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Posted by mlex 16 hours ago

Before GitHub(lucumr.pocoo.org)
524 points | 167 commentspage 3
ctoth 15 hours ago|
I remember this old thing called Bugs Everywhere -- it was a bug/issue tracker which actually lived inside your hg repository. I wonder if we could standardize on something like that? or git notes with an issues ref? or something magical like that?

Then it's BYOR -- bring your own renderer. Trivial CLI bugtrackers, agentic nonsense, pretty web stuff, whatever and the data lives in the repo.

lloydatkinson 15 hours ago|
I've often wondered why no one has built an issue tracker with Git notes, or if one exists, why it's not widespread.
psychoslave 14 hours ago||
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug

And probably the network/black-hole effect of platforms like GitHub, Linkedin and the like are hard to achieve with fully distributed solutions, all the more when the other side is backed by huge capital which absolutely love concentration of power.

zkmon 5 hours ago||
SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team, about 20 yrs back. I never saw sufficient justification for the complexity brought in by Git.

But as I say, New tech invades the world and makes the perfectly working old tech as incompatible, just by changing the world around it. So git became a necessity imposed.

paganel 4 hours ago|
There was a big hype around it (you probably remember it), and around distributed version control, if you weren't using a DVCS you were suddenly seen as an inferior computer programmer and hence your employment opportunities were diminishing. That perspective when it comes to almost all-things programming-related has only accelerated ("if you're not quick to adapt to agentic AI you will lose your cushy job!"), with the recent AI craze the latest example of that.
prima-facie 14 hours ago||
Smaller, decentralised forges actually make lots of sense from a digital sovereignty point of view. Over reliance on a single instance like GitHub is not healthy in the long run. The issue they would have to solve is federation.
kelnos 14 hours ago|
Yeah, federation is really the sticky bit. It's very frustrating for people to have to create yet another account in order to file an issue or submit a pull request.

And on top of that, spam is a huge issue. We've progressively further and further locked down new accounts on gitlab.xfce.org because the spam situation has just gotten so bad. We actually don't allow new "native" account creation at this point, and ask people to come to our Matrix channel to ask for an account. We do allow SSO from Github and gitlab.com, but some spam still sneaks through that way too.

I have my own personal Gitea instance that just doesn't allow outside users at all. I'd love to move all my personal projects to it, but at some point I would actually like to try to start a community around one or two of them, and I don't want to have to deal with spam.

account42 1 hour ago|||
We already had federation for decentralized forges: Email

But that wasn't hip enough so everyone moved to GitHub.

prima-facie 12 hours ago||||
Oh we have a neat solution for that. Just give us your government issued id! I'm joking of course.

Thank you for maintaining Xfce! It's the best de around.

divbzero 9 hours ago|||
I really like the idea of distributed forges, but am not familiar with viable solutions for federation. Are there good options available right now? Or at least a not-terrible option?

(Edit: Turns out there’s a very obvious and widely used option. git format-patch + git send-email is used to develop major open source software such as Linux, GCC, and Git itself.)

deepsun 12 hours ago||
And not a single mention of GitLab. I remember it was a pretty serious contender, sometimes leader, strange that author doesn't mention it.
steveharing1 4 hours ago||
I think github is at a point that its too hard to ignore just like google is even though we might not like what they are doing now but we were the one made them this big.
edf13 5 hours ago||
My first was this monster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_SourceSafe

bsenftner 1 hour ago||
I remember that. I've been writing code since the 70's, and have lost count of the number of source code management systems I have been forced to learn. Early on they were over engineered, and a pain in the ass to learn. Then they'd go "out of fashion" and the next pain-in-the-ass over engineered nonsense was forced and learned. I resisted git FOR FUCKING EVER because i was so tired of relearning how to do the same fucking thing slightly different in some other convoluted over engineered system. But it looked like Git was going to be the forever winner, so I finally gave in and learned git through and through. Fuck now its dying!?
codeulike 5 hours ago||
"Hey can you check that file back in?"
edf13 5 hours ago||
Ha ha... yes... that brings back memories!
codeulike 5 hours ago||
Or someone checks in the project file without checking in the new classes they added :facepalm:
jpeeler 10 hours ago||
I was hoping that by now we would have an up and coming DVCS replacement that functioned as a "github in a box" (pretty sure fossil has been described as that, but it's too much on the cathedral side). Being able to mirror an entire project though version control would significantly help with mirroring if we go back to a decentralized world. Maybe going back to decentralized project hosting is just another pendulum swing similar to how compute moved to the cloud...
rtpg 14 hours ago||
I really worry about a bunch of people going over to codeberg. Site's already super slow, but apparently it's quite nice when self-hosted

Anyone who is able to just plop a forgejo instance on their own machines... please do that if possible!

dndn2 2 hours ago|
Can a small project do this and (cheaply) be robust to getting slashdotted?

Which is often the dream for a small project.

Probably yes, Codeberg are very transparent about their infra details and they don't seem wild:

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta

MrAlex94 16 hours ago|
If it wasn’t for SourceForge I’m not sure my life would’ve ended up where it is! They use to promote projects they liked and ended up putting Waterfox on their front page a few times. Really sad when they started blasting people with ads and swapping out installers with adware for popular projects. By that time I moved to Microsoft’s CodePlex, if anyone else remembers that? Felt like I was the only one using it at the time! I remember the connection speeds to it were atrocious, but appreciated they’d share ad revenue from the downloads of a projects page which was nice. I remember it was actually super expensive to offer downloads [for binaries] back then, using these code hosting websites was the only way to do it for “free”
xtracto 14 hours ago|
I also remember SourceForge fondly, before the ad infested thing.

Specially, I remember not "getting" Github at some point. Bitbucket had mercurial support, sourceforge had SVN, and all the Cool projects lived in SF (I'm talking mid/late 2000s).

The first time I navigated into a github project and just saw the code three I was puzzled. (SF was centered on the project/product while GH focused on the code.

a1o 14 hours ago||
Hey, I also remember Launchpad and Bazar, and adding an individual new source to my apt. Launchpad had something like CI before everyone from what I remember.
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