On Thu, Aug 8, 2024, at 10:49 AM, Radosław Piliszek wrote:
Hi OpenDev friends,
I wonder if Forgejo has ever been mentioned as a really free (as in speech) alternative to Gitea.
When the soft fork happened we discussed it but it didn't seem urgent at the time as the intention was to keep the two code bases largely in sync. (Forgejo would do more releases to get features out quicker, but wasn't going to diverge in terms of codebase at the major release points if I understood the original intentions properly).
If not, I think this is the best time because the two projects started to diverge (as of early 2024) and the further down the path of Gitea upgrades, the harder it might be to migrate.
Yes, more recently the soft fork has become a proper fork and that may present some increased effort to migrate. However, it is important to note that we only use Gitea as a git mirror and content rendering system. This means it should continue to be relatively trivial to move from Gitea to Forgejo (or vice versa). We simply spin up the new system and replicate to it then add the system to the load balancer. I'm not terribly concerned about the fork becoming less soft as a result.
I think Forgejo presents itself as a better incarnation of Gitea for OpenDev because it is more aligned in spirit and has higher transparency than Gitea. All the reasoning behind Forgejo and related relevant details are summarised in [1]
I think we should be careful making these assertions. In particular Gitea continues to be open source software developed in the open that accepts patches from external contributors. Last I checked they make their volunteer led "roadmap" (if it can be called that) public as part of every release they develop [2]. Yes, a private company holds the trademark, but as far as I can tell they continue to be doing open source. I don't think everyone has stopped using SQLite or Chromium etc just because a private company holds the trademark. Now not everyone may agree with all of the decisions they do make. I've personally been frustrated with the response on some of the bugs I've filed lately, but they did eventually get resolved (like the MySQL/MariaDB case sensitivity problems). Note the above is based on my personal interpretation of the rift that occurred but I am not deeply involved in either community. I do think that there are flaws in [1] like the assertion Gitea requires copyright assignment. (My own interpretation of that matter is that there was mass confusion over what the policy guidance required and what was requested and both sides could've handled the situation better. I am not a lawyer, but it seems that Gitea merely requests simplified copyright headers attributing "Gitea authors" and you join that membership retaining your copyright when code is merged. Again I'm not a lawyer don't consider this legal advice if you contribute to Gitea).
Please let me know if this could be welcome on OpenDev. If so, I can offer my time for being a bridge between the communities and helping with the possible migration.
My personal opinion (I haven't discussed this with the wider team; we can probably use this thread for that) is that I'm not sure we would get many benefits from a change today which makes it a very low priority item for myself. In particular Forgejo's main strength appears to be the support for "forge federation" which we wouldn't be able to participate in as we use Gerrit as our Forge and Gitea/Forgejo would simply be git mirrors and content rendering. If people want to migrate I think we should be explicit about what benefits we expect to receive from or provide to Forgejo as a result. Then balance that against the effort required to switch in order to determine if we should proceed. I suspect that if we were starting with a blank slate we would lean towards Forgejo, but we are not and so far Gitea has been functional.
Kind regards, Radek