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Comment by gk-- | Hacker News Reader

even aside from this, their reliability has been absolutely terrible since they took it over. it's down so often we had to setup slack notifications directly to the devs to try to take some of the pressure off our ops teams.

they must be migrating it to hyper-v or something. brutal.

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Even aside from that, what are we doing centralizing FOSS project hosting on a closed source Microsoft platform?

It was much better than the closed source SourceForge which existed before it. A lot of small projects dont have the energy to self host. Plus for small projects the barrier of entry is an issue. I recently found a typo in an error message in Garage but since they run their own Forgejo instance and OpenID never really became a thing I never created a PR.

It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative. Of course large projects do not have this issue, but for small projects Github delivered a lot if value.

Strong agree on this. I think a lot of people who've entered software development in the past decade or so don't appreciate just how bad the available options were when Github launched.

If you blanch at the thought of a one line in a pull request just wait until you see what Sourceforge looked like, release download pages where you had to paying keen attention to what you clicked on because the legit download button was surrounded by banner ads made to look like download buttons but they instead take you to a malware installer. They then doubled down on that by wrapping Windows installers people published with their own Windows installer that would offer to install a variety of things you didn't want before the thing you did.

Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla.

It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.

I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big.

But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.

KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind of change that would have been a PR from a fork in GitHub.

However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise shop that doesn't have software as it's core business

KDE uses GitLab now, the change-over was mostly in 2020 with some less commonly used features staying on Phabricator a while longer.

I use a self-hosted GitLab instance in a commercial setting (with developers on Linux and Windows) as well. It's a software department of a non-software company. Fairly small. The person or persons in charge of GitLab have set up some pretty nifty time-savers regarding CI and multi-repo changes - I'd prefer a monorepo, but the integration makes it bearable.

We still use KDE's bugzilla. One of the reasons that Vagrind was initially developed was to help with KDE back when many developers didn't really understand how to use new and delete.

These days sourceware.org hosts the Valgrind git repo, buildbot CI and web site. We could also use their bugzilla. There isn't much point migrating as long as KDE can put up with us.

> It is first now with Codeberg there is a credible alternative.

There is no credible alternative, because 3rd party hosting of the canonical repo is a bad idea to start with. By all means use 3rd party hosting for a more public-facing interaction, but its about time that developers understand that they need to host their own canonical repos.

We understand, and say no thanks. The benefits don’t outweigh the costs

The benefits now don't outweigh the costs. No doubt, totally agree.

The benefits down the road, when your chosen 3rd party host has been enshittified up the wazoo ... they far outweigh the costs.

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