I don't even need to rent a server for that. Everything runs on my router (openWRT is amazing)
Let me repeat this again. We didn't centralize git when we started using github/gitlab etc. We centralized discoverability and reach of projects.
So far, everything else can be decentralized - issue tracking, pull requests, project planning, ci, release management and more. But we still don't have a solution to search projects on potentially thousands of servers, including self-hosted ones.
We do.
https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central
https://www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages
https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/
And many others.
And we still have forums like this one and Reddit where people can just announce their project. Github is more of a bad code refuge than a high signal project discovery.
And most software have an actual websites or is present in some distribution. I don’t care that much for weekend projects.
We aren't talking about your preferences alone here, are we? The case that the parent commenter mentioned is exactly what I was talking about too. What if I want a solution? What if I'm looking for algorithms or examples? What if I want to find a group of projects that's tackling a certain problem? How are my needs invalid? Are the projects that don't have such elaborate setups, polish or completion unworthy of discovery and help? You're essentially dismissing requirements that drive others to large platforms.
That sounds hardly like an alternative to what's possible with Github now. The only alternative that came anywhere close to that ideal was freshmeat - and even that didn't achieve the full potential. Check this discussion alone to see how many talk about 'network effects' or 'discoverability'.
As an example, I had to reverse engineer some kinda obscure piece of hardware and after getting everything I needed for my project, I put everything on github in case it was useful to anyone. A few months later, someone was in a similar situation and built on top of my work. Neither of us made a "package" or even "a piece of software", just some badly written scripts and a scattered notes. But it was still useful to publish somewhere where others can find it, especially a place with very good SEO and code-optimized search.
You mean like Google? I can’t imagine ever searching just GitHub for software… I use a search engine and it’ll point me to GitHub or Gitlab or whatever frontend the software is published on.
I also find GitHub’s intra-project search to be so horrible that’s it’s quicker in the long run to just clone the project to my local machine and git grep there. And at least my local git doesn’t inexplicably choose to hide a few relevant results from me the way GitHub constantly does.
Why do you need a search index on your self hosted git server? Doesn’t Kagi solve that?
The search index doesn't have to be on your server, does it? What if there is an external (perhaps distributed/replicated) index that you could submit the relevant information to? Or if an external crawler could collect it on your behalf? (some sort of verification will also be needed.)
There are two reasons why such a dedicated index is useful. The first is that the general index is too full of noise. That's why people search projects directly on Github. The second problem is that the generic crawlers aren't very good at extracting relevant structured information from source projects, especially the information that the project owner wants to advertise. For example the readme, contribution guidelines, project status, installation and usage information, language(s), license(s), CoC, issue tracker location, bug and security reporting information, keywords, project type, etc. Github and sourcegraph allow you to do precise searches based on those. Try using a regular search engine to locate an obscure project that you already know about.