
Gitea – A community-managed fork of Gogs - ausjke
https://gitea.io/en-us/
======
dqv
It was forked because they wanted a different management model that included
more people.

[https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-
gitea/](https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/)

------
vvarp
As someone who's currently using gogs I'd like to know what are the primary
differences between gogs and gitea - right now the website doesn't talk too
much of benefits coming from the switch.

Sure, community managed sounds great, but does that automatically guarantee a
solid project vision, predictable release cycle and lots of new features?

Don't want to sound negative but I think reasons for the fork needs to be
clearly presented and potential switchers (like myself) got to be assured
there's a better future with the fork rather than original

~~~
sondr3
The main difference is mainly in who contributes and the speed of development
right now, who knows what'll happen in a few months. The main issue is that
the sole maintainer of Gogs has a habit of going missing for months at a time,
this normally wouldn't be an issue if he gave other contributors write access
to the repo, but he doesn't. He actually removed a few the first time he went
missing.

Right now, the initial release was pretty much just a cleanup effort to get
the codebase ready for the new changes that are coming down the line. If you
look at the PRs open for 1.1 there's a lot of goodies coming that I'm looking
forward to.

~~~
xorcist
The maintainer seems to be doing a stellar job and giving it away for free.
It's a bit childish to talk about someone going missing for a _month_. If he
got paid for it, he's be legally entitled to a vacation that's just about that
long.

I can't help but think about the open source maintainer burnout that has been
featured so many times. Let off your project for a couple of weeks and you
have all sorts of people _demanding_ write access to the repository. That must
be up to the mainatiner and his or her vision for the project.

Don't misunderstand me. Fork away. Forks are the social contract open source
software stands on. But please, for the sake for the health of everyone around
us, think of what language you use. Someone hasn't "disappeared" just because
they're offline for a while. Make him or her proud or their community and what
they did in the meantime instead. That's also a fork, just much less of the "I
took my stuff and left!" vibe.

And I realize I'm overreacting to the choice of a few words on a project I've
never been involved with and never seen before, it's just that some forks are
just hostile for no apparent reason whatever and it's so unnecessary.

~~~
sondr3
I thoroughly disagree with you on this, it's not childish when a whole lot of
people are using your software in production to want the software to be
maintained by more than one person. Bus factor and so on. He frequently goes
away for not just one month, but several. That's not healthy either, but it's
his project and he runs it as he sees fit, which obviously the community at
large disagrees with.

And forking is exactly how open source is supposed to work, you disagree with
how something is run and you fork it. A lot of contributors weren't happy with
how things were and they forked it, it's how open source should and does work.

And yes, I do think you are overreacting. I've been following and using Gogs
for over a year now and the maintainer going away for months at a time has
been very annoying, so I'm happy to see Gitea work.

------
ausjke
I played with gogs half-year ago and gitea is my first software try-out in
2017, it worked beautifully for pretty much everything I wanted and it
requires way less cpu/mem to run(comparing to gitlab,etc), I'm sold.

------
anondon
My major issue with Gogs and Gitea is that they lack a cache to store the git
history/log. So if you work with repos that have many commits (example, the
git repo itself or the linux kernel repo), you will forever be waiting for the
commit message for each file to load because Gogs/Gitea scans the entire git
log for each file.

This was an issue when I tested Gogs a few months and I don't see any mention
of a cache so I think it's still an issue.

For smaller repos though, Gogs works incredibly well.

Regarding this fork, it makes sense if the owner of gogs is not giving write
access to others. At the same time it would be a shame if Gitea becomes
popular and overshadows Gogs. I hope they can work out a mutually acceptable
solution and merge.

~~~
tboerger
We are aware of that issue, and hopefully we will find a proper solution to
improve the load time for bigger repos.

------
zsj
A community is not about how many people have permission to write the main
repository. Linux kernel is the example. Linus is only one who has permission
to write the mainline tree.

~~~
cyphar
True. But Linus also doesn't disappear for several months at a time. Not to
mention that Linus is not the only decision maker in the project. Greg KH
maintains the stable kernels (which is ironically where most people get their
kernel from).

------
mongrelion
I wonder how long it's going to take before gogs and gitea get merged, just
like it has happened in the past with major forks , nodejs + iojs being one
example.

~~~
carwyn
They've split and merged before. This is the second time gitea has forked.

~~~
0942v8653
What did gitea contribute the last time they merged?

~~~
bedonnant
I think it was at a time when the original maintainer kept silent for a while.
When he came back online, gitea stepped back.

~~~
MetalMatze
Exactly, but then he went silent again for over a month in December. We will
continue development of Gitea, even now that he's back.

------
alkonaut
Question to any gitea devs/users: How can I get rid of the (terrible) i18n??
I'm trying out the app but it's complete gibberish! It appears to do some kind
of User Agent detected i18n - (which by the way an app should never do imho).

I just want english so I can have some kind of understanding of what I'm doing
but I can't find the setting either in my user profile nor in the app
configuration.

~~~
PascalW
I haven't tried but I think you might be able to add this to your config to
fix that:

    
    
      [i18n]
      LANGS = en-US
      NAMES = English
    

[https://gogs.io/docs/features/i18n](https://gogs.io/docs/features/i18n)

Edit: tried and indeed it seems to work.

~~~
alkonaut
Thanks, that worked perfectly.

Odd to implement i18n and then automatically choose based on UA, but not have
a user option?

~~~
jhasse
I can select the language on the bottom right of every page of my Gogs
instance.

~~~
alkonaut
Lol: it's the same in Gitea. I spent a lot of time carefully going through
every settings page I could find, did not look in the footer.

------
kureikain
His reply is very reasonable and some of Gitea dev is a bit of harsh in tone
IMHO. Or maybe that's because of my English level.

Anyway, I think this is how OSS should be. We shouldn't have to force people
to merge the code that we want. At the end of the day, it's his project
anyway.

Good luck to both of projects.

~~~
jhasse
Where can I see his reply?

~~~
dqv
>In my point of view, it's a sign of success of Gogs that Gitea forked it.
Gogs is under MIT license and there is no problem with me totally that Gitea
is developing its own version. It happens often in open source community(when
you are not satisfied with upstream version, I fork a lot actually).

Seen here:

[https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1304#issuecomment-1246...](https://github.com/gogits/gogs/issues/1304#issuecomment-124664775)

------
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------
throw2016
I think a fork should not be a casual decision as the main developer would
have put in hundreds or thousands of hours on the project and was motivated to
get it to this state. A project by a small team or even a single person will
obviously be constrained in many ways.

Now if the project has potential or takes off a 'community' should fork it
only if all other avenues have been exhausted and with good reasons.

Its important for a 'community fork' to let the community know the exact
rationale or 'community' can easily becomes a excuse for some to seek to
control or capitalise on others work. This does not help open source
especially if the main developers are too busy developing while those who fork
have time to market the fork to a community.

~~~
freshhawk
If the main developer doesn't want forks then don't use an free/open source
license. It is very simple. "Capitalise on others work"? That's insane, that
license is very explicit that this work was donated to the public under well
specified terms. It welcomes all of us to capitalise on it, _that 's the whole
damn point_.

There is a single sufficient "good reason" to fork a project. You want to.
People are free to use your fork or ignore it.

~~~
throw2016
The point was not against forks but transparency and good faith. Open source
is not just about forking but also contributing, no?

What have the forkers contributed to the product so far? Where are the
technical reasons for the fork? Where is the community discussion and
consensus? Has there been any kind of democratic action? So on what basis is
the word 'community' used?

A fork shoud not simply be about people misusing the word 'community' for
seeking control and ownership because that's not what open source is about, is
it?

~~~
tboerger
As already said, nearly all people in the org are former Gogs contributors,
the owners have been elected by the other people who joined the effort,
everybody who has contributed 4 pull requests can join the maintainers team of
gitea, the owners will be elected every year by the community, EVERY scripting
for the infrastructure and the website and so on its entirely published. The
only thing that is a secret shared between the current owners are the secrets
for the services like github tokens, github oauth or email credentials.
Everything else is open, accessible by everybody.

------
hkt
This seems positive. It means that the big weakness of Gogs (bus factor) goes
away. I'll be interested to know if they opt for anything more sophisticated
than "more than one person has admin on the repo" as a governance model.

------
zyang
Hosted on github...

~~~
papaf
This is my biggest complaint about gogs. I use it for personal projects but it
is harder to collaborate with and get pull requests from other developers
using gogs than it is with github. It is a pain if you have to register with
every gogs instance that you want to prepare a pull request for.

I think if gogs/gitea was self-hosting it would encourage the developers to
find easier ways of collaborating.

This is my only complaint about gogs. It is amazing otherwise, suits my needs,
is low maintenance and is an impressive piece of work. I would encourage
anyone to try it that wants to have private repositories for personal
projects.

~~~
vertex-four
Github has OAuth2 - couldn't gogs have a "log in with Github" option that
pulls all the data it needs from there automatically?

~~~
bkcsoft
When Gitea gets support for consuming OAuth2 this will be make possible

Tracking Issue is [https://github.com/go-
gitea/gitea/issues/26](https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/26)

------
pryelluw
The gogs and gitea websites feature the same basic content on the front page.
Is it also open source? Im curious and dont mean to stir up shit.

~~~
scaryclam
The front page states that it's under the MIT license, so I'm guessing yes.

~~~
pryelluw
Missed that. :) Thx.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
This is a pretty immature community IMO. The gogs maintainer just has life
sometimes and they want to fork because he leaves some PRs open for a while.
Learn some patience, the project will be better off for it.

~~~
ahacker15
We can for sure understand that one is not available all time. Everyone has a
life, and sometimes need many weeks away, etc.

This is not the reason of the fork. The reason is that he refuses to give more
people write access to the project to keep it going.

Before the first time he went AFK, he even removed write access from the 2 or
3 other people that had it.

~~~
sangnoir
> This is not the reason of the fork. The reason is that he refuses to give
> more people write access to the project to keep it going

Others don't need write access "to keep the project going" unless they intend
to ship releases without him/her- they can make PRs and the maintainer will
merge them when they are back. Perhaps the Gitea committers want a more
predictable release cadence?

I agree that a fork is probably the best solution here, due to the impedance
mismatch, the forkers don't seem to be fans of the BDFL model. Additionally,
"community" is a much wider term than how you used it, it's not just other
contributors but also includes users and bug reporters. I wish Gitea the best
of luck, but I'll remain a Gogs user.

------
madeofpalk
Ahhh gogs. This project has always rubbed me the wrong way with how much of a
blatant steal of Github it is.

Sure, 'copy' the features, and take inspiration from the UI and layout, but so
much of gogs looks identical to GitHub that it's nothing but stealing.

~~~
funjjhcc
The issue of calling IP property.

I mean it's not like someone's breaking into GutHub's server room and stealing
equipment.

You want to say it's a breech of copyright, patent or trademark? Maybe.

But then FreeBSD "stole" Unix, Windows stole Mac, Mac stole Xerox, Microsoft
stole WordPerfect, and so on.

~~~
madeofpalk
Isn't that semantics? I'm obviously quite aware there wasn't any _physical_
theft.

My point was around the developers being seemingly okay with ripping off
Github's UI.

~~~
Mithaldu
The thing you're missing is that in this case UI is not something you can
usefully make different without harming yourself in the process, due to it
being a huge contributor to function beyond form, and "ripping it off" doesn't
hurt anyone else as long as you don't actually impersonate them by copying
their logos.

~~~
madeofpalk
Stash, Bitbucket and Gitlab all tend to disagree that theres only one way to
build a UI for git websites.

I agree that no one is being harmed, but personally I just thing it's
shameful.

~~~
Mithaldu
Stash and Bitbucket are horrible to use imo, and last time i looked Gitlab
looked almost the same as Github.

~~~
benley
Gitlab's UI has evolved considerably in the last couple of years. If it looked
just like Github when you last saw it, I would suggest checking it out again
because it's quite different compared to the gitlab of 2013ish.

also I agree with you that stash and bitbucket are Really Not That Great.

~~~
Mithaldu
Cheers, gonna give it a look again. I retain the memories of it because the
only instance of it i ever used hasn't been updated in years.

