I don’t know if it has already been mentioned so I’m asking it here: what about code?
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This is still TBD. I am giving it another day and if things aren’t actioned on then I will be setting things up on GitHub.
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I think GitHub is the most contributor friendly, because almost all dev have an account on there, and it gives a better visibility. Workflows are also free for public repo
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We can consider moving somewhere else in the future. What matters right now is that we keep the momentum up!
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I am sorry but what do you mean with “things”? The Foundation response?
I’m definitely not GitHub’s biggest fan but I understand that argument. I fear we eventually get stuck there due to platform lock-in but let’s not borrow tomorrow’s problem.
Nonetheless I think striving for digital sovereign and suficency are key parts in creating a healthy project. E.g: both KDE and Gnome have their own infra.
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I think it’d have to be github – no one has the money for a repo as big as this. Unless we have a millionaire lurking, we’re chained to github.
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Damn, I forgot about how massive is nixpkgs. 
But thankfully not everything is nixpkgs tho, we could consider discussing where, how,s and why host certain subprojects when the opportunity arises.
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Aux should be hosted on GitHub and mirrored on a self-hosted Forgejo instance.
PRs from the Forgejo instance may get accepted, but I fear the lack of communication due to messages from each platform being invisible.
Sorry, I was vague lol. I reached out to Codeberg to see if they would be able to support the bandwidth and activity. Haven’t moved much on that though.
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Dw, we should keep in mind we’re dealing with some brutal requeriments due to the sheer size of nixpkgs.
The size isn’t even the biggest problem. The sheer amount of activity that would be recorded would make the database under Codeberg (or a self-hosted Forgejo instance) scream.
Size would only become a problem when it comes to forking the repos to send PRs from. Unlike on GitHub, on Forgejo (and thus Codeberg) each fork is a full copy. That’d be a lot of huge copies.
(For credentials: I work on Forgejo, and have spent the past ~16 hours debugging some of Codeberg’s database woes.)
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It must be pretty rare that people are willing to change after they have been using it for a while and we depends on GitHub actions. Like a soft lock-in.
Edit: not saying that GitHub is not the best choice.
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Would something like Gerrit have any advantages for us?
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I would love to use Gerrit, however I don’t know how many maintainers would be willing to migrate to it.
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for context: myself and @coded host our own Gerrit instance and use it for our personal projects. I also have experience from other projects… but that means I know firsthand how difficult it is to get people who are used to the GitHub workflow to contribute using Gerrit. Something like Forgejo is a much smaller jump
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+1 on gerrit. I miss the critique/ gerrit review workflow…
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somewhat similar to the concerns raised by the OP of Aux Name Enhancement, not using github will seriously hurt search engine discoverability of aux
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I know you mentioned codeberg but I’ve always personally had issues with them. And I didn’t need to go far I just opened the website and error.
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FWIW (which is not much), I will try to contribute actively to aux as long as there’s some way to contribute without needing a Microsoft (github) account.
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Having an opportunity for a fresh take on the tooling sphere is one of the biggest appeals to me of a fork.
I find it a weak take to define politics & community as priorities & then pick a status quo forge for SEO & free only as in gratis reasons. If you think munitions & martial law projects are bad for humanity, wait til you see the poverty & environmental destruction done the capitalist class who put their profits above all else. A lot of projects were caught holding the bag when Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018 since they already had their community centered around the proprietary platform along with other tooling that caused as soft lock-in but also now exposed all of their members to the ToS, data collection, & rules of a US-based, publicly-traded megacorporation. Some left, especially those with strong commitments to “free software” or adjacent movements, but many didn’t because folks underestimate how much work it is to leave your primary forge when you’ve already been committed to it.
Reasons to consider other forges:
- No (or at less) reliance on proprietary software
- Not causing a community schism between those who are fine with & those that are opposed to using proprietary software or supporting megacorporations
- Open or other otherwise ethical alternatives exist & are plentiful with a variety of levels of qualities as well as being better for performance & battery life
- Ability to actually contribute & help that open forge as issues arise
- Ability to self-host now or in the future
- Ability to define the community terms of services instead of also having to follow the rules set by Microsoft (including one account for physical person, etc.)
- Not subjecting all code, history, comments, & other discussions to Microsoft’s data collection & LLMs training
- Allows those in regions blocked under US sanctions to create accounts & use the service
- Ability to use the search feature & show collapsed comments without creating an account
- No ads or upselling in the UI
- Not locking the ability to follow specific pull request & issues to the account to follow (there are Atom feeds for other features, but not these)
- Not following the footsteps & process of Nix/Nixpkgs
- Maybe Git isn’t even the right tool for scaling which might explain the slow review process
I would hope for a more radical approach to define the beliefs of the project. For the LLM reasons, if a MS GitHub mirror had to exist, it should be read-only with disabled issues, pull requests, discussions, projects, wiki, & sponsorship (Microsoft takes a cut of this). Ideally even contributions to this project wouldn’t require creating an account with with Forgefed on the horizon, mailing lists, etc., but these can be tough problems to solve that shouldn’t get in the immediate way. Nixpkgs is the only real reason I still have an account & I would probably finally delete my Microsoft GitHub account if I could contribute to a project with the technical philosophy of Nix but could contribute somewhere where the tools align with my values.
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