Comment by jbstack
3 months ago
Suggestion: improve the opening summary paragraph:
"Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow."
From this, I can't tell how it's any different to just plain self-hosted Git. A well written introduction should tell the reader immediately what the software actually does. If it's meant to be an alternative to something like gitea / forgejo then say that, with a brief summary of features that build on top of Git.
Reading the intro, I feel like I got a good hint about what this is. It sounded like "local first git for teams, without the hell of sharing patches via email".
I don't know what gitea or forgejo are, so comparisons wouldn't help me.
The other day someone here coined JTPP - "Just the prompt, please", expressing preference for reading the prompt instead of the e-mail/article it produced. The reasons for that are rather obvious, but I think it applies to marketing copy in general.
With that in mind, I wonder what the original idea behind this project was - the "prompt" that someone got in their mind, which got them excited enough to build this. Reading the "original prompt" might make it easier to figure the product out. Marketing copy is "how we can make what we have look more alluring to people". The "original prompt" is directly answering "what we actually aspired to build".
"make a thing that works like github but doesn't need github or email"
I wrote that as a joke but now that I'm reading it... even a terrible prompt might be useful.
1 reply →
P2P Github
In case anyone is reading this and is merely looking for "local first git for teams, without the hell of sharing patches via email", the solution to this is to establish an empty repository (git init --bare --shared=group) in any mountable shared storage you have, and then setting that repository as the remote for your local branches.
I can tell you. Forgejo is a git server (i.e. you can push to a remove that lives in a different machine) plus a web GUI that allows to list repos, list commits within a repo, navigate commits and files within a commit.
The license is Free and Copyleft.
You still have to run it on a server somewhere, which Nintendo can get shut down.
14 replies →
The existing summary is great. It uses git in the first sentence. Meanwhile forjo's landing page seems to be activly avoiding the words git and source control leaving it a cryptic mess.
AD: Feel free to take a stab at an alternative, we're an open source project and we accept and welcome discussions but patches more so! What would read better in your opinion?
it reads fine to me
> What would read better in your opinion?
You're asking someone else to describe what your project is doing?
The lack of good description isn't unique, I've bee skipping more and more of those lately, but asking others to tell the developers what they've developed is new in my book.
Sometimes when you’re close to something it’s very hard to describe it because you’ve been looking at it from all angles for so long that when someone else approaches it from a different direction it’s hard to see what blind spots they might have. It’s not crazy to ask people for input and it’s not crazy to say “we’re open to patches if you just want to do it yourself”.
For me personally I was (and still am a bit) unclear on what being “based on git” means. Can I just rebase with abandon? Is there a concept of force push? Can I safely use lazy-git, tig, commit-patch, and other git utilities? Or is it more integrated and i have to use the rad cli to avoid corrupting the git repo? What about the issues? If I write some software and publish it with radicle, is there a way for plain git client to clone the repo without installing radicle (and without keeping a plain git mirror somewhere)?
no, it's a distributed peer-to-peer alternative to something like github. it has all the features like a locally hosted forgejo/gitea/gitlab, but it also is built on a distributed and fault-tolerant peer-to-peer network for hosting public projects.
I looked at the page and my understanding was that this is a decentralized github. Teams can collaborate without a company getting access to the code?
Unless something's changed since last I checked it out, it's git "on the blockchain." Including its own RAD-coin token.
Edit: removed snarky line.
I don't know about previous versions, but afaik since the release of the current heartwood implementation it is neither based on a blockchain nor does it include any "crypto" stuff. If it did, I probably wouldn't be using it.
A lot has changed. But also you must've checked it quite some time ago. It's not on the blockchain anymore since the "heartwood" iteration, which was announced 2023-04-18. Please take some time to re-inform yourself, even just in this HN thread (search for "RAD ", the whitespace is significant).
Glad to hear it.