2018-06-06 Away from GitHub

Microsoft is buying GitHub. Mastodon is abuzz with discussions. Let’s remind ourselves of Embrace, extend, and extinguish, the phrase used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors, according to Wikipedia. 🤢

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Just read through the examples on that page. 🤮

So I want to move away from GitHub.

Git itself is federated. You can pull from anywhere and push wherever they allow you to. Some of the things you cannot do, however:

What other functionality do you use? I think that’s all I do.

Maybe I’ll just create a software wiki for myself which implements these features and leave it at that. This requires a few things:

1. hosting my own git repositories ✔️

2. a platform to manage tickets ✔️

3. notifications by mail ✔️

I have a proof of concept up and running. It’s based on Oddmuse and a bunch of additions in the config file.

a proof of concept

Oddmuse

I suspect it’s either going to be that, or something like Fossil. The main drawback is that nobody else uses it, however. All those Mercurial users know what I’m talking about. I know that I don’t like to contribute to projects using “unpopular” version control software.

Fossil

Fossil has tickets and it serves a website for its repositories. I dislike the database stuff but SQLite has a good reputation and at the end of the day all the `.git` directories are gobbledygook to me anyway.

I don’t really need code browsing via the web. That’s why I don’t need `cgit`, I think. I hardly ever do it. Sometimes I link to particular lines of code when I comment on an issue, perhaps. I guess I do kind of miss the cheap README.md = project homepage and project documentation.

A feature I sometimes used was online text editing: I sometimes fixed typos in documents which resulted in automatic pull requests on GitHub and that was useful and cool.

The other alternatives like GitLab and Gitea have a reputation for needing a lot of resources, so that’s bad.

​#Programming ​#GitHub ​#Oddmuse ​#cgit

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

JWZ comments: “Anyway, this is your periodic reminder that Microsoft is a vile garbage fire of a company.”

JWZ comments

– Alex

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I guess I do kind of miss the cheap README.md = project homepage and project documentation.

cgit actually kind of has this, I just discovered. Just sprinkle this in your `/etc/cgitrc`:

readme=master:README.md
readme=master:README
about-filter=/usr/local/lib/cgit/filters/about-formatting.sh

(*above* scan-path, if you put that in your cgitrc).

Example:

· http://koldfront.dk/git/fffs/about/

http://koldfront.dk/git/fffs/about/

(I haven’t fixed the broken image link yet).

– Adam 2018-06-06 14:51 UTC

Adam

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Nice! And works for me: Face Generator README.

Face Generator README

Current setup:

#
# cgit config
# see cgitrc(5) for details

css=/cgit-css/cgit.css
logo=/cgit-css/cgit.png

readme=master:README.md
readme=master:README
about-filter=/usr/lib/cgit/filters/about-formatting.sh

source-filter=/usr/lib/cgit/filters/syntax-highlighting.py

clone-prefix=https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit

remove-suffix=1
enable-index-owner=0
scan-path=/home/git

Anything else I would need?

– Alex Schroeder 2018-06-07 06:14 UTC

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Note to self: I use `git clone ssh://git@alexschroeder.ch:882/home/git/face.git` where as others will use `git clone https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/face`.

– Alex Schroeder 2018-06-07 07:15 UTC

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The only things I have besides what you’ve got is:

max-stats=year
noplainemail=1
local-time=1

and I’ve set `root-title` and `root-desc`

– Adam 2018-06-08 15:31 UTC

Adam

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Thanks!

– Alex Schroeder 2018-06-08 15:36 UTC

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I’m also using this opportunity to splitting subfolders out into new repositories for some projects. The GitHub help pages are still useful. 🙂

splitting subfolders out into new repositories

– Alex Schroeder 2018-06-09 20:25 UTC

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Free Software Needs Free Tools. «The only cost, we are told, is that the tools themselves are nonfree or run as network services with code we cannot see, copy, or run ourselves. In their decisions to use these tools and services—services such as BitKeeper, SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub—free software developers have made “ends-justify-the-means” decisions that trade away the freedom of both their developer communities and their users. These decisions to embrace nonfree and private development tools undermine our credibility in advocating for software freedom and compromise our freedom, and that of our users, in ways that we should reject.»

Free Software Needs Free Tools

– Alex Schroeder 2018-06-21 19:06 UTC

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email + git = <3. Nice instructions!

email + git = <3

– Alex Schroeder 2019-05-24 17:12 UTC