Lots of layoffs (“re-evaluating our operational footprint”) and switching to “agentic” processes. Target user is AI.
Anyone still hosting Gitlab?
Lots of layoffs (“re-evaluating our operational footprint”) and switching to “agentic” processes. Target user is AI.
Anyone still hosting Gitlab?
Oh god that is so cringe. Just getting into coding i have no idea what to use as an online repo. I dont want to use github because microsoft but i want the basic repo collaboration features to be available cloning, pull requests, issues etc.
If you don’t want to host something yourself, check codeberg
I like codeberg and have no plans on migrating away from it, but their codeberg Pages product is…weak to say the least. There’s very frequent downtime. I had multiple users reach out to me letting me know my site was down… embarrassing. I set up kuma uptime checks on it, and now I see when the outages happen.
Forget “four 9’s” or anything close to that…my 30 day uptime is a measley 91%…
They communicate that openly tho:
https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg
Not sure if that’s also for the Pages feature, but in general having a weekly 8hr maintenance window is not optimal.
That’s true, but even at worst case (full 8 hour outage per week) that’s still 96% uptime.
Most of my outages have been out of that window.
Github seems to be down a lot, too, although perhaps not their pages part. Perhaps you could try to have just the pages in some other place?
That’s true! I’ve read recently that GitHub’s uptime is pretty terrible too.
My site is low enough stakes that I can live with it on codeberg. I just relaxed the uptime check a bit so it only alarms if I have an extended outage. Even so, the alarms aren’t actionable to me…other than maybe announcing to my users that there’s an outage rather than having them ask me if I’m aware of the outage.
Thats rough. Check out https://grebedoc.dev/ I believe codeberg itself also wants to migrate to that as well, I cant tell you how reliable it is though (I am using hetzner managed for 1.90€/m) is but I dig its simplicity.
Codeberg, I can recommend
Isnt codeberg centralized? I worry it will run into the same issue as github. I was checking out Radicle but its cryptic and hard to search for other projects.
Codeberg is supporting forgejo which Codeberg is built on. Forgejo is ActivityPub powered git repositories. So imagine regular git, but everyone can have their own repos on their own sites and you can still interact with each other. So yes, Codeberg is centealized FOR NOW. But they’re working on opening it up to EVERYONE to run their own and be able to access all the repos you use over the Fediverse.
Will it be possible to have decentralized pull requests? Like I open a PR on my site, my friend reviews my PR on his site, and I get his reviews on my site?
That’s the plan, but it’s still far away
That’s nice
This was always baked into basic git from the beginning if you review your code in E-Mail chains or mailing lists.
So not really baked in at all then?
why wouldn’t it be? you can send emails from web uis too. you can share diffs however you desire. you can have a remote for each developer, and push/pull changes to each other. the github mindset kind of ruined the resilience and distributedness of git: one central remote, one account authority, one central place where discussing MRs… ever forgejo is not as good as decentralized git: what’s a forgejo identity?
meanwhile git has been decentralized and distributed since day one, linux is still developed in a decentralized and distributed way and forgepub is just not ready and not even close.
sending emails with an attached diff to many ppl is too hard? make a nice offline gui doing that and we’re distributed. github was a psyop to make us un-learn git, making it better is silly, like wasting decades searching for “good cigarettes”
Okay, but by definition none of that is “baked into” git…
Email chains and mailing lists are not really a practical way to develop anymore, and it is increasingly anachronistic (as is the idea of tying your identity to an email which is also baked into basic git). This was the only realistic democratic and federated option when git was designed, but it was never the ideal one. Forgejo is trying to build a better, more ideal, also-federated alternative that is really designed for code collaboration from the ground up. Once the design is stabilized, there’s no reason it couldn’t get built into git also. I would love to be able to create a PR with git itself and have it automatically submitted to the origin repository.
That’s nowhere near as convenient as current web based PR.
The protocol extension is ForgeFed and it’s still a work in progress afaik
The issue tracker is on Codeberg.
Forgejo is only one of the implementations and not the reference implementation.
It will also be more general:
That sounds like the dream.
Just like bluesky is centralised “for now” i.e. forever
Except bluesky is funded by VC and they created their own protocol and federation design.
Codeberg is an open source repo only place, they’re building in AP, they have monthly updates. So nothing like Bluesky.
But I understand the trepidation.
Even if, switching your used repo hosting service is a matter of minutes if you’re using git. You register on the other site, add your SSH key, update the remote URL of your repository which is just a
git remote set-url origin <new url>and then hitgit push, probably with something like--forceor another option, kinda forgot the exact name. So that’s something you could easily automate in like 10 lines of bash script for all your repositories.It’s super hard to “trap” people in something like github because git is so open and decentralized. Switching is super easy. Most people who stay on github or gitlab do it because they need the CI/CD pipelines or because they’re lazy and/or stupid.
When I read this discussion on HackerNews they act like they’re trapped and it would require moving the sun and the earth to switch over.
And the open issues, tasks and pull requests?
Right.
Those are all part of the forge, not git.
The 2 are very different things.
And what kind of service is gitlab, which we are discussing here, or github which was brought up in the comment, or codeberg?
They are forges.
I think the comment of migrating git, was more for smaller and maybe private projects. Not large collaborations. So only the git part, not the forge part.
https://docs.codeberg.org/advanced/migrating-repos/
Its centralized, but they (forgejo, the underlying software) are building on standards wherever possible so it should be easy enough to move things around. I also don’t really see them breaking bad anytime soon, at some point you have stop worrying and start to build shit.
It is but they’re working on federation for forgejo (which powers Codeberg).
Oh sorry, I might have misunderstood your question. Yes, Codeberg is centralised, but it is registered at a public e.V. in Germany making it more open (not a company).
But then you could use what they use, Forgejo to self host.
Or Gittea as suggested by somebody else.
Codeberg for hosted, Forgejo for selfhosted.
They are great.
Codeberg or sourcehut.
Gitlab was always cringe.
Even cringe as it always was, still a better product than GitHub. Microsoft drove it into the ground, but it was quite bad before as well, comparatively.
For a beginner, I’d probably stick to Github initially, just because there’s so many guides and tutorials on how to use it, and their free plan is still pretty generous.
A lot of the knowledge is transferable though. If you do want to try something else, Codeberg is pretty good for open-source.
To just learn about Git, you don’t even need a host like Github or Codeberg. You can have a Git repo just on your computer, and still get a bunch of the benefits of source control - a full history of everything, separate branches and worktrees so you can have multiple incomplete changes and switch between them, etc.
Codeberg
Host a Gitea?See reply comment below
Or Forgejo, which is a fork of Gitea and is what Codeberg uses. They explain their advantages over Gitea here: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
The tl;dr is that Forgejo is maintained by a non-profit whereas Gitea is maintained by a for-profit company, and Forgejo is completely open-source whereas Gitea is open-core with some features only available in their hosted service. Forgejo also has better testing and a bigger focus on security.
Oh dang I didn’t realize! Thank you!! I was just starting to look at those things myself and wanted to also avoid GH. Plus Gitea was available on Yunohost too. I’ve heard of Codeberg, I’ll see if I can host that instead. It’s too bad other companies don’t move away from GH…