RFC: Alternative git forge to GitHub

[avivace]

GitHub is not open source. GitHub Actions run on proprietary runners and we're increasingly relying on CI/CD pipelines based on them.

We need to establish a reliable alternative solution which we can start adopting as a mirror/backup for the time being and, in case of service disruptions, policy or billing changes, easily migrate to it.

The features we're interested in are:

• Plain git hosting
• Releases/Binaries
• CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
• Static serving capabilities (GitHub Pages)
• Issue trackers

Those features may be provided by different solutions, provided they can be integrated easily. Bonus points if the suggested products are open source and self-hostable themselves.

[ISSOtm]

Alternatives:

• GitLab
• Self-hosted Gitea instance
• SourceHut

I know SourceHut provides all of the requested features except for releases (in theory they can be shimmed by implementing that ourselves via the static site serving, but that's more effort on our side.)

I can't speak for GitLab or Gitea, as I've hardly used those.

[CasualPokePlayer]

proprietary runners

They're not really proprietary, creating the VM images used by the default runners can be done as the code for doing so is open source. Additionally, you are able to just use your own self hosted runner using whatever if you really want to (although in practice having this setup at all would just be a backup given how very very generous GitHub is with its free runners).

[pinobatch]

How easy would it be for contributors to adapt to SourceHut's email-based workflow? From "Step 2" on git-send-email.com:

Your email provider should have instructions somewhere for SMTP access.

I wasn't aware the popular email providers (Gmail and Outlook) were still offering SMTP in a way that integrates well with command-line tools. It turns out the page gives instructions for Gmail but not Outlook (formerly Hotmail).

[aaaaaa123456789]

Outlook supports SMTP (I'm currently using it).