November 16, 2022
On October 25th Gitea Ltd took over the Gitea project and most of the forgefriends related work was focused on bootstraping a fork governed by a democratic non-profit community. During that time the workplan for the federation grant was finalized.
Collaboration
Most people usually involved in forgefriends and other federated projects spent a substantial amount of their time handling the Gitea Ltd takeover. During the first days to figure out what it meant and discussing the consequences. And eventually decided to bootstrap the Forgejo project, a fork of Gitea under the umbrella of the Codeberg e.V. non-profit.
The fork is “soft” in the sense that it is a set of patches applied on top of Gitea, rebased on a regular basis. Very much like forgefriends currently is but properly documented. Some of the work currently done in forgefriends, such as the F3 integration, could be contributed as a feature branch on Forgejo.
Development
Discussions started to switch from using Gitea as a codebase to using Forgejo instead. There are only advantages in doing so because:
- It removes most of the current friction created by the requirement to use proprietary services (GitHub, crowdin, discord, etc.) to participate in the Gitea development.
- People involved in Forgejo have a focus on federation that is close to the goals of forgefriends. This creates an environment where development is more likely to move forward.
Transparency and funding
The federation grant intake call of NGI Entrust happened: it was the last roadblock and everything is ready to proceed. A workplan was finalized and will be discussed during the next monthly meeting before being submitted to NLnet so the contract (called a Memorandum of Understanding) can be signed by all parties.