Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.
Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.
The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.
The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.
And that’s where it breaks the rule of “Do One Thing Well”.
And while it’s super popular to spread and consume everything like a big sticky blob - oh hello, systemd - doing many things poorly (yes, we see you, systemd) needs a lot of diplomacy and help from others - hi, Kay - to keep the code flowing. It’s often not worth it, as we’ve seen but don’t want to admit … with systemd.
(if you’ll excuse me, I need to go change the location of the static nic config files and use a reader more complex than ‘.’ because the windows format is way better and I’m old if I think otherwise)