I had been thinking of self-hosting my little repos and realised GitLab was too heavy for my taste.
Just needed a code browser.
A forum alongside with connections to the repo would be good, but again, gets heavy.
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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A self-hosted sourcehut instance might be what you are looking for.
All features work without JavaScript
That's great
To anyone saying it's dumb not to use a forge, have you heard of a little open source project called Linux ? It does not use a forge either
Can you use git without a forge? Sure. As long as you don't give a hoot about the entry barrier. But for any open source project were you want to encourage contribution you better have a nice presence on a forge.
i feel like this just keeps happening in the open source space, people go "Oh this is bloat, get rid of the bloat" and ardently insist that actually it's better to use a bare TTY, despite that just.. obviously being hilariously dumb?
Even just being able to view the source code without cloning is very valuable. A bare repo does not provide that.
I worked at a place that just had a git on a sftp server and that was it. Worked well in a small team. Git is made for it.
Having a separate issue tracker turned out to not be a big deal at all. Theres a lot of niceties github has, but it turns out you really dont need a whole bunch to make good software.
Nowadays i would probably go with gitea or forgeo if I had to self host, but git by itself is perfectly fine.
Did you not do code reviews? It's the main thing I would miss. Being able to comment in-line, and manage iterations, is very valuable to me.
Gerrit still exists for that. Whether it's currently best, idk.
Gerrit is a hosted service, no?
You can self host it.
Their comment was about not having any hosted service though.
What does that even mean? If it's a service, it's a program running on some computer somewhere. Is that not hosting?
They were talking about hosting the git repository via sftp - so bare file transfer - a bare repository. And how that was enough for them.
While that is also hosted, and hosted through a service, it's only a file transfer service and hosting.
That means specifically without a hosted service like a forge or gerrit.
Which is why I was interested in how they handle stuff that is usually done through such forges and services / hosted software.
Oh I see. The Linux kernel has been doing fine with mailing lists (LKML) for decades, if that helps.
We did. You bring down the branch and then discuss. We used jetbrains and it had a function like that. But it was a while back.
you really dont need a whole bunch to make good software.
Thank you. Louder for those in the back!
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
You can't use that to assert that your view about not having something is correct.
IMO a bug tracker and PR review system are essentially and cannot be taken away. It would seem like most of the world agrees with me.
Others have already mentions gerrit, no need to review on the forge, and there's as well gitweb. I imagine there exists many other solutions much better than the forge MR/PR. Particularly reviewing PRs on github is really messy for me. Depending on how complex the review might become I end up branching to the PR branch locally and checking the complex stuff locally without the forge.
And there are many many bug trackers much better than the issue trackers. Bugzilla actually has kept improving, though I believe it might be too much for small projects, but there are many more.
I do agree with the article writer that one really needs to create too many accounts already, GH from MS, Gitlab, sourcehut.org (I really like this one better, but still you need yet another account), codeberg, gitea, and some with different instances with different accounts each... It's crazy, and now AI crawlers getting on them all, and also violating FLOSS licenses... Notice on distributed private repos it's way harder for AI misbehavior and illegal behavior to do what it does in general.
That's just assembling a forge from pieces...
3 things:
- I did not assert that “not having something is correct”
- You don’t need a forge for bug trackers and PR reviews (note: I also did not assert they are not needed or useful, either in my previous message or in this one)
- If something is required, it cannot be taken away without making the software less perfect. Perfect software is as small as possible and no smaller (note: I also don’t believe perfect software exists, but there’s some that gets as reasonably close as realistically possible)
Please note also, that I responded to a very specific part that I quoted, namely the fact that you need reasonably little to make good software. Everything else is not an assertion on my part, but an assumption on yours.
So, Fossil is perfect?
Fossil has a lot of features and config knobs.
Appreciate the KISS perspective.
For me, the project management features of a forge are extremely helpful. Setting milestones, assigning issues to them, defining timelines and regularly reiterating the planning has proven to accelerate our work as a team significantly. This experience refers to huge code bases (climate models) and medium to large team sizes, though. And probably also my bad memory 😵💫
I suppose it’s always good, though, to evaluate how much management a code will actually need in the end, and what tools correspond to that need.
Yep. Glad he's got a system that works for him, but as a solo dev I love my Forgejo. I self host it, (so no Trust issues) and if you've hosted any other services before, the setup is a simple Docker compose - so I'm not sure I accept the Heavyweight argument either.
Funny how this shows up as cross-posted to the same community when there's been a post about it two months ago.
It shouldn't be labeled "cross-"post, but the linking to earlier discussion is certainly valuable and useful.
I remembered this post.
Pretty dumb not to use a forge. Adds a huge barrier to contribution for little benefit. None of the reasons he gives make sense.
Maybe a good option for projects that you don't want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?
Not using GitHub because it's proprietary is an especially illogical stance. Virtually all websites are proprietary.
Maybe a good option for projects that you don't want anyone else to contribute to, but then why make them open source in the first place?
Because, at least to some people, open source is more about user freedom (to modify the software and share the modifications with anyone they wish) and less about collaboration.
For example every time I publish some simple utility that I wrote for myself and decided could be useful for other people, I release it under a reasonable open source license and pretty much forget about it - I'm not going to be accepting merge requests, I don't have time to maintain random tiny projects. If I ever need to use the utility for something it doesn't quite do, I'll check if any of the forks seem to have implemented it. If not, I'll just implement it in my repo.
The reason I'm publishing the code is because I know how much it sucks when you find some proprietary freeware utility that almost does what you need, but you can't fix it for your usecase on account of it being proprietary for no reason (well, author's choice is the reason, and I respect it, but it's still annoying)
That's a fair point. I don't think that's the case here because he talks about all the bad ways he prefers to receive contributions (email, patch files, git bundle etc.).
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