September 13, 2021
Most of the work during the last month was around funding with Gitea and plans were made to apply for a grant for fedeproxy as well. Writing code was the other important topic, publishing the August release and preparing the September release. It may look like there is less activity than usual: this is because this monthly update covers only about two weeks instead of the usual four weeks. The September 2021 monthly update videoconference will be held September 15th 3:30pm, 2021 and is open to everyone.
Software Development
The most significant change was to implement the architecture to listen to forge events so that new projects are noticed and observed as well as issues when they are created by any user, for both GitLab and Gitea.
Groundwork continued with support for issues in Gitea, reworking the list of forge projects, cleaning up the representation of user identities and the addition of mercurial tests.
The third release of fedeproxy was published August 31th and is in experimental stage. The next release is scheduled for September 30th. See the release notes for details about what they provide.
More technical details can be found in the development category of the forum.
Diversity
The experiment continues to improve the language and socio-economic diversity, with a few interactions in Chinese around Gitea in Gitee.
Details on the work done to foster diversity are available in the forum.
Collaboration
Chapril forge
Loïc and Pierre-Louis continue their work as maintainers of the Gitea based, Chapril forge. They both participated in the Chapril monthly meeting.
Gitea
An issue and a pull request related to federation were added to the 1.16 milestone. The 5K€ fedeproxy grant now contains a list of the issues and pull requests that are in scope (4 at the moment) and their status to conveniently follow their progress.
The generic grant application was used to create a NGI Zero Discovery grant application, due October 1st, 2021.
As cooperation with the Gitea developer community seems to be promising for future work with fedeproxy, the idea of using Go instead of python was explored. It is unlikely to happen before 2022 but it seems to be a sensible way to get fedeproxy closer to the Gitea community and increase the probabilities of sharing code and ideas.
GitLab
An issue and a merge request were created for the addition of the nodeinfo well-known URI. It is a baby step towards federation.
Communication
The August 2021 monthly event happened, with Pierre-Louis and Loïc. It was an opportunity to discuss the project in person.
The September 2021 monthly event will happen September 15th.
Transparency and funding
After considering funding possibilities to continue the work on fedeproxy when the DAPSI grant runs out (i.e. February 2022), Loïc Dachary is going to apply for a NLnet grant focusing on developing standards because is is both essential to fedeproxy and very time consuming. Pierre-Louis Bonicoli has the opportunity to benefit from funding by CIR and will explore this possibility.
Details on transparency and funding are available in the forum.
Horizontality
Horizontal communities such as fedeproxy (see the manifesto) are still uncommon and face challenges such as the impossibility of federating a domain name. Recent catastrophic events in a few Free Software project communities that are non-horizontal triggered discussions and ideas on how to workaround this problem in horizontal communities.