Comment by jmpavlec
1 year ago
The tag line isn't the most informative. It took me a scroll or two on the main page to figure out its purpose. (Self hosted GitHub alternative). I'd suggest making that clearer earlier as the word "forge" in terms of software could have a variety of interpretations.
"forge" has been used since "sourceforge" if not longer to describe these kind of hosting-packages.
I guess technically you could have called Redmine, and other systems at the time, forges I think the term took off after that.
The only time I ever see Sourceforge mentioned is in advertisements on /.. I think most young developers today have no idea what it is, if they even know what /. is.
Young developers are still learning the ropes :)
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I used to use libraries that were hosted on sourceforge and I did not get the connection.
You can’t even rely on young devs to get Monty Python jokes anymore. Referring to a website that went away when jr devs were ten is a bad plan.
You’re old, dudes.
Disagree. Refering to GitHub as category-defining would be antithetical to the Forgejo spirit. Forgejo stands on its own.
Disagree. Unfortunately Forge is not a well known category defining term. Using it as a tagline defying the purposes to popularize Forgego.
Yet when posts online described it as an alternative/clone of GitHub/gitlab/gitea it was alsa received with criticism and complains that "what if I don't know what gitea is".
Naming and creating descriptions is not trivial, I wish more complaints would also simply come with proposals of better taglines, so we can bash those ideas quickly in comments and cut that long feedback loop.
Disagree. SourceForge was established in 1999. The term "software forge" was in widespread use, until Github started gaining mainstream attention. But the term "hub" doesn't necessarily always refer to the same thing - e.g. certain adult entertainment website is also using it.
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Defining itself as simply an alternative to the mainstream is a not a great way to makes its own identity.
Imagine if Fedora presented itself as simply “an open source alternative to windows”.
Sure, that might be easier to understand for those less in the field, but really doesn’t help it’s own identity.
Forgejo is a GitHub clone. No one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
Why Github and not Bitbucket?
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Many of us remember life before Github, and web UIs for other version control systems existed before Git. Github is just a Trac clone and no one can claim with a straight face that it's somehow completely unrelated.
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And then all software revision control systems / forges have more or less the same conceptual model for their platform, and just adding their specific sauce and some tailoring to specific needs. Some more innovative and deviating platforms from this more-of-the-same approach are Sourcehut (brutal minimalism) and Gitlab (enterprise dev lifecycle, process support). And then there's the general trend for these platforms to become one-stop-shop maximized lock-in walled gardens, aiming to support the entirety of software development practices (while they seem open and gratis).
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Calling it a software forge is the correct form. Even if the term isn't that well known. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)
It’s clearly a self hosted GitHub alternative and that’s IMO the way to talk about it. And per other comments, it’s obviously this once you start using it - it’s basically the GitHub interface and it’s great that it is - it’s very familiar and easy to use
Thank you. I was trying to figure out what "forge" meant here.
When I think "forge", I think a tool to turn a raw material into finished product. Ergo, the blacksmith tool that turns iron into a horseshoe.
The software analogy would be turning text source code into a runable binary. Ergo, a compiler or an interpreter.
Github and SourceForge move source code from one place to another. To overextend the analogy, they are more like a combination shop/delivery service. Source code is moved but never altered or transformed.
Long story short, this crusty C/C++ dev thinks forge is a really weird term for a self-hosted, sugar-crusted Git server.