A beginner's guide to Sourcehut (2025) | Hacker News Reader

A beginner's guide to Sourcehut (2025)

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60 pointsbradley_taunt17 comments

If you're major concern is copilot : Microsoft sucking up your codebase, you better not be producing open source applications anywhere.

Not a single open source license will protect you. (And it won't help even if they add an exclusion clause for AI).

Hostile forges will help though, unless the forge gets big enough.

Scrapers (SEO bots included) tend to only have a handful of "corner cases" built for navigating sites - if your code forge is actively trying to prevent scraping it could help prevent quite a lot.

Your choices remain important, even if it's not foolproof.

codeberg serves a poisoned AI page when the detection is triggered

If your only concern is copilot, this is accurate.

For Micrsoft-competitive, closed source projects, SourceHub is a much better choice than GitHub.

Patches / PR

> It’s probably the core reason developers choose GitHub as their main git forge. I get it. It does have it’s advantages of giving a better experience for reviewing a set of changes. Initially. But what if I told you there was a time when submitting email-based patches was the standard for version control?

The author explains well how you can bear with patches, but not why patches were chosen in the first place. What advantages do they have over PR? I see none, and I won't lose my precious time working-around an inferior process to Github's already subpar PR one.

Here is what email patches are all about:

https://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kerne...

I tried email patches with another person myself. The only reason GH won here, is because the git people made one fatal mistake: They forgot to include the tree hash and only show the commit hash in the email patch. But the commit hash is useless. When you email patch, then commits people want to treat as "the same" and talk about have different hashes. The commit times differ and there is not only the commit author, but also the committer.

We stopped doing email patches, because commit hashes became useless for communicating with each other.

GitHub made commit hashes "constant" in a way people care about.

For our purposes, tree hashes would have been much better in practice.

The git user interface is literally "git porcelain". It cuts you for no reason.

That's not the only problem with git send-email by a long way. Even the setup process is extremely painful.

You did not explain why the patch based process is "inferior", neither did you explain why you'd have to "work around" the process!

Learning git format-patch, send-email, configuring SMTP, setting up wrapping, mailing list etiquette, versioned patch sets...

I believe I've read something by Drew DeVault about it, but I can't find it.

The closest I found is this - https://drewdevault.com/blog/Code-review-with-aerc/ - although it has broken links.

I think there is a strong argument that Gerrit is the current evolution of the patches workflow, many prefer it, and there are a lot of good blog posts explaining why.

I don't know what the justification for emailing patches around is though, that seems needlessly painful in the face of alternatives

Patches allow people to contribute without having an account on the forge.

The author appears to highly appreciate being able to contribute without an account, just an email.

I didn't quite get why that is. Isn't an account effectively just an email, with an additional password?

An account would be tied to a users table record as well as a profile, activity log, etc. Git is decentralized but source forges on average are not. I can make a commit to your code if you share the repo, but committing that code under my git user/email doesnt create an account on the source forge.

Having to create an account adds friction and requires you to agree to shady “terms and conditions”.

For all the reasons the OP mentions, I am using Coderberg for a while. This is already in European hands - no cloud-act. https://codeberg.org/

One very crucial point that no forge (IIRC) supports that the article missed (or I accidentially skipped it) is that email supports tree-style discussion! That is a HUGE benefit IMHO, especially for patchsets, but also for "issue" discussion!

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