Sourcehut looks really good

2023-06-08

I've talked about software forges previously on this gemlog. I host pretty much everything I write on Codeberg and I've been overall happy with it, but I find myself more and more thinking sourcehut might have been a better choice.

I'm definitely oldschool when it comes to computers. My first box was a Tandy TRaSh80, which is to say my earliest computer experience was with a DOS interpretor on an 8-bit POS. I still prefer command line interfaces a lot of the time, even when a gui is really full featured. Codeberg runs Forgejo, a light fork of Gitea. Gitea has obviously been designed from the ground up to be as much like GitHub and GitLab as possible, which makes it immediately comfy for younger devs. In contrast, Sourcehut gives you a really minimal web interface that can fairly be described as "spartan" or even "ugly". But what it does give you, and I like this a lot, is a more traditional way of working that is centered around the command line and email rather than the web browser.

GitHub has a lot of it's own abstractions over top of git, and those ways of working have largely replaced the traditional way of working with git for a lot of developers. Those abstractions have also been directly copied into both GitLab and Gitea, further perpetuating their adoption. Add to that the hand holding that VScode provides for git operations and I think it's fair to say that an entire generation of developers have zero idea how to actually use git on the command line.

Now, I was already aware that sourcehut handles patches via `git send-email` instead of the `pull request` push a button in the browser model. But I recently had cause to open a ticket on a project hosted on sr.ht, and discovered that this also works by sending an email. Bonus, you can send patches and open tickets via email, all without having an account on the site. Even bigger bonus, I sent the email from mutt because why yes I am that much of a nerd. And of course it worked and the ticket appeared on the project's page almost immediately.

I'm sure that this way of working isn't for everybody, but I think that the type of people inhabiting Gemini are probably a little more likely to appreciate this workflow over what has become the "normal" developer workflow in recent years.

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