Blogs

Forge federation: monthly report March 2022

Most of the work done in the past month revolved around writing software. In part within the new Friendly Forge Format project but also as contributions to the main branch of the Gitea codebase. Development Gitea incremental import/export The ability to store the foreign ID of issues during migration in the database was merged in Gitea after seven weeks of discussions. It is not an uncommon delay for changes that involve adding a new table to the database.

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Forge federation: monthly report February 2022

Most of the work done in the past two months revolved around writing software. In part within the forgefriends codebase but also as contributions to the main branch of the Gitea codebase. Last month the organization of the forge federation webinar replaced the monthly update and this report exceptionally covers two months instead of one. Development Gitea incremental import/export Presented to the Gitea community for the first time during the webinar in January, the development work contributed to the Gitea codebase to implement an incremental import/export feature was then the primary motivation for various contributions including:

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An effective Code of Conduct

Expectations A Code of Conduct applies to people who interact in a well defined space, either online or IRL. For instance, the forum is an online space where you, as a first time participant, expects that other people present behave according to the Code of Conduct. If you think somone else is working against the Code of Conduct, you also expect help from people who claim to be members of the Forgefriends Community.

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Forge federation: monthly report 9/9

This is the last of the series of nine reports started April 2021 when the DAPSI grant was approved. It started under the name fedeproxy and now has a better one forgefriends. Most of the activity was related to renaming the project, discussing governance and funding. Not much happened on the software side of things. Software Development The main branch reached a point where it implements the main features found in the deprecated python based implementation: the switch from Python to Go is complete.

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What is forgefriends?

https://forgefriends.org/ is an online service to federate forges. The software projects hosted on one forge are synchronized in real time with their counterparts on other forges, via the W3C ActivityPub protocol. Developers can freely use the forge of their choosing while contributing to the same project. It operates independently from the forges and serves as an incubator with rapid prototyping to research the best user experience. Most Free Software projects are hosted on proprietary online services (called forges) that do not provide an export/import feature flexible enough to allow them to move easily (GitHub, SourceForge, etc.

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Forge federation: monthly report 8/9

Most of the work during the last month was around implementing fedeproxy and contributing to Gitea. A proposal to change the name of the project from fedeproxy to forgefriends is well on the way. The November 2021 monthly update videoconference will be held November 18th, 2021 5pm Paris time and is open to everyone. Software Development The switch to go was delayed by two weeks, during which contributions to advance federation in Gitea were done, with the help of a cheatlist.

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Fedeproxy is written in Go to share code with Gitea

Early 2021 the fedeproxy project was created to build communication bridges between forges. It would allow to create a bug report on a project hosted on GitLab even when using Gitea. At that time community members knew very little about the ActivityPub protocol, the Gitea codebase or its community. But they knew it would be years before all forges are able to communicate with each other using some kind of standard protocol.

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Forge federation: monthly report 7/9

Most of the work during the last month was around implementing fedeproxy in Go. It will bring fedeproxy closer to Gitea and allow both projects to share significant parts of the codebase related to federation. The October 2021 monthly update videoconference will be held October 18th 10:30am, 2021 and is open to everyone. Software Development In August 2021, the idea of implementing fedeproxy in Go was discussed. There was no push back, on the contrary.

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Forge federation: monthly report 6/9

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.

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Forge federation: monthly report 5/9

Most of the work during the last month was writing code, publishing the July release and preparing the August release. Collaboration with existing forges, Gitea and Heptapod also made significant progress. The August 2021 monthly update videoconference will be held August 26th 3:30pm, 2021 and is open to everyone. Software Development The bulk of the work was to begin the implementation of the webfinger and ActivityPub protocol. The inbox messages are verified to be signed conformant to the http-signature IETF draft.

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