Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

  • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    I don’t know what a forge is and why not just use Git instead but good to see some more free software in our high seas.

    • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      Forgejo is a free/open source code hosting site like GitHub or Gitlab. It’s a fork of Gitea, over concerns with management and commercialization. You might know it from Codeberg, which is one of the largest managed instances, but it’s really easy to host your own.

    • unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      It was new to me too, but a (code) forge is essentially a VCS server with stuff like a wiki and issue tracking. So think GitLab, GoGS/Gitea/Forgejo, BitBucket and all the others.

    • Kajika@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      yes bare git works just fine. if you ever want a web GUI and/or issues and Pull Request you want such a tool.

      A web GUI can be very nice to share your repository publicly. You can also use codeberg.org if you can’t or don’t want to self host.

      PS : I’m kinda shocked (not that much) by the downvotes or your legitimate and polite comment. Still looking for better communities/system.

    • dinckel@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The original announcement isn’t even very long. Could you not have read it before leaving this comment?

      • GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        I indeed haven’t read the full announcement and I know comments like mine are annoying to some but it is what it is I guess.

        • GregorA
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          1 month ago

          Understandable, thanks for explaining what happened. I do dumb stuff like that too

      • davidgro@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        I also read the announcement (and FAQ, and other pages) but was still hoping someone would comment on what it is exactly.

        (I did guess along the right lines at least, but wasn’t really sure)