Forges¶

Requirements¶

• Fully free software
• Low resource usage
• Javascript requirements:
  • Friendly upstream that could accept patches to make all features work without JavaScript
  • If possible don't depend on JavaScript
  • if possible the JavaScript has to be compatible with LibreJS
• Workflow requirements:
  • Have the ability to tell users about sending patches to the mailing list
  • Friendly upstream that can accept patches for integrating it with a mailing based workflow.

Possible forges¶

Gitlab¶

It has some big dependency on Javascript,
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: ?

Pargure¶

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

• The buttons seem to be greyed out when they cannot be used This is much better than Gitlab where the buttons like "Send pull request" completely disappear if the feature is deactivated. Having button like that disappearing is really bad as users struggle to understand what they are doing wrong and can't contribute, when in fact the feature is simply deactivated without any way that shows it.
• It's compatible with LibreJS but still requires JavaScript for some functionalities. Upstream seem friendly and is probably very interested in getting patches to make it possible to enable to use all features without any JavaScript. For that the few features that depends on it would need to be modified to work without Javascript as well.
• There is some interest in bridging a mailing based workflow to pargure: https://pagure.io/pagure/issue/15

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