Subject: [bug#76503] [GCD] Migrating repositories, issues, and patches to Codeberg

From: Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2025 08:37:02 +0100

Hi everyone,

A few comments which I will prefix with a summary of my own perspective:

 1. I am an occasional contributor to Guix, contributing mainly packages
    that I make for my own needs and wish to share.

 2. I am a voting member of Codeberg e.V., because I believe that
    Codeberg and its Forĝejo project are a step in the right direction,
    which I see as transitioning forges from platforms to services
    that don't "own" projects, nor user accounts.

Overall, I am very favorable to moving to a forge because of point 1. I
don't see anything objectively wrong or bad about the current e-mail
workflow, but for an occasional (or new) contributor its hard to become
fluent with it. In contrast, forges are becoming standard even for many
non-coders.

I won't comment on topics I am ignorant about, in particular the storage
debate. Nor much on other points that I think can be solved in
collaboration with the Codeberg team, e.g. the LibreJS issues.

That leaves the problem of becoming dependent on a platform, which
implies that all contributors must create an account and accepts terms
of services, and that, at least in theory, the platform owners can do
harm to the project.

As I said above, the long-term goal should, in my opinion, be forges as
services, much like e-mail servers. Projects bring their own domain,
terms of services, etc., and pay a service provider for keeping the
servers running, retaining the option of switching service providers. We
don't have this possibility right now, but the federation approach of
Forĝejo makes it look reachable in a small-integer number of years.

For me, moving to Codeberg is a stepping stone towards this goal. It
looks like Guix would be their larges project, meaning that we would
have a lot of influence on how Codeberg and Forĝejo will evolve towards
serving projects like ours. I see that as an opportunity.

As for the current terms of services, I have personally no issues with
them. Any set of written rules leaves a potential for abuse, so I am not
a fan of overinterpreting written rules. I'd rather look at how the
rules are applied, and from that perspective, I am not aware of any
project having had issues with Codeberg.org.

Cheers,
  Konrad.