Random thought [LWN.net]

Random thought

Posted Mar 27, 2026 15:06 UTC (Fri) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
Parent article: The forge is our new home (Fedora Community Blog)

Back when I was closely evaluating forge software in 2020, one question I had is: is there a free software based forge instance which does hosting of free software from the general public and has an upstream they track but they don't have some very intimate relationship with, I did not find any. There are many related questions this would answer, for example, do you know that you can actually host an instance without having to develop a bunch of anti-spam code? I haven't been looking as closely as before, but unfortunately, this does not change that situation. Since then, we've seen codeburg closely involved in forking their upstream, and now pagure.io is gone. The forgejo software's docs before the fork basically implied: we do not support unrestricted public registration: you are on your own if you enable it.

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Random thought

Posted Mar 27, 2026 15:15 UTC (Fri) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (5 responses)

> The forgejo software's docs before the fork

I should have been more specific: around 2020, that is the impression I got. I don't know if things have changed.

Random thought

Posted Mar 28, 2026 17:13 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (4 responses)

Would salsa.debian.org qualify ?

Random thought

Posted Mar 29, 2026 16:31 UTC (Sun) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (3 responses)

> Would salsa.debian.org qualify ?

From what I can see, no. https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa says "Salsa is supposed to provide the necessary tools for package maintainers, packaging teams and other Debian related individuals and groups for collaborative development. "

Random thought

Posted Mar 30, 2026 11:12 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, Salsa allows non-Debian contributors to join and hosts some non-Debian free software projects projects too.

Random thought

Posted Mar 31, 2026 20:19 UTC (Tue) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418) [Link] (1 responses)

Ya, but the message is fairly clear that the combination of those 2 things (non-contributor doing non-debian stuff) is not how debian wants it to be used on average.

Random thought

Posted Apr 3, 2026 19:20 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Yeah, I think one would want either the user to have "enough" Debian impact to ignore it or for the project to be Debian-relevant (-specific?) enough to warrant hosting on salsa.debian.org. Same with s/Debian/Fedora/g and Fedora's forge.