useful as a landing page, or maybe even just the readme. When checking out a new project, I'm interested in what it does, not in its folder structure when its LICENSE.md was last modified.
That said, it's a bit like QWERTY. Maybe a bit weird, but it eases quick orientation on a new keyboard or repo if everyone uses the same layout.
https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/8030
then it just looks like a bad joke with all the anime girls and everything else...
If I use composite actions, the logs get associated with the wrong step[1]. It's just a visual thing (the steps themselves run fine), but having 90% of your action logs in the "Complete job" step is unpleasant.
For reusable workflows there's a few open issues as well, but what happens in my case is that jobs just don't start at all, they stay as "Waiting" forever.
These issues only matter if you write your own reusable actions with YAML (the actions written in JavaScript seem to work fine), but it's worth mentioning.
Other than these two issues, I'm very happy with Forgejo and would still recommend it if people ask for my opinion.
- The provided reason given was due to user accessibility concerns complicated by what likely is a breaking change.
- Even if you don't agree with the claim, a reserved name isn't unreasonable at all. Not to make a standard of GitHub, but the `admin` username is reserved there too.
- Dismissing an entire product based on a single non-critical technical limitation while simultaneously not contributing to the solution (unless you have a different username there, happy to be corrected) is fundamentally toxic.
- All the while conflating two separate products (Anubis and Forgejo) that aren't related at all.
- And that Anubis offers a non-anime girl solution, and is MIT Licensed if you really don't care for supporting the author.
I'm not going to prod at the "and everything else" part either.
I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.
Seems you have to remember what -v you are sending as you respond to feedback. Pretty troublesome... Glad ffmpeg is moving to a more modern solution.
To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved. One of the main objections to moving to hosted platforms like GitHub or Forgejo is from people who worry it will result in a lot of low quality PRs that have to be dealt with. I’m not suggesting I agree, but it comes up a lot.
If you’re using the git tool, it’s very easy to get it working and easier to use afterwards. It allows you to use you own environment and not someone else’ web app. If you’re the maintainer, people send you patch and you can script out the review phase. If you’re a contributor, it’s actually a few command to send a patch to anyone. And learning how to cleanup your commits is always good.
I can understand the pain if your only email account is gmail. But there are good smtp providers out there.
As an old fogey who started with mailing lists, and still uses them to send patches, it's actually much simpler than browser-based workflows. Most of it is your own workflow in your own repo clone in your own environment. The patch and email threads are a universal abstraction; you add the rest yourself, with any method you're familiar with. This removes any complexity that would otherwise be imposed by the browser, remote web app, etc. It's like sending someone a letter in the mail, rather than choosing between 15 different messaging systems, protocols, apps, OSes, etc. If you can read words you can figure out your own way to deal with the contents.
And as far as it dying out: I actually think it's faster to communicate via mailing list. The thing a GitHub clone gets you is co-located collaboration, and CI tests. Those things are very powerful, and really should be integrated into a single open source standard, rather than a lot of custom web apps. But the modern software developer doesn't understand the value of standards.
Git itself is simple, but is their .md file renderer open? Are their workflow runners available anywhere to re-use? The API also has gaps (esp if you wanted to migrate your PRs or Issues over), though I don't remember what was the thing I couldn't achieve with it.
But I guess you are referring to indirect, incidental domination like "social" lock-in (I always smile at job application forms asking for a GitHub link — I've got thousands of free software commits in their own, dedicated software forges, but very few things on GitHub directly, or at least, in mirrors not tied to my GH account), "marketing" lock-in (I've heard many junior and not-so-junior engineers refer to GitHub as "Git"), etc...
This part seems mostly interoperable. GitHub's alternatives seem to have implemented something mostly compatible. If you migrate from github to gitlab or gogs or gitea or forgejo, that part will probably just work.
Worst case, markdown is still mostly readable as is and a commit can fix the odd non working thing.
But 100% agree with the rest of your comment.
GitHub has managed to create a network effect by trying to be a social network and succeeding. They managed to create fomo for code hosting. This very HN post shows this.
Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a clone of Github.
[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...
Look instead at the amount of features introduced with each version. Forgejo releases twice as often as Gitea does, so compare two releases of Forgejo with one release of Gitea made within the same time frame. I haven't been impressed so far.
Also a bit more context: https://lwn.net/Articles/963608
I'm not sure why that would make them hard to take seriously unless the things they're saying are false. Is that what you're claiming?
> If you look at forgejo commits, more than half of them are merges of library updates made by the renovate bot, which artificially inflates the level of activity you see
If I thought number of commits strictly equals activity then I guess it would look like that, but I don't. From what I'm seeing, a lot of the Gitea devs left to go to Forgejo and are now working on it exclusively, while the work being done on Gitea gets selectively merged into Forgejo too. I don't actually care about that either - Gogs had all the features I wanted when I first installed it years ago and all I really want out of the maintainers is security patches. I'm mostly just concerned about licensing and ownership models that incentivize the software org to inevitably turn evil in the future.
And I suggested comparing releases, not commits; Gitea is ahead here both in what it supported at the moment of the hard fork, and in what has been introduced since then (counting only the MIT version).
Who's asking for all those new features? Enterprise users? I love the old Gitea because it was light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi Zero. I've been delaying trying Forgejo due to concerns about bloat, but you've just sold it to me. All I need for it is to mirror Git repositories I care about every couple of days. Like gp, I consider Gogs/Gitea to have been feature-complete years ago
From the context in that mailing list it does seems there is more to it. Not to mention Gitea is still MIT license and continued development. But competition is good, I hope both project do well.
The "open core" (Gitea Enterprise) is not Gitea, it is a downstream fork by CommitGo, who you can pay for contract development for custom features. The features are expected to be upstreamed, there are open PRs, they just don't yet meet Gitea's code review standards. You can run them from the PRs if you like.
It is possible to migrate from 1.22 to Forgejo simply by changing the binary, and downgrading from 1.24 to 1.23, and from 1.23 to 1.22 is possible if you know your way around PostgreSQL and have a spare hour. I always write downgrade scripts for each release and test them before upgrading Gitea to make sure that I can always back out and move to Forgejo if Gitea folds. Haven't seen much reason to do it up to this moment, though.
edit: for example, here's a 1.23 → 1.22 downgrade script; I don't have access to 1.24 → 1.23 atm:
Compared to Cloudflare and Google, you can actually talk to a human here and they might (I have no reason to believe the opposite) actually care about niche browsers whereas Google seems to test their products on browsers other than their own engine only after release (presumably people will get annoyed about these breakages/outages eventually and switch to a their browser or a rebrand thereof). There's no such conflict of interest here. I'm not aware of a better thing to use than Anubis or a self-written equivalent (my understanding is that it's a simple sha2 PoW)