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Comment by orangeisthe | Hacker News Reader

what's the problem in moving to codeberg?

the loss of network effect.

I have never once in my life cared about where a programming language kept its source and I think if anyone is using that as a basis for decision-making, they are truly a moron.

You’re telling me you would be as likely to contribute to a project hosted in CVS as compared to git (and on GitHub)?

No, but making a codeberg account, seemingly the second most popular forge in the world, is not that huge effort.

I agree. It's possible in the future a project hosted on codeberg is a silent "stamp of quality". Though, I still think there could be impact wrt a network effect.

> second most popular forge in the world

This is absolutely brutal to GitLab

never once seen a link to codeberg, at least gitlab or god forbid source forge still gets linked to on occasion

I don't care if it's on GitHub at all, it's not hard to work with any arbitrary git remote. CVS would be a weird choice, but it wouldn't be a dealbreaker on its own. Fossil or some other modern alternative VCS wouldn't be a red flag or weird at all.

But I wasn't talking about contributing to the language, which is a weird standard to use here since Zig isn't interested in outside contributors. I was talking about choosing a programming language for use for some professional or personal project. I don't give a fig what version control solutions the team chooses to use if the language is good and solves my problems, and I would consider it very strange if someone tried to argue that I shouldn't use some language because they put their code on a non-Microsoft owned server.

I generally agree with you that choosing something based on where it's hosted is dumb. I still think there could be an impact wrt a network effect.

The original comment you replied to was talking about "the loss of network effect" and you sounded dismissive of it. It might not even matter, but I think it's somewhat fair to say it could have an impact.

Linux kernel is not even run on github. Somehow people manage to find its source and contribute to it.

What I assume you mean is not the network effect, where more users of a product makes the product more valuable. That's still true for Zig as more users increase the ecosystem, funding potential etc. regardless of where the compiler source lives.

I think you mean to say something like barrier to entry for contributors? Where having to sign up for a new service will discourage some engagement with the core repo.

One funny thing is that if you go on codeberg and want to submit a PR to Zig, you can't. Because Zig's too big for Codeberg, and you're over your free quota, so you can't push your update to your fork.

Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!

> Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!

https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/agit-support/

Yep

Worth noting that while it's absolutely unfortunate that we're hitting this Forgejo design flaw, AGit honestly is just a better workflow, and I (Zig core team member here, full push access to the upstream repo) have started using it for pretty much all of my PRs. There are a couple of small things I'd like to see improved about Forgejo's implementation of AGit, but IMO it fundamentally makes so much more sense than the two-step push-then-PR workflow (especially if you're an external contributor who would also need a first step of "fork the repo").

I agree. It would be very interesting to see a forjego config-mode/fork/clone/alternative with AGit as the main (or _only_) contribution workflow!

It's not where people are, it's not boosted by Google/$AI.

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