Forges

Requirements

Forge evaluations done by other Free Software organizations

The FSF is currently evaluating forges to compliment their Savannah servers: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/coming-soon-a-new-site-for-fully-free-collaboration

FSF 2020 forge evaluation page on the LibrePlanet wiki: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FSF_2020_forge_evaluation

December 4th, 2020 update: "The FSF forge is still a work in progress. Since our last update, summer intern Amin Bandali deployed a testing instance of SourceHut, one of many possible programs for the forge." https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2020/fall/updates-from-the-fsf-tech-team

Possible forges for Replicant

Gitlab

We used gitlab before and we had resource usage issues. The VM went out of RAM because of that.

It also extensively depends on JavaScript and it doesn't look easy at all to fix.

From our FOSDEM 2020 report that is not yet released:

They used a framework that did most of the work on the server side,
but at some point they switched to a framework that does JavaScript
on the client side.

Accepting patches to fix that would require to double the UI work for
everything, but it might be possible to do server side rendering for
JavaScript. The issue is that it cannot make requests from buttons
like that, so in addition to the page rendering that could happen
through server-side JavaScript, introspection could be used to
rewrite the buttons.

It also hide buttons, which is awful for users as they don't understand what is going on.

Packages: ?

Pagure

Website: https://pagure.io/pagure
Command line tools : https://pagure.io/pag-off

Features:

Packages: currently packaged in Debian SID, in a PPA, might be packaged in other distributions

Contacts: #pagure on Freenode and/orthe pagure-devel@lists.pagure.io mailing list

Sourcehut

Website: https://sourcehut.org
Primary Maintainer: Drew Devault - sir@cmpwn.com
Person who wrote this section: j3s - j3s@c3f.net (feel free to contact me with any questions!)

Pros

Cons

See Also

Relevant email from the libreplanet-dev email list about how the Sourcehut CI can optionally be adapted to provide CI support for other forges, like Pagure and Gitea: https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/libreplanet-dev/2021-01/msg00001.html