Social/collaboration features are explicitly deprioritized by design; I think this is a natural consequence of srht being built by and for lone wolf developers. GitHub and Gitea (which is basically a github clone) seem much more geared toward collaboration by groups, something most small-time f/oss developers don’t need.
Also, the emphasis on email and irc is bad, imo. The web won because it is better. A lot of the anti-web stuff is just tradition.
I also self-host Forgejo in my homelab and really enjoy it.
See also their clarifications on Gitea the company[1]:
> Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible
This was in a followup to the original announcement.[2]
Forgejo (i.e. Codeberg, a FOSS non-profit) maintains that the project should be led by the community, not a company[3]:
> Sadly, Gitea Ltd broke that trust by a lack of transparency: its existence was kept a secret during months. After the initial announcement, Gitea Ltd published another blog post but it was still vague and there has been no other communication since. Who are the Gitea Ltd shareholders? Who, among the Gitea maintainers, are employees of Gitea Ltd?
[0] https://about.gitea.com/pricing/
[1] https://blog.gitea.com/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-an...
[2] https://blog.gitea.com/open-source-sustainment/
[3] https://blog.codeberg.org/codeberg-launches-forgejo.html
If someone contended that SourceHut optimizes for devs who've been writing Linux kernel code for 25 years, so you weed out all the newbs and can get the hardened veterans involved in your project, I could buy that. I'd disagree that it's what I'd want for my project, but to each their own. I couldn't recommend it as an alternative to other services that require participants to know how to use a web browser.
With the PR flow, people need to sign up to the website, create a fork, clone the repo, make their changes, go into a slow web ui etc. It mostly works because everyone is on Github. However, even that solution sucks if you are having a polyrepo setup and need to make changes in many places.
For bazaar style development where you accept contributions from anyone and don't use Github, the email flow is so much faster and simpler. Yes, you need to set it up once. But the other day I contributed to a open source project that was self-hosted, and it's amazing that I just can clone the repo, make my changes, commit and then git-send-email, bam done. Had I needed to sign up and create an account, set up a fork, I probably wouldn't have bothered because it was a small contribution. However no need to register to a website, no need to click through a slow ui, no need to create a fork, it reduces the ritual to make contributions by quite a lot, given that you've set it up.
There is also https://git-send-email.io/ which provides a nice tutorial for people.
I am glad that there is a good alternative that supports this flow, because I think it is superior. There are a ton of alternatives if you want the PR flow (Gitlab, Gitea, Github, Codeberg).
But in some ways it isn’t. Like any fool (like me) can just get some Emacs configuration for free from others. There doesn’t seem to be that kind of sharing for all the fiddly little things you need to do with git-send-email and the rest. All I’ve heard so far is that, oh yeah I usually deal with this specific issue by running some Perl scripts that I wrote eight years ago and that I’ve been nurturing ever since. But it wouldn’t be very useful for you because it’s very, very idiosyncratic. Might not even work outside Debian and my Apt state...
Also, I hate when I’m looking for useful forks of something on GitHub and have to sift through tens of useless forks that were created just to be able to submit a pull request.
Sometimes useful when the main project gets nuked or deleted, if you can find them.
There’s not really much need for a “forge” without collaboration. I wouldn’t pay the price of SourceHut just so that I can fetch and whatever between my machines. That’s like a pricey sneaker net.
If all you want is a lightweight web UI for a git repository, git's official GitWeb project offers this. SourceHut isn't just an alternative to GitWeb.
It's not the case that SourceHut treats collaboration features as out-of-scope. Drew seems to draw a bright line between social and collaboration features, and intends for SourceHut to offer solid collaboration features, but without any hint of trying to be a social network.
From an old comment of Drew's: (edit: I now see Drew's comment was replying to you yourself)
> SourceHut is designed to facilitate collaboration, of course, but it's done differently from platforms like GitHub and those that seek to emulate it. And of course it is more than a git frontend, providing tools specifically to facilitate collaboration such as mailing lists and bug trackers. SourceHut is an engineering tool, not a social network. It is designed to get your work done and then get out of your way.
> GitHub is explicitly designed like a social network, and this is a design that we reject.
(From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963467)
> I think this is a natural consequence of srht being built by and for lone wolf developers
Built by lone wolf developers, plural?
Minus that last part, I'd just stick with plain Git. It's everything I need for my own personal, only-for-me projects.
