For years, the best argument for centralizing on Github was that this was where the developers were. This is where you can have pull requests managed quickly and easily between developers and teams that otherwise weren't related. Getting random PRs from the community had very little friction. Most of the other features were `git` specific (branches, merges, post-commit hooks, etc), but pull requests, code review, and CI actions were very much Github specific.
However, with more Copilot, et al getting pushed through Github (and now-reverted Action pricing changes), having so much code in one place might not be enough of a benefit anymore. There is nothing about Git repositories that inherently requires Github, so it will be interesting to see how Gentoo fares.
I don't know if it's a one-off or not. Gentoo has always been happy to do their own thing, so it might just be them, but it's a trend I'm hearing talked about more frequently.
This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet.
- It's slow for git command-line tasks, despite the site UX being much faster, git operations are really slow compared to Github.
- It doesn't have full feature parity with Github actions. Their CI doesn't run a full pkgcheck I guess, so it's still safer for a new Gentoo contributor to submit PR's to github until that gets addressed.
The original AGit blog post is no longer available, but it is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo....
From there, I found a dedicated Git subcommand for this workflow: https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go
I really like what I've read about AGit as a slightly improved version of the Gerrit workflow. In particular, I like that you can just use a self-defined session ID rather than relying on a commit hook to generate a Gerrit ChangeId. I would love to see Gerrit support this session token in place of ChangeIds.
If you haven't seen it already, Codeberg is seeking donations here: <https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/>. A good way to support a product you like rather than becoming the product yourself.
I have not used Codeberg that much myself. I have known about it, but the UI is a bit ... scary. Gitlab also has a horrible UI. It is soooo strange that github is the only one that got UI right. Why can't the others learn from KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE?
I REALLY recommend it
The alliance any up-and-comers can make with the ecosystem is to develop more of what they host in the open source. In return for starting much closer to the finish line, we only ask that they also make the lines closer for those that come after them.
That's a bit of an indirect idea for today's Joe Internet. Joe Internet is going to hold out waiting for such services to be offered entirely for free, by a magical Github competitor who exists purely to serve in the public interest. Ah yes, Joe Internet means government-funded, but of course government solutions are not solutions for narrow-interest problems like "host my code" that affect only a tiny minority. And so Joe Internet will be waiting for quite some time.