Gentoo on Codeberg

Is this the start of a more frequent code-migrations out of Github?

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.

All everything aside, reviewing big pull requests on GitHub became nearly impossible - even with the simplest change view it makes you spend too much time on waiting for the page to load the necessary file first. The performance degraded significantly from what was the experience from 10 years ago. UI became an absolute mess. Maybe even vibe-coded.

Great to see important projects like Gentoo showing it can be done

This “Great Uncoupling” is well underway and will take us toward a less monocultural Internet.

So I've started to use it since that's the way things are going. It's pretty drop-in compatible with how I used to use Github contributions for Gentoo. There are currently 2 downsides I'm facing:

- 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.

I was familiar with the Gerrit workflow, but not the AGit workflow.

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.

Codeberg is one of my favourite Git hosting services. It is (to me) what GitHub should have remained like. I have been mirroring most of my GitHub projects to Codeberg as well. Someday when I can afford the time, I might decide to make Codeberg my primary repository hosting service and GitHub the mirror.

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.

For all the negativity on github I will praise them for one really good feature - code search across an organisation. I've found it really useful particularly for 'platform' related changes to be able to find how other people in an org has solved a problem. It's particularly useful when the documentation only shows the happy path (or was written 5 years ago and 'oh nobody does it that way anymore')

Many European software companies are looking for alternatives outside the US now with the geopolitical situation between the US and EU. It's not only limited to the three big cloud providers, but Microsoft in general, in addition to other US providers.

That's good. I am getting very annoyed at how US-dependent Europeans have become, ever since Trump keeps on threatening us non-stop. The Canadians understood the issue; European politicians are WAY too slow. There is a reason why Trump is also known as Agent Krasnov. Yuri Bezmenov predicted this in the 1980s; he literally explaind the "Flood the zone with shit" tactic, which is a KGB strategy (or, even older than the KGB). Steve Bannon only steals stuff; his mind is unable to devise anything on his own.

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 am also moving my "important for me" projects to Codeberg.

I really enjoy using Codeberg (as well as my own self-hosted Forgejo instance). It's fast and responsive, and if something is broken or inconsistent, it's trivial to create a PR and get it merged with minimal friction. It's a breath of fresh air after having dealt with GitHub's bs for many years.

mmh, maybe the perfect time to leave github aswell and return to gentoo.

codeberg is AMAZING and VERY VERY fast and snappy and EASY TO USE.

I REALLY recommend it

The reality of good competition is that competitors are built on good, cheap open source. No matter how decentral, a lot of users will want guards at the offramps and onramps. The only path for... everyone to create stronger competitive checks on services they rely on is to make sure that the open foundations are extremely strong.

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.