As a longtime provider of services in one form or another since the late 80's and early 90's, I felt the pain of having to write out the following blog post/update.
Drew is an opinionated perfectionist with an attention to detail and his perspective that chafes some, endears others, and deservedly, receives the respect earned when someone strives toward par excellence for those for whom they provide services for.
I have some differing set of conclusions from my understanding of what he laments as the ordeal he's been through in the past year, like, "why would anyone consider a carrier besides DHL for international overseas shipments?" Also, I fail to see the logic in moving his entire infra from the U.S. (where there are many affordable top-tier carrier hotels - aka datacenters) to Amsterdam, which also has fine facilities and maybe it is because of privacy concerns which depending on what those are, may indeed be quite valid from my perspective.
But not having IPv6 fully deployed (as a result of datacenter choice?) is puzzling, although almost inconsequential operationally, in production, ... Almost.
Considering I've always looked directly at the carriers themselves, used my own delegated IP infrastructure for core operations, I tend to look at a datacenter as three things:
Electricity
Fail-over electricity (Generators)
Air conditioning
Most folks rent a rack that comes with transit, I ask how much the XC is - I can find, mix, and pick my transit providers. I just wanna know that my shit is secure in a suite or cage behind locked cabinets that I personally have 24/7 access to at anytime (even though I'll rarely do so) and have 24/7 remote hands to swap drives, hot-pluggable power supplies and plug cables into the designated ports I specify, etc. Those things typically come w/zero cost.
For DDoS'ing, I do like to outsource this as part of a package, and I'm open to any offers of included transit/XC and want to know how much each additional 20A of electricity cost me each month in addition to the rack fees. Putting the onerous of protecting my customers from a good DDoS'ing on someone else like my upstream takes a lot of worry away.
Shipping machinery though, that's a bit distinct too, I've been burned a few times domestically, although always recovered my *tangible costs - time? well, I've lost a couple of customers because their infra was lost or damaged in transit, but insurance is important - Drew had that. What I'm really wondering though, is who besides DHL would you even trust to ship servers over the Atlantic Ocean?
That's a cost I would not consider skimping on - A girl I almost married worked for DHL for over 20 years and they'll cut a check at the drop of a hat, which might have worked out well for Drew considering these were old boxes ready for retirement anyway and the replacement cost (new stuffs) is what you insure for.
Anyway, I've really admired much of what Drew has done over the years, was cheerleading for him as he migrated from full time paycheck person to finally being able to announce that he "thinks" he can make enough money for a living by devoting himself full time to FOSS with his fledgling SourceHut.
Yah, sometimes his head swelled up pretty big, making it hard to fit through doorways, and I've butted heads with him here and there on technical matters only, but have always respected him, and in truth, he was never not correct even if his way was the wrong way, or there was simply a better way - usually those were matters of opinion coz there's more than six ways to Sunday to skin a cat.
Anyway, he's been kicked in the balls really hard, which if you know much of him, must have been really hard to lay all of that out in some manner of detail (He's almost always brutally transparent). For that, and moreover for getting right back up after being knocked down (maybe by da man?), I applaud his candidness. His devotion to those of you reading this that may have free repos at SourceHut, and I'm also encouraging everyone to kick in at least a few bucks - fuck that dumb app that you don't need, let alone pay $2.95 for the exclusive right to be tracked - I urge you with all FOSSiness in mind... Give it a read, and send him whatev, ... I guarantee it will come back to you tenfold.
Drew is a consummate FOSS warrior, do it for yourself, please - Five bucks, fifty bucks, heck, whatever isn't going to cut into your budget for porterhouse steak this weekend would be nice.
And it will make you feel good too.
Full disclosure: I'm not getting shit from this article. Drew and I only converse occasionally and usually it is to disagree - some folks are just good coz of what's in their heart, their commitment to the community, and whether you're a fan or not doing this for him really is doing this for yourself and everyone else in the FOSS world.
Since I linked to a repo on code.driusan.net I finally got around to writing a blog post about my distributed bug tracker / source code manager that it's based on.
I was going to write it after I got my rust port up to parity with the original #plan9 version, but I screwed up my laptop's hard drive and lost the rust port (it turns out refusing to put it offsite with git because I wanted to be sure I was dogfooding my scm wasn't a great idea.) so I'm just writing the post now.
@driusan I have always wondered why any service needs to do anything more than support self-sovereign identity (OpenID, PGP, even e-mail like #Sourcehut does).
debugging tests that fail only in #gitlab#ci is the worst... #sourcehut absolutely has it right by allowing you to SSH into a runner that failed a job.
We're looking for some new maintainers to join the org 👀
Our GTK port is currently minimally maintained, due mostly to our reliance on the Colloid theme as our base.
We'd ideally use a more flexible base, or write the theme from scratch. This means we'd welcome maintainers who have pre-existing knowledge with GTK theming.
@catppuccin#SourceHut is free software and has CI capabilities. Discussions in email have worked fine for decades, and still works for quite large projects.
As for real-time chat, #IRC still exists, and doesn't even need me to register an account to ask a question. There's plenty of good webclients to keep the barrier lower than Discord could ever do. Creating a bot for IRC is perhaps one of the easier tasks an aspiring programmer could work on. I have no clue what "forum channels" are supposed to be, but I'm quite certain it is not a required feature to develop software.
It seems incredibly bad faith to pretend these things don't exist or aren't known about.
BTW, we went "the hard way" and picked the sourcehut todo service as a bug tracker and project management tool for RDE, Ares, Arei and neighboring projects.
It's very bare-bone, but we could implement cross-project milestones via labels, it's already have basic filtering and searching and integrates nicely with email and git.
Will be developing the rest of the functionality as we go. Probably via API or by upstreaming patches to sourcehut.
> Alternative search engines are neat, as are RSS feeds. OpenOrb is a self-hosted app which allows visitors to search over a list of blogs you love. If you put your 10 favourite blogs in there, it'll search just those blogs and not show you any sponsored content or machine-generated garbage.
I'm thinking again about moving from #github to #sourcehut. I firmly believe in paying fair prices for services that don't invade my privacy. My private repos stay inside my home network on a #gitolite server. I don't use GitHub Actions. Issues and projects are handy but I can use other task tracking systems. I'd probably keep my GitHub account to follow other projects/discussions and for single sign-on needs.
If you've moved your personal code from GitHub to sourcehut, is there anything you regret or would warn others about?
between codeberg, sourcehut, and disroot, and ecosystem of stuff-that-isn't-github is just so good. different service providers fitting different niches, all backed by some good software and lovely people. i hope they're all able to keep it up!!!
@jacqueline I was interested in trying out #Radicle, but after a good two hours reading docs and trying to figure out their decentralization model I'm just more confused than when I started. Plus, call it superstitious, but any project that embraces .eth is a project I'm fine staying away from.
I'll just self-host #sourcehut and call it a day. Figuring out how git-email works will be my next project.
how likely is it that #sourcehut will add a web-interface for pull requests resembling that of "all the other" forges within six months?
how likely is it that a web based text editor will be added within that time frame?
(please do not explain the email workflow or why it is superior, this question is about how high the entry barrier will remain for non devs). @drewdevault
Been evaluating #sourcehut, and noticed that the service uses git send-email rather than pull requests like other git services. I’m reading why this article by @martijnbraam
I’m seeing talk of force-pushing after opening a PR. Why force-push after a PR is opened? Are y’all trying to undo/edit commits? Cause that seems like just bad practice to me. If so, why aren’t you just squash merging? Maybe I’m missing something here.
Maybe I just don’t get it, but seems to me, using email to submit patches, and using an email client to correspond with other developers is a massive step backwards in terms of UX.
Perhaps once I set up my email client “properly” I’ll love this flow too. But I’m highly skeptical that all hopping between different programs and CLI tools is a better UX.
A good reason to not like #gitlab is there use of #cloudflare. With my #firefox and its cookie settings and blockers I can't log in, because cloudflare can't check the "security of my connection".
The git-send-email workflow (as implemented on #sourcehut) is often said to be harder than the github/gitlab "clic-to-PR" workflow.
Teaching open source using an inhouse gitlab, I often refuse pull-requests because students have wrongly merged and are modifying the whole repository. This happens often.
Sending patches by email, you immediately spot mistakes (well, you don’t make them at all).
Yes, you need to learn git-send-email but it saves everyone so much time!
@penryu was migrating my public repos to codeberg. they seem nice/ also took all my private repos down and maybe next week, will try hosting #sourcehut on a pi
Inspiré par la mise hors-ligne de #sourcehut, l’hébergeur de mon blog, une réflexion sur la pérennité d’une présence en ligne, le tout en lançant l’année des 20 ans de mon blog:
I've updated the Modern Tools list to include another new take on top - glances - as well as hwatch and viddy, two new takes on the venerable watch. I've also deprecated exa references in favor of eza, as exa was forked and abandoned some time ago (I'm told) and eza is where the community is these days.
Somewhere in this world, there’s someone remotely controlling a huge amount of infected computers/iot devices and who decided, for unknown reason, that they should all permanently try to access #sourcehut .
The attack is so important that even the datacenter hosting #sourcehut was unable to handle it, which prompted an urgent move to a new one, in Europa. But the attack followed and the new datacenter is also on his knees.