Microsoft is buying GitHub. Mastodon is abuzz with discussions. Let’s remind ourselves of Embrace, extend, and extinguish, the phrase used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors, according to Wikipedia. 🤢
Just read through the examples on that page. 🤮
So I want to move away from GitHub.
Git itself is federated. You can pull from anywhere and push wherever they allow you to. Some of the things you cannot do, however:
- send patches via the website
- track issues
- browse code and documentation online
What other functionality do you use? I think that’s all I do.
Maybe I’ll just create a software wiki for myself which implements these features and leave it at that. This requires a few things:
- hosting my own git repositories ✔️
- a platform to manage tickets ✔️
- notifications by mail ✔️
I have a proof of concept up and running. It’s based on Oddmuse and a bunch of additions in the config file.
I suspect it’s either going to be that, or something like Fossil. The main drawback is that nobody else uses it, however. All those Mercurial users know what I’m talking about. I know that I don’t like to contribute to projects using “unpopular” version control software.
Fossil has tickets and it serves a website for its repositories. I dislike the database stuff but SQLite has a good reputation and at the end of the day all the .git directories are gobbledygook to me anyway.
I don’t really need code browsing via the web. That’s why I don’t need cgit, I think. I hardly ever do it. Sometimes I link to particular lines of code when I comment on an issue, perhaps. I guess I do kind of miss the cheap README.md = project homepage and project documentation.
A feature I sometimes used was online text editing: I sometimes fixed typos in documents which resulted in automatic pull requests on GitHub and that was useful and cool.
The other alternatives like GitLab and Gitea have a reputation for needing a lot of resources, so that’s bad.
Tags: Programming GitHub Oddmuse