Comment by miki123211
17 hours ago
I don't think we need a federation of forges. What we need instead is just richer git repos.
Fossil gets 90% there with integrating tickets (issues), forums and wikis as part of the repo itself. When you clone a fossil repo, those are also part of the clone, and can be browsed offline on an airplane. Replies can also be written offline and, permissions willing, synced back up to the remote, either immediately or when the internet connection is regained.
I think this is the direction we should go in, but without hardcoding any specific artifact kind as part of the VCS. Instead, repos should be able to contain apps, which would define policies on what artifacts are acceptable, what rules they must follow, and who's allowed to upload and download them and at what times. The job of the forge would then be to execute those policies and render the artifacts for web users in whatever way the app desires.
With such a setup, moving to a different forge would entail nothing more than pushing the repo there.
Hey, so... Thanks for this. I've been building ticket systems and agents and whatever else as flat files in git repos lately and now I see I have to extend that to actually managing the repos themselves.
This is going to be so nice.
I think this idea is additive not contrary.
I still would like to be able to send and receive issues and pull-requests, to/from anyone.
Your idea here seems to be about how to encode the data. You talk about web interfaces & who is allowed to do what. But it's not clear to me how my repo/forge gets my PR in front of you. The social networking technology feels like it has to come into play somewhere, and I don't see that as described in your system.