Comment on State of federation in git forges
alexcleac@szmer.info 3 days ago
I’ve been following the software forge federation some time ago, and didn’t feel to pick up even when it was discusssed initially. It is a neat idea on high-level, though it requires forges to implement it, which has a risk of not picking up (just look at how much iterations of social media federation protocols was there, until ActivityPub arose).
On the other hand, all of the forges are based on a distributed technology out of the box: git. Most of the “modern days” comforts there are, are just built on top, and there are different ways to approach it.
As an example, you can send patches directly to the author in email. Is heavily implemented and suggested by sr.ht 1 — a software forge, which focuses on building a federated workflow by using email for communication (which is federated by design). This way, you can create “Pull Requests” without having account on the forge — all you need to do is just submit a patch. Author is very vocal about supporting it 2, and provides quite useful guides to learn 3, 4
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 days ago
Yeah I guess git via mail would solve some of those problems. Maybe I’d just need to get used to it, but generally I prefer a web ui for those things, including Issue tracking etc - I know there’s tools for that via email and there’s good reasons to use it, but somehow it doesn’t feel right to me. I’ll give Drew’s articles another look, thanks for posting.
alexcleac@szmer.info 3 days ago
The web ui with integration of email ecosystem for all those things are one of core selling points of sr.ht
tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 days ago
Indeed, not sure I want do host sourcehut though. Looks like a complicated setup and only supports Alpine but not (Docker) containers.