alt Hacker NewsI'm really looking forward to some form of federated forking and federated pull requests, so that it doesn't matter as much where your repository is.
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I use GitHub because that's where PRs go, but I've never liked their PR model. I much prefer the Phabricator/Gerrit ability to consider each commit independently (that is, have a personal branch 5 commits ahead of HEAD, and be able to send PRs for each without having them squashed).
I wonder if federation will also bring more diversity into the actual process. Maybe there will be hosts that let you use that Phabricator model.
I also wonder how this all gets paid for. Does it take pockets as deep as Microsoft's to keep npm/GitHub afloat? Will there be a free, open-source commons on other forges?
GitLab has been talking about federation at least between instances of itself for 8+ years: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/16514
Once the protocols are in place, one hopes that other forges could participate as well, though the history of the internet is littered with instances where federation APIs just became spam firehoses (see especially pingback/trackback on blog platforms).
I just want a forge to be able to let me push up commits without making a fork. Do the smart thing for me, I don't need a fork of a project to send in my patch!
I would love git-bug project[1] to be successful in achieving that. That way Git forges are just nice Web porcelain on top of very easy to migrate data.
For those curious, the federation roadmap is here: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/m...
I'm watching this pretty closely, I've been mirroring my GitHub repos to my own forgejo instance for a few weeks, but am waiting for more federation before I reverse the mirrors.
Also will plug this tool for configuring mirrors: https://github.com/PatNei/GITHUB2FORGEJO
Note that Forgejo's API has a bug right now and you need to manually re-configure the mirror credentials for the mirrors to continue to receive updates.