Bonum Certa Men Certa

Choosing Between Options to Outsource to Evades the Best Solution (Self-Hosting)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 14, 2024

Black Sourcehut with text

SO following the issues in Notabug some Free software supporters caution against moving to GitLab because, as one person put it: "These issues do indeed seem to exist on Notabug. But I personally wouldn't recommend jumping to GitLab, as they seem to require JavaScript for the Web interface to work at all, and the JavaScript seems to be unclearly licensed."

Several years ago we spent nearly a year researching (and not rushing) most of these platforms before choosing to implement our own in Gemini Protocol. It was hosted directly from my home. We redeployed it again earlier this year.

Runxi Yu said: "Codeberg <https://codeberg.org/> seems to be relatively stable and runs on Forgejo (a community fork of Gitea). If I recall correctly, Gitea is a fork of Gogs itself. In any case, the experience is relatively nice, and feels similar to Notabug. Perhaps also take a look at SourceHut <https://sourcehut.org/>, which has a more traditional email-based workflow with good support for email patch review."

Codeberg seems OK. Both my wife and I opened an account - one for each - at Codeberg to sign the pro-RMS petition. There's a mention there of SourceHut and, as noted in Daily Links yesterday, there's this update from SourceHut, dated Wednesday and composed by Conrad Hoffmann: "First and foremost, let me state the TL;DR: our grand plan has not changed, and we are still planning on moving most services to Kubernetes. But to talk about why that’s taking so long, how we are preparing for this, and what this means for folks running their own instances, I need to set the stage a little bit. [...] The bad part was - at least initially - the Ceph cluster. While we had the storage capacity we needed, there had not been any performance testing yet. So this unfortunately happened in production, with the predictable, occasional hiccup. But by now, things have settled down and it seems the cluster can handle the load just fine. The object storage still feels a little less performant than before, but bearable. We’ll continue to tweak things, and hope things will get even better once we start using the advanced features of Ceph for horizontally scaling our services."

So they will basically increase the level of complexity. Most users don't need this sort of complexity, which can introduce more security issues and complicate D-R.

There's no intention to 'bash' SourceHut, honestly! But the key point is, choosing SourceHut is choosing to outsource and then rely on (or entrust to) some other entity, a small team on shoestring budget. What's more, if Drew DeVault does not agree with your politics or the objective of your code (e.g. 'crypto'), you will be deplatformed. So it is rather illiberal and some assert that the CoC doesn't go far enough. No, thanks!

We'll just repeat what we said earlier this week: "The lesson of the NotABug.org story, plus the experiences of SourceHut and GitHub (before Microsoft took over), ought to be that self-hosting Git - albeit it requires some extra/new skills - can pay off. One can control one's destiny..."

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