Git and Gemini: An overlooked symbiotic relationship?

Over the past year or so we've studied the internals or rather the requirements associated with Gitea, Gitlab, and some other Web-based interfaces for Git. Those turned out to be almost as bloated as Web browsers, hence overkill and potential pain to maintain. Of course outsourcing to SourceHut/Codeberg or GitHub is even worse as it's not self-hosted and thus you're at the mercy of someone else's business model and personal objectives/politics. For what it's worth, we did a similar assessment of video hosting platforms as well as self-hosted software; all of these were frustrating and inadequate, so we rolled out our own.

A week ago we started working towards exposing our code, for the time being in read-only mode, as is typically the case (much of this stuff is Techrights-specific and we don't anticipate much participation by outsiders). This may change to allow direct access over git:// (or rather ssh://), but for the time being we limit that to the "Keep it simple, stupid" (KISS) approach, which is gemini:// rather than anything "http" (a standards we increasingly abhor; as for https, it's cementing monopolies and centralisation).

"We're not sure if we're first to be doing Git over Gemini, but it's perfectly possible."Gemini isn't good at everything (its handling of very large files, for instance, is rather poor), but the requirements for a Git front end are quite barebone/minimal (in Git everything is just text; yes, just like in E-mail). We're not sure if we're first to be doing Git over Gemini, but it's perfectly possible. There's this project which is a "Git remote helper to do basic cloning of repos from a Gemini server." But that's not the same. Either way, several people already explore these territories. And as it turns out, based on this live thread, mailing lists too can be done over Gemini (there are several examples [1, 2] and implementations already).

We certainly hope that in the coming years gemini:// will be used for a lot more things, GNU/Linux distros will package Gemini clients (it's easier when everything is in repositories), and mainstream media too will give gemini:// addresses. At the moment the protocol enjoys explosive growth, not only among computer geeks. ⬆