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POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 02 Feb 2018, 14:00
by Julius
EDIT: https://git.freegamedev.net

This one is a poll mainly for developers, but users very active in testing early releases or bug reporting can also vote.

We could set up one of the available web front-ends to a git repository here on FGD that would exclusively cater to open-source game developers.

The options are pretty much:
Gitlab CE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce (slightly cut down self-hosted version of the Gitlab.com service)
Gitea https://gitea.io/ (lightweight Github clone, not as "freemium" as Gitlab CE)

With current strong preferrence to Gitea (or Gogs, which is more or less the same), due much lower server requirements.
You can have a look at it's features here: https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/

Gitea demo: https://try.gitea.io/demo/test

Login could most likely be linked to the same as the forum, so all forum users could directly log into Gitea as well and submit issues or (if allowed) edit the wiki etc.

I also think this kind of repository with wiki is much preferable to our current "public" wiki, as wikis are always "owned" by someone and not just public waste-lands.

Note that due to server storage space limitation each individual account would probably be allocated only very limited space (5mb?). For officially hosted projects this could be increased of course, but I don't think FGD should become a file-hoster or the location to download large open-source games.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 02 Feb 2018, 15:54
by Lyberta
Deleted.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 02 Feb 2018, 19:32
by Julius
Lyberta {l Wrote}:I honestly don't know. I host my stuff on GitLab and contribute to other projects on GitLab and GitHub. I think some developers tend not to like to create a separate account to report a minor bug. That's why GitHub became so popular - because everyone uses it.


Yeah, that and it's convenient to look/search in one place only.

However Gitea easily allows logging in with your Github account also (through Oauth2) and I could imagine that a small repository of only open-source game related stuff could be nice as well.
A bit like what Charlie referred to when he suggested a easy to search and update repository of open-source games was his long term vision for FGD... just with a bit of a more developer centric twist if it is in fact a git repository.

But since Gitea pretty much looks and works like Github, people should be able to adjust quickly (less so with gitlab) and you can also set up a non-code repository like an "awesome" list or so.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 03 Feb 2018, 11:00
by Magellan
I would definitely use it! I would happily move my own small game projects over to a dedicated FOSS game repository, and would use it for future projects. I checked out the Gitea demo and it looks quite easy to use.

Julius {l Wrote}:However Gitea easily allows logging in with your Github account also (through Oauth2) and I could imagine that a small repository of only open-source game related stuff could be nice as well.


And this makes it even more attractive! :) All in all, I like this idea a lot.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 03 Feb 2018, 11:50
by farrer
Although I like the idea, the big problem here would be project's sizes... For example, the git repository for SuperTuxKart is ~250MB, even if their art repository is separated on a svn repository (with ~2GB). Some other projects (I'm guilty of this) use their git repository for media files too, being even more bigger (not the best practice, I agree, but it's a way of simplifying the work for keeping everything on one repository).

FGD server costs could increase quickly if the idea got any momentum... I don't have all "featured projects" checked out here to sum, but a good initial estimative would be to look how much storage space their repositories take...

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 03 Feb 2018, 13:42
by Julius
Yeah, that is also a bit of my concern. Currently the server I could run this on has 40GB total SSD storage, of which not all would be available of course. And while the hoster seems quite generous in regards to traffic use, they will throttle speed when a very high bandwidth is used for longer than 15 minutes.
It is relatively easy to get additional slower storage with this webhost (for example 250GB with 2.5TB traffic for 5€/month), but I can't see myself getting into file hosting for many larger projects, as this also entails the risk of illegal files being hosted etc. For a few individual well managed projects this could of course be a different story.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 04 Feb 2018, 13:37
by Lyberta
Deleted.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 04 Feb 2018, 13:51
by Julius
HDD space isn't the main issue (as I wrote it is not very expensive to get extra, and for a start the available 40GB will do I guess). The problem is rather that if we allow large file hosting people will start using it as their main distribution point which will quickly cause problems with server load & traffic limits as well as various maintenance issues (I would need to regularly check the repositories for what is hosted on them due to legal reasons).

These are not unsolvable issues of course, but it is a bit out of my league and interest to run as a hobby (which FGD is to me and the other admins here).

Maybe there is a way to link larger binary files to an external source within git, so that might be a solution.

But I also think that the code base for many projects really isn't that big if you store the art assets on a separate repository (which is technically preferable anyway). After all code is just text files, so I doubt most projects would run into space issues if they had lets say 30mb each? Not sure on that though...
Allowing a smaller volume quota per user makes a system much more manageable, as there is a implied barrier to hosting downloads for players from that service (or even automatic updating systems in the game) and the likeliness of illegal uploads is also much reduced as they tend to be larger in size.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 21 Feb 2018, 18:13
by Julius
Test installation of Gitea:
https://git.freegamedev.net/

Feel free to play around with it, but please don't upload huge files. User accounts and repositories will be wiped after some testing!

Edit: hmm... anyone got a tip how to implement a disk quota in git? Gitea itself doesn't seem to have that function which would kinda prohibit public use :(

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 24 Feb 2018, 05:13
by Julius
This is probably on hold until user disk quotas are implemented in Gitea or Gogs. Seems like it is on their roadmap though.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 05 Jun 2018, 15:08
by Julius
Looking into this again given recent news...

Another option would be Phabricator: https://www.phacility.com/

Anyone got experience with that? I actually have a bit more storage space on my php only host, so this would allow slightly bigger repositories.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 15 Jun 2018, 12:53
by Wuzzy
To all those who are using GitHub:

Please note this is (sadly) a proprietary platform which is unusable in various places without executing proprietary code (JavaScript).
It's a sick, sad irony that probably one of the biggest code hosting services for free software in the Internet is itself proprietary. GitHub has always been this way, long before Microsoft came.


So I think this project is a great idea, there are currently not that many options so far, so having some sort of “safe haven” is always good, even if it will be limited to smaller projects, it will still be a win.

Relevant read:
https://www.gnu.org/software/repo-criteria.html

Apart from all the criteria in C, A+5 is very important to me, too. I have no idea why it comes so late in the list. It should always be possible to download/backup/export your metadata (i.e. bug lists, etc.). That way, you are much less dependent on one particular service.

If storage size or traffic are a problem, you should probably clarify upfront what the expected hard limits are.

I'm not a huge fan of Gitea's Interface that much, it's clear from the web demo that is's a VERY faithful GitHub clone (I didn't like GitHub). They even cloned the reactions. But it's more or less acceptable and more just my personal taste, definitely NOT a deal-breaker. Gitea looks a bit broken when you disable JavaScript. I don't like websites which fail (even just partially) when you disable JavaScript, to me this is just lazy coding. At least Gitea documents all JavaScript licenses, that's good and kills my main criticism of GitHub.
On the other hand, Gitea is having a very simple interface.

Anyway, setting personal taste aside, I am generally in full support of cloning well-known proprietary software/platforms (no matter how “shameless” they clone stuff) to make re-learning less painful for users. :)

In comparison, GitLab seems much more heavyweight. So if I had to choose between GitLab and Gitea, I would favor Gitea.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 19 Jun 2018, 23:20
by gouessej
Hey

Thank you for mentioning Gitea. Instead of creating another centralized repository, why not providing some tutorials to help other developers to host their projects on their own servers? If you stick with the idea of creating your git repository, please document the way you do it so that other developers can do the same.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 20 Jun 2018, 01:02
by SecureUvula
I'm running Gogs myself, but I'm behind Tor so other people would need to use Tor, or a proxy like onion.to to see my repos. If FGD had a central repo I would just use that as another push destination.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 15 Jul 2018, 00:55
by Julius
gouessej {l Wrote}:Instead of creating another centralized repository, why not providing some tutorials to help other developers to host their projects on their own servers? If you stick with the idea of creating your git repository, please document the way you do it so that other developers can do the same.


The thing is... unless the current experiments to implement a federated issue tracking software go somewhere (see discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17288727 ), a somewhat centralized repository is much nicer from a user perspective as you can easily create issues, comment and submit patches without going though the hassle of creating yet another account and checking different platforms all the time. There is after all a reason Microsoft paid all that money for Github ;)

Gitea is really easy to set up, so I don't see how us writing another tutorial for it would help. It literally took me less than 10 minutes to get the instance mentioned above running (although I have to admit I already have a nice Docker based VPS set up).

Anyways... this is still in my plans and I would really like to offer some place for Github refugees, but without some sort of disk quota system it is quite a pain to run even a semi-public service. The relevant Github issue for it can be found here: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/3658

I also checked the other possible options, but Gitea is really the most convenient and lightweight. Gitlab CE is of course also nice (see for example https://framagit.org/ for a nice public instance), but the disk-quota feature is only part of their paid enterprise version.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 04 Aug 2018, 18:14
by Julius
Kind of a personal reminder, but maybe interesting to others:

Fossil SCM seems like an interesting lightweight alternative that can import from Git but includes issues tracking and a wiki etc:
https://www.fossil-scm.org/

There is also work being done to have a federalized issue tracking and merge-request system based on XMPP, see:
https://www.goffi.org/b/F4xScokjZejCYAB ... based-xmpp
(But IMHO a system based on ActivityPub might see broader adaption, see: https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed )

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 30 Dec 2018, 18:42
by Julius
After contemplating this for a longer while (and since there doesn't seem to be a fully convincing federated solution coming soon) I think a system that takes over issue tracking and adds nice functionality like notifications to XMPP etc is actually the better solution. You can switch the git code repository easily but the bugtracking and other community features are not so easy to move. Currenty I think Kanboard.org (with a nicer custom skin) might be a suitable solution that integrates well with other services.

Other ideas/suggestions?

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 01 Jan 2019, 14:04
by charlie
Kanboard looks pretty interesting.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 05 Jan 2019, 15:26
by Julius
Got Kanboard running (https://kanboard.freegamedev.net/ but there is no registration enabled yet... the Oauth2 option will hopefully work in the future). Integration with Github is great (you can manage the issues from within Kanboard it seems). There is also integration with Gitlab, Bitbucket and Gogs/Gitea that allows interacting with these services through webhooks.

There is also a lot of cool notification options for integrating it with chat services. XMPP my preferred option, but there is more or less everything (Mattermost, Slack, Rocketchat etc.). Through the XMPP Biboumi bridge IRC will also be possible I guess. And Matrix will soon have a XMPP bridge as well (although I would not be surprised if Kanboard had a Matrix.org plugin as well see: https://github.com/andrewshadura/kanboard-plugin-matrix).

I hope someone will implement the project activity streams to allow public ActivityPub federation (e.g. to subscribe to a project's changes though Mastodon or our own Hubzilla). Voice you support or offer to help implementing it here: https://kanboard.discourse.group/t/fede ... vitypub/85

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 05 Mar 2019, 01:40
by Jastiv
We do need to do something about the wiki. Its terrible to try to contribute to it, and last time I tried, I just gave up. I don't know if git would fix that, but any kind of decent data base and better way to find usable open source games is needed. I also want to know how active the project is, as in how many people contributed in the past month or year and how often, and a way to sort projects by that. I don't want to sort through empty repositories where someone just opened up a project and it doesn't have any files, or it has files, but it won't compile or is missing source etc. You can either go to wiki's like this one to find open source games, or the "hard" way to searching through repositories from sites like gitlab or github or worse yet random internet message forums.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 25 Apr 2019, 10:29
by Julius
I am reconsidering hosting an Gitea instance, as I got a good offer for a root server with more storage space (that also allows easy extension and upgrade without having to set up everything again).

Also given the recent new EU legislation that gives certain leeway to open-source code hosting systems, it might be good to have that as a line of legal defence in case that should ever be needed.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 27 Apr 2019, 20:06
by Julius
https://git.freegamedev.net/
(Registration still disabled)

Gitea is really nice and low resource use. Lots of nice improvements with the new version 1.8 as well.

Is there a need for SSH access? For now it is disabled.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 27 Apr 2019, 20:46
by fluffrabbit
SSH should be useful if you're routing through I2P etc.

EDIT: That would be redundant. I know it must be useful for something, but I just woke up and haven't had my coffee yet.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 07 May 2019, 15:11
by Julius
I enabled user registrations. Sign up here:
https://git.freegamedev.net/user/sign_up

You can easily create a new repository, or mirror one from Github or Gitlab etc.

I still need to figure out why federated sign in with OIDC gives me an error, but soon you will also be able to register and log in with your Github, GitLAB etc. accounts. I am also optimistic that it will work with our own Hubzilla or Mattermost accounts soon after.

I left creations of organizations and teams open for now, but I will probably prune abandoned ones quite regularly and might disable it in the future if we get too much mess in that regard.

Re: POLL: Would a FGD git repository be of use for you?

PostPosted: 07 May 2019, 15:13
by Julius
Works great with the GitNex Android Client by the way: https://gitnex.com/