“secure alternative”? Others are not secure?
Didn’t you know? This cloud provider offers lead-free, gluten-free computing services without antibiotics! Also it’s not tested on animals!
How does it distinguish itself from GitLab?
IME it’s way easier to self-host
From my personal experience running GitLab and Forgejo (Gitea Drop-In replacement/Fork):
- Gitea/Forgejo is easier to get running
- UI is less bloated/faster
- GitLab redesigned their UI and imo it’s shit now
- No features locked behind a “Pro” Version (Pull or Bidirectional mirrors are for example unavailable on GitLab self-hosted unless you shell out for premium)
- Gitea Actions is a lot more intuitive than GitLab CI, this is likely personal preference but it’s still an important factor
Gitlab used to be cute, small, and innovative (as in open). But now it’s too bloated. Gitlab CI is not well designed and half-baked.
Also, with gitea the table of contents for org files are properly rendered in HTML as it should be. As someone that uses org-mode this is a reason to avoid gitlab.
But for most people I’d say the less resources that gitea requires means you save on compute and ultimately is cheaper to host.
I’ve been running my own gitea server on kubernetes and with istio for over 3 years with no issues.
I have no experience with forgejo but I agree with all of the above in terms of gitea v gitlab
Thirded
Forgejo has different development priorities but feature wise they should be identical since the Forgejo devs also push their code upstream into Gitea
huh, would you look at that. Pretty stupid move and something that makes this entire thing even more suspect. Glad I picked Forgejo over Gitea
It does need only a fraction of the resources.
It’s also pretty easy to just roll your own gitea server.
Anybody interested in a plain git server with Cgit as a front-end? It’s fast
I am, do you have any good guide for that before I dive into deep google dives?
I’m still bummed that Bitbucket is going cloud-only. We’ve been using it on-premises for years and it has been lovely. Atlassian must be concerned that their customers won’t follow them into the cloud bc they just sent out a customer survey (about two years two late).
I would be less critical of this if it was not the same company managing Gitea, it seems like a decent enough platform but having Gitea be OpenSource is a detraction from possible profits because nothing stops anyone from creating a service like this for cheaper.
I hope the company behind this stays on the good path but I’m not holding my breath, I’ll be sticking to Forgejo for the time being.
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Everyone here is just ignoring the fact that this gitea is not the same gitea it used to be
The new one is called forgejo, and everyone should use that instead of gitea
What is wrong with gitea? Is not forgejo just a slightly modified fork that is regularly synchronized with gitea codebase? I know nothing about motivation of forgejo authors, where can I read about it?
I’ll try to summarize:
- Gitea is managed by a For-Profit that apparently popped out of nowhere -> profit motive conflicts directly with FOSS and since the corp isn’t well known it must be assumed acquisition was solely to make money
- Gitea now requires Copyright attribution, meaning if you push code to Gitea in an existing file it ain’t your code anymore -> omega level oof for a FOSS project because this essentially kills any upstream contributing (as seen by Forgejo deciding to stop their contributions)
- This Cloud Service being offered when Self-Hosting Gitea is really easy, again -> profit motive conflicts with FOSS but now on steroids because a “core” feature of their service will limit their ability to make more money
Thanks for explaining it, because it’s a long and complex story I didn’t want to type 😅
Also, probably the most touching point is how this happened. Gitea was a community project, and they were electing a leader every year or so, and giving them all the passwords (and it seems like the rights for the project, although it’s not stated anywhere) This “out-of-nowhere” company is just one the temporary presidents that hijacked all the domains, repos, etc. Registered a for-profit company and transfered everything there
The community itself wrote an open letter wanting explanations And at the end they forked gitea into forgejo
That’s a very selective truth way of telling the story. While what you wrote is technically correct, the “temporary president” in question is one of the founders and has been reelected for the position every time. He also did it together with some other core contributors, so while I agree that this was communicated incredibly poorly with the wider community, this wasn’t a hostile takeover at all.
I consider it a hostile takeover because the majority of the community was betrayed by their actions, and they switched from a democratic to a fascist governance model
I think you first need to define “community”. The majority of the code contributors seems to have been actually fine with this change and continue to contribute to Gitea. Only a minority moved to Forgejo.
Personally, I also prefer Forgejo because I share their concerns about the future of Gitea owned by a for profit entity, but let’s not invent a false history here.
Wasn’t the project bought out by some company, that now is behind this cloud service?
No, some of the core Gitea developers decided to incorporate a Hongkong based for profit company to better monitize services offered to companies.
This by itself is not such a bad idea, but it was communicated incredibly poorly with the community left in the dark for at least half a year and the subsequent fallout was also dealt with poorly.
I think the best way forward for self-hosters is Forgejo because of that, but that doesn’t mean Gitea is currently a bad choice.
That’s why the fork Forgejo was made. Codeberg uses that fork as well.
