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Guess it's finally time to close my single PR for Gitea that has been stuck in limbo for almost two years now and move it to Forgejo for good.

It felt alright to keep it open when there was still a chance for it to benefit both projects, but now that that's gone, I see no reason to keep putting up with months of silence and accumulating conflicts between review comments.

What are the functional differences between Gitea and Forgejo? Ones that would help an end-user like me pick?

This article makes it clear that I have to pick, but gives no clue as to how I would do that.

I have found https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/ but there again, it's all about the governance and the development process. The federation is a concrete feature I guess, but it's not there yet for either Gitea or Forgejo.

Forgejo is an ideological fork (not a bad thing) that has chosen to rule out staying abreast of the significantly higher rate of development happening upstream. Consider it to be like Pale Moon instead of Firefox.

Gitea has a great active community and remains MIT license with no CLA.

Yes I know that, this is on every page. The functional differences are not, that's why I am asking about those.
I can't say what Forgejo has over Gitea, but I can tell you Forgejo is missing everything from the 888 merged PRs in Gitea 1.23: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/releases/tag/v1.23.0-rc0

Repo license support, integrated Arch package repository, automatic issue suggestions, and the new review+homepage UIs would be notable ones for me.

re my commentary nine months ago: I thought Gitea was fairly safe, as they were not requiring a CLA. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39680587) They still seem to only require a DCO, so I don't think they're gearing up for a commercialization rugpull... yet?

Some of the forgejo devs apparently believe that a collective copyright header is the same thing as a copyright assignment: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/27455 & https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/67 I disagree on that point personally, but is there precedent here anywhere in the world?

Now that forgejo is not hard-tracking the gitea source, maybe we'll see in a year or two which project has better technical velocity or whatnot. IMO it's a coin toss between the two at this juncture.

>I don't think they're gearing up for a commercialization rugpull... yet?

What would even be the point of a closed source github clone? Why would anyone chose Gitea of github in that case?

GitLab is only open core, and people choose it.
youll find plenty of reasons and justifications in the wider world of industries software engineering touches. Look at butbucket, microsoft (sourcesafe and then they bought out all of github), perforce, rational, bitkeeper, etc.

All it really takes is some investor pressure or a bright idea that they could chase some large enterprise sales money, and then youll see more optimizations in that direction.

Sometimes they're useful, like in cases where theres features that are important and even critical for medium-large enterprise usecases, but most people find boring to develop for. The risk comes, IMO, if you dilute the core product value while chasing those objectives.

You can check the technical velocity already, and it's extremely in Gitea's favour,
Tangential, did AI devs take a stab at maintaining a soft fork from a diverged codebase?
The spirit of forgejo is great, but the whole CI component of both Gitea, forgejo und Github is absolute garbage. Just compare it to GitLab and it becomes clear.

Why the hell are Actions and 20GB "containers" used? It all makes simple command line installs in a container so hard to do. Actions overcomplicate simple stuff like git clone by burying it in mountains of TyseScript to the point of no recognizability or transparency. And having an external dependency on someone others otherworldly wrapped shell script. A singe-purpose container does not exist in that type of world which utterly defeats the whole point of using containers.

Is there a similar CI implementation to GitLab out there?

I still use Drone with Gitea and it works great. I wrote a little adapter [1] so it can run VMs with Qemu, in case I need to build untrusted code (or on a different OS).

I don't know why they picked the GitHub thing for their CI.

[1]: https://github.com/remram44/drone-runner-qemu