FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg

by whataguy • 11 months ago

364 304 11 months ago

code.ffmpeg.org

ec109685• 11 months ago

Why did it move to Forgejo?

They were using an old fashioned mailing list to pass patches around, I would imagine features like pull requests and issue tracking made forgejo an attractive option

kjeldsendk• 11 months ago

The list seems long? https://forgejo.org/

dsissitka• 11 months ago

It sounds like they're still testing but there's this from https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346938.h...:

  ### July 22nd, 2025, Modernization of contributions
  
  The project is modernizing its contribution methods and switching to a software
  forge.
  
  We have setup a platform on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/). The new
  process features continuous integration on all commits and merge requests,
  labelling for categorization, conflict resolution, and logging in via OpenID or
  Github.
  
  The main repository will become
  [code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg](https://code.ffmpeg.org/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), with all
  others being mirrored to it. Users are encouraged to begin using it, effective
  now.
  
  Mailing lists have supported our development for nearly 25 years, but as more
  and more contributors started to become involved, the ratio of merged patches to
  total mails begun falling. Mailing lists became a source of friction, with
  discussions frequently stalling and uncategorized noise drowning out patches by
  bumping them down in inboxes.
  
  Although [patchwork.ffmpeg.org](https://patch.ffmpeg.org/) was set up to track
  submissions, it was less than reliable, with many patches and mails slipping
  though. Since its activation exactly 9 years ago, it recorded 54,476 patches,
  with 53,650 patches having the state of not archived. In comparison, the mailing
  list has had a total of 150,736 emails during the same time period.
  
  Additionally, new users have frequently encountered difficulties with mailing
  list development. From finding out the correct SMTP login details, configuring
  git send-email, new email security mechanisms interfering with mailing list
  operations, and finally not having a comfortable workflow to review patches.
  
  After years of discussions, and a vote, we officially announce the new platform,
  [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/), running
  [Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/). Documentation will be updated to reflect the
  change.
  
  Mailing lists will continue to be monitored, and used for project discussions
  and other topics better discussed elsewhere, but traffic and noise should become
  significantly reduced over time.
  
  Bugs/issues will be accepted on [code.ffmpeg.org](https://code.ffmpeg.org/),
  alongside with [trac.ffmpeg.org](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/) for the time being.
  
  We are also hoping that this will significantly reduce the amount of unmerged
  patches. If you submitted a patch which received no replies or conclusion, we
  apologize, and you are encouraged to resubmit it on the new platform.

joshbaptiste2• 11 months ago

Main link should point to this ...

rs1862• 11 months ago

I wish a certain open source project would take notice of the reasoning here...

bhaney4• 11 months ago

I'm finding out about Forgejo (and their reasons for forking Gitea) right now for the first time. I already migrated my Gogs install to Gitea, and now I have to migrate Gitea to Forgejo? This shit is why people just stay on Github.

bigfishrunning2• 11 months ago

Why would you have to migrate? If you're happy with Gitea just stay there.

bhaney4• 11 months ago

According to Forgejo[1], Gitea underwent a secret hostile takeover by a for-profit company and has been moving from free software to "open core" bullshit. The reason that I, and I assume a lot of other people, made an effort to switch from Github to Gogs/Gitea was to evade the for-profit corpo nonfree crap. The more I'm looking into it, the more it looks like the real development is happening on Forgejo too.

[1] https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/#why-was-forgejo-create...

Incipient• 11 months ago

I use gitea and it "just works". I'm definitely not going anywhere.

stepupmakeup• 11 months ago

All 3 are still under active development.

homebrewer4• 11 months ago

We've been using gitea for 6 years, and I see no reason to migrate anywhere at this moment. Gitea sees faster development and has more features (even though many patches flow to Forgejo — the reverse is impossible due to license restrictions).

It is possible to migrate from 1.22 to Forgejo simply by changing the binary, and downgrading from 1.24 to 1.23, and from 1.23 to 1.22 is possible if you know your way around PostgreSQL and have a spare hour. I always write downgrade scripts for each release and test them before upgrading Gitea to make sure that I can always back out and move to Forgejo if Gitea folds. Haven't seen much reason to do it up to this moment, though.

edit: for example, here's a 1.23 → 1.22 downgrade script; I don't have access to 1.24 → 1.23 atm:

https://paste.debian.net/plainh/7d8cab27

tap-snap-or-nap• 11 months ago

It's very likely not so different in function and performance for users and better suit their dev needs than what you may be used to.

joshbaptiste2• 11 months ago

Why leave Gitea just because an alternative exists..

mgraczyk• 11 months ago

The site doesn't load any css for me on mobile, is it really worth it not to use GitHub or gitlab?

DeepYogurt• 11 months ago

It's pretty good on desktop. Report the bug and I'm sure they'll get to it

bhaney4• 11 months ago

The CSS bug happened to me on desktop too (but went away after a refresh). It looks related to Anubis since the reason the stylesheet isn't applying is that it has HTML containing "<title>Making sure you're not a bot!</title>" prepended to it.

asveikau• 11 months ago

I had that issue after it "verified I'm a human", I refreshed and it looked fine.

bastawhiz• 11 months ago

I have refreshed a few times and the styles still aren't loading

exikyut• 11 months ago

How fascinating, the exact same thing happened to me!

sergiotapia2• 11 months ago

How exactly does mailing list contributions work? I've only ever seen a few urls of messages but they are extremely obtuse. You would need to click parent parent parent to get context on the message you originally read.

I must be missing something and since mailing lists are dying, would love to understand this relic of the past.

homebrewer4• 11 months ago

You're supposed to use a proper email client which solves this problem. Sourcehut uses the email contribution workflow and has the documentation to support it; have a look at it:

https://man.sr.ht/git.sr.ht/#sending-patches-upstream

https://git-send-email.io/

https://git-am.io/

sergiotapia2• 11 months ago

Thanks for the links!

Seems you have to remember what -v you are sending as you respond to feedback. Pretty troublesome... Glad ffmpeg is moving to a more modern solution.

necovek5• 11 months ago

Linux kernel today is still managed with patches on the mailing list. It shouldn't be hard to see how this can be extremely effective for a maintainer running a programmable editor like Emacs or Vim.

Aurornis9• 11 months ago

The web view is meant to be the publicly searchable archive, not the primary interface. Developers are supposed to use an email client and git integrations. You can follow a number of different guides to get set up to contribute but it’s not actually easy to use the workflows.

To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved. One of the main objections to moving to hosted platforms like GitHub or Forgejo is from people who worry it will result in a lot of low quality PRs that have to be dealt with. I’m not suggesting I agree, but it comes up a lot.

skydhash2• 11 months ago

To be honest I think the difficult and learning curve is part of the goal. The people who operate in these worlds don’t want it to be easy for anyone to come along and get involved.

If you’re using the git tool, it’s very easy to get it working and easier to use afterwards. It allows you to use you own environment and not someone else’ web app. If you’re the maintainer, people send you patch and you can script out the review phase. If you’re a contributor, it’s actually a few command to send a patch to anyone. And learning how to cleanup your commits is always good.

I can understand the pain if your only email account is gmail. But there are good smtp providers out there.

0xbadcafebee2• 11 months ago

Simple: you don't use the browser at all. You download the source code via your VCS client. You find the thing you want to change, make a branch, modify it, generate a patch. You email the list with your patch and a very detailed description of what you're doing and why. Lots of people reply, and your email client shows you the threads hierarchically. It makes sense to you because you started the whole conversation and see their in-line replies in your email client.

As an old fogey who started with mailing lists, and still uses them to send patches, it's actually much simpler than browser-based workflows. Most of it is your own workflow in your own repo clone in your own environment. The patch and email threads are a universal abstraction; you add the rest yourself, with any method you're familiar with. This removes any complexity that would otherwise be imposed by the browser, remote web app, etc. It's like sending someone a letter in the mail, rather than choosing between 15 different messaging systems, protocols, apps, OSes, etc. If you can read words you can figure out your own way to deal with the contents.

And as far as it dying out: I actually think it's faster to communicate via mailing list. The thing a GitHub clone gets you is co-located collaboration, and CI tests. Those things are very powerful, and really should be integrated into a single open source standard, rather than a lot of custom web apps. But the modern software developer doesn't understand the value of standards.

shmerl• 11 months ago

Congrats! I was waiting for them to start using a decent bug tracker.

mmaunder• 11 months ago

Why not GitHub?

mrcsharp• 11 months ago

Does it make a difference? More alternatives to Github is a good thing and alternatives mean nothing if no one is using them.

frollogaston• 11 months ago

It's impressive how much GitHub dominates with so little lock-in. It's so easy to add a new git remote. Yeah GitHub has its own features too, but for a long time free private repo wasn't one of them.

jazzyjackson• 11 months ago

official reasoning is posted elsewhere, but GitHub means you rely on Microsoft.

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea which is a clone of Github.

arcastroe• 11 months ago

Forgejo is a fork of Gitea, which is a fork of Gogs, which is a clone of Github

xeonmc• 11 months ago

Oh boy do I have some recent news for you…

crabmusket• 11 months ago

Why GitHub?

esperent2• 11 months ago

Opening this site I get "Oh Noes! Invalid Response" with an anime girl.

Tried refreshing, opening in a private windows, same thing.

EDIT: tried it again and got to "Making sure you're not a bot" with the same cringey anime girl, then the site loaded without CSS. Tried one more time, finally it loaded.

EDIT 2: clicked on a link and I'm back to "Oh Noes!...".

ericbarrett3• 11 months ago

That is Anubis trying to get your browser to do proof of work: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

zakki• 11 months ago

So AI made human browsing inconvenient?

bobajeff• 11 months ago

Thanks, I found out I had to disable Brave's protection to get it to let me past.

Aurornis9• 11 months ago

That’s the anubis anti-bot mechanism.

I understand where they’re coming from with all the choices made, but honestly I suspect the anubis anime girl and associated sporadic failures (that I’ve seen, too, despite having a rather standard environment) functioning as a filtering mechanism that attracts a certain in-crowd person and makes a lot of others uninterested in staying around, and I think that’s intentional.

mhitza• 11 months ago

I'm also locked out with the same message. Might be a setup failure as I didn't encounter this issue on other websites using that PoW page.

dinkleberg• 11 months ago

I can't get past the gate on my Linux workstation. But on my Mac, using the same browser with the same extensions, it works fine.

m4rtink2• 11 months ago

I think Anubis is cute. ;-)

account4225• 11 months ago

Welcome to the bright future where open source projects happily put DRM on their websites. Yay!

setheron• 11 months ago

Dunno why but lately I can't visit any Anubis protected websites from my phone (Android).

Just says Invalid Response :(

kiwijamo• 11 months ago

I can access it ok on Firefox on Android FWIW.

ipaddr• 11 months ago

Not sure how that helps the parent commenter.

ericbarrett3• 11 months ago

Did you block cookies?

Dwedit• 11 months ago

Meanwhile, my phone is a potato that is slow to actually solve the proof of work challenges.

eviks4• 11 months ago

So now you have to see some anime flash instead of just having the website open?

KingMob• 11 months ago

It's a new anti-bot mechanism that uses in-browser proof-of-work.

eviks4• 11 months ago

That explains the delay, not the flash

reactordev• 11 months ago

What's with the anime girl? I couldn't get past her. Is that a Fargejo thing?

rice7th3• 11 months ago

That's anubis, an anti web crawler tool [0]

[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

nozzlegear3• 11 months ago

Why is the anubis mascot an anime girl?

elric3• 11 months ago

Not a very good one, given the apparently large number of complaints by presumably legitimate users in this thread.

Seems like it doesn't like users who take privacy enhancing measures.

crote• 11 months ago

It's Anubis[0], an AI crawler blocker.

[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

userbinator5• 11 months ago

s/AI crawler/non-Big Browser/

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

With the calm, respectful understanding that everything is subjective and there's no accounting for taste -

and in my personal capacity -

I do not understand how cutesy anime characters have been deemed sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne enough to be displayed to literally every single person who visits my site.

With apologies to fans of the art style, it is a negative signal to me. I do not prefer to use Cloudflare for things like this, but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

overboard2• 11 months ago

I for one don't see anything wrong with anime characters, though I suppose neither of us are likely to change our minds.

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

"sufficiently tasteful/professional/anodyne" != "wrong"

c0balt• 11 months ago

but I would not use Anubis unless I could disable the imagery, and every time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

They do offer an unbranded version, botstopper. It is part of their commercial offering [0] and intended for "professional" environments

[0] https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

Can't fault the logic. Will never use it if that's part of what they've chosen to paywall.

account4225• 11 months ago

IMO this makes it even worse - not only are FOSS projects now happily putting DRM on their websites, they also add ads for a commercial service.

clickety_clack• 11 months ago

I respect the expression of individual taste, but it suggests strongly that the platform has not reached professional maturity.

cma• 11 months ago

Professional maturity: https://www.reddit.com/r/graphic_design/comments/kv5651/what...

Duralias• 11 months ago

It has simply been normalized and for a lot of smaller scale sites, that this was first made for, being a little less professional isn't a problem.

But for situations where a company simply won't use Anubis because of its branding then they do sell a unbranded version.

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

strogonoff6• 11 months ago

What an ingenious approach for a sustainable OSS project: serve the free version with playful art that you enjoy and that expresses your individuality, but which some people are bound to find triggering/improper; sell a bland lifeless corporate edition to those people.

bakugo5• 11 months ago

Is there anything stopping anyone from just making a fork and removing it manually?

eddd-ddde• 11 months ago

How is it different from the classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions?

It's just art style.

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

Not sure what you're referring to, or what you mean by "it's just art style". It's a style that is likely to clash with the website branding it precedes, in my opinion.

forrestthewoods2• 11 months ago

It's just art style.

Art styles aren't picked randomly out of a hat. Humans are pattern matching machines and will draw conclusions based on choice of art style or mascot.

classic corporate caricature of a person with unnatural body proportions

Corporate Memphis is an abomination and I harshly judge any company that uses it. Everyone hates Corporate Memphis and makes fun of it.

sdrinf• 11 months ago

I actually _like_ this, and so does the comfyweb & weebs who are a very significant portion of the driving force behind calm, decade-long projects.

userbinator5• 11 months ago

I couldn't care less about the art, but the user-agent discrimination is far worse. Implying that anyone not using an "officially sanctioned" browser is an AI bot is such a devious scheme that I don't think even Google themselves would've come up with it.

TJSomething• 11 months ago

I think you've got the logic backwards. It defaults to assuming that user agents that have "Mozilla" in them might be bots. Uncommon browsers don't get challenged. It wouldn't make sense for bad faith bots to use uncommon, easy to block user agents.

odo1242• 11 months ago

I mean, Anubis does allow you to change the image to whatever you want. (edit: apparently the feature is behind a paywall unless you edit the source code)

I kinda like the Anubis girl though (as you said, subjective)

OhMeadhbh• 11 months ago

It's the kids. They all like the anime. Not at all like the serious teams I worked with at IBM and DEC that slapped trek logos over everything.

some-guy• 11 months ago

Define kids? I know plenty of Gen X and elder millennials into anime

scythe• 11 months ago

In the radiology department at Westchester Medical Center, all of the portable X-ray machines have little nametags on them that read, variously, "Enterprise", "Voyager", "Defiant", etc.

gblargg• 11 months ago

Worse, it prevents people with older browsers from even visiting the site.

account4225• 11 months ago

Yes it's DRM but somehow acceptable now (it shouldn't be).

bowsamic• 11 months ago

I do find the fact that anime is inescapable among mainly the American youth (not seen it as much here in Germany) to be alienating. I guess it’s just what it feels like to get old

akk04• 11 months ago

I don't feel you're right? I'm pretty sure that Germany experienced the same 80s anime boom that was felt in other parts of Europe too, and DoKomi (German anime convention) pulls ~180,000 people, very close to overtaking Comic Con. I'm actively involved in the European anime-adjacent DJ scene so I know Germany is not some low spot within Europe at all.

I think perhaps you might be overestimating how popular anime is with Americans because of how popular it is on the Internet.

nine_k4• 11 months ago

Hmm, does the cutesy anime Octocat bother you? It's all over GitHub; admittedly, not as large, but definitely more pervasive.

My point is that people get used to such things, and stop to even notice.

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

The context is a bit different from a proof of work captcha that sits in front of otherwise-unaffiliated sites.

WhereIsTheTruth• 11 months ago

It could have been worse, it could have been a crab

numpad02• 11 months ago

~15 years ago I'd come across tweets sharing how European art teachers are struggling with cultural intrusions of anime into fine arts(lol), ~10 years ago Chinese companies started serving anime-style online games, ~5 years ago COVID kickstarted VTubers in anglosphere, now an anime art is in a major OSS like an AC/DC reference.

It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them. Anime wasn't always accepted in Japanese culture(where it was born); it always existed and was growing consistently over the entire postwar history, but there were still plenty of cancellation forces on Twitter when it launched in late 2000s.

Don't worry, companies like Apple would be having an ultra sexualized silver gimpsuit teenager mascot by 2030 and anime hate would be replaced by something by then at this rate.

mpalmer11• 11 months ago

Can people just not like something? Not everything is a sociopolitical debate.

It's funny how vehemently people respond to anime the first time, it's often so strong that they would not be consistent with their judgements or even own moral standards. It then subsides, and then it'll be something that "doesn't look like anything" to them

uh... no, not in my case at least.

account4225• 11 months ago

If anything, I have only grown to hate the style more the more it is pushed everywhere.

pineaux2• 11 months ago

Its the cool kids doing it. It's the same kind of h4x0r esthetics as the nyan cat or unicorns and beavers everywhere.

akk04• 11 months ago

You would be horrified to spend any time in Japan then, where such characters are used in official capacity for anything from shops to corporations to government agencies, police stations and street signs.

It's just flashing a logo as the equivalent of a loading spinner while it does things. I don't see how the specific logo could possibly be interpreted as tasteless or offensive -- I know I'll take it any day over fucking Corporate Memphis.

very time I see it on another site, I think: "hm. weird. whose branding is this?"

I'd hope at some point you'd start remembering whose branding it is, that would make things much less confusing for you :-)

Now imagine if the developers of sudo were behind this, now that would be the stuff of nightmares...

m4rtink2• 11 months ago

Yeah, imagin typoing "ls" and having a Steam Locomotive drive through your terminal! Thankfully no one implemented that. ;-)

account4225• 11 months ago

I don't like the art either but much worse is how accepting open source projects are of putting the DRM that's behind it on their websites.

thrdbndndn• 11 months ago

The biggest news is not what software they use but they finally moved away from mail list, which is a big win.

talles• 11 months ago

OK, not GitHub "because Microsoft". But is there any particular reason why Forgejo and not GitLab, Gitea, or Gogs?

I'm not throwing shade at Forgejo or anything like that, I'm genuinely curious if there's anything about Forgejo that made it a better alternative than the other options.

nightpool2• 11 months ago

Forejo is/was a soft fork of Gitea due to some licensing / trademark bruhaha that I think got blown somewhat out of proportion. (And Gitea was famous for using Github instead of dogfooding their own software, which I've always thought was a pretty strange choice). I'm not familiar enough with the development roadmap of both teams to make a good call on whether following the fork is a good idea or not, but I know a lot of projects are just bandwagoning on the fork due to generally frustrating Gitea governance. GitLab is open core and I know a lot of people are frustrated with their UX and with their high resource consumption for self-hosting (although I would expect YJIT probably made a big improvement here). I've only seen maybe one project use Gogs seriously, I don't get the sense that it has the same level of adoption as the other three.

lotyrin2• 11 months ago

Yes, Issue with GitLab is their "Enterprise" maximalist feature set. Seems like they want to be the solution for the entire SDLC for every conceivable team.

I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.

If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.

ptman• 11 months ago

There is a plan for hosting gitea on gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

rldjbpin• 11 months ago

OK, not GitHub "because Microsoft".

all well and good to host your own code. but from a contributer's point of view, it is between managing dedicated accounts per project you want to participate in...or sign in with github [1]

openid exists, and is arguably older, but odds are most people would not be using it to begin with.

[1] https://code.ffmpeg.org/user/sign_up

picafrost2• 11 months ago

It's cool to see such an impactful project choose sovereignty. I hope more projects follow their example.

If you're a backbone-of-the-internet project like FFmpeg is, living on GitHub seems horrible. You will be subjected to thousands of low quality pull requests and issues from people searching for typos to fix, adding a line of white space for a contrived reason, or similar nonsense changes. Just so they can put "FFmpeg contributor" on their CV (or whatever).

nine_k4• 11 months ago

Typos may be quite impactful, don't discount them.

My only contribution to node-grpc fixed missing quotes, but only because that produced real crashes.

miohtama2• 11 months ago

But the parent does not refer to fixing crashes

usr11064• 11 months ago

In my previous work we were strict about typos, whitespace and general consistency in reviews. And even fixed them later if they slipped through. I found it a bit ridicolous a times.

In my current company nobody cares. It can be seen in the whole code quality. Full of smaller and bigger bugs as well as horrible hacks. It can be seen whether coders look twice or more at their own stuff before putting it to review or not, just trying to avoid ridicolous comments. It's a whole attitude. I write good code in a messy source base is unlikely to work in practice.

That said, I have submitted cleanup commits to open source projects only in the same MR with a real code change I wanted to make and only in vincinity of that change.

nosioptar2• 11 months ago

A typo caused NASA'a Mariner I to fail.

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mariner-1/

Aurornis9• 11 months ago

Rejecting useless or white space-only PRs is quick and easy. It’s not as big of a problem as you’re suggesting.

I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.

reconvene12902• 11 months ago

It’s all in the approach: start with a “thank you for the project”, and a “hope you don’t mind but I’ve corrected a few typos” and nobody will shout you down. Only go with a blank PR description and it’ll come across as arrogant and spammy.

account4225• 11 months ago

Rejecting useless or white space-only PRs is quick and easy.

No, it really is draining.

I’ve gone through a few projects and updated the documentation as I explored the codebase. Reception ranges from thankful to people scorning me for attempting to make contributions that weren’t code changes. It’s frustrating when maintainers are more interested in keeping people out than in considering actual code or doc improvements.

It's frustrating when people make "contributions" that take more effort to review than they put in and then get mad when they don't get thanked for it. This attitude is exactly why dealing with drive by pull requests is not "quick and easy" - suddenly you need to do social and public relations stuff when all you want to do is code.

jambutters• 11 months ago

Thousands is quite the exaggeration when there are only 379 on ffmpeg github. If you look through them, its actually 5-10% if not less

picafrost2• 11 months ago

Another way to frame this is that even though the FFmpeg repository clearly indicates it's a mirror repository and has had a single open pull request titled "WARNING: PULL REQUESTS ON THIS REPOSITORY ARE IGNORED" [0] sitting in the pull requests page for 10 years, they've still had to close hundreds of pull requests.

[0] https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/pull/153

tzury• 11 months ago

This issue has only worsened with LLMs "assisting" contributors in submitting PRs that end up wasting maintainers' time.

Tools like OpenAI Codex, which can connect directly to repositories, are likely to amplify this problem even further.

That said, this is also the real measure of the actual value of LLMs and coding agents: the day we see top open-source projects having dozens of bugs effectively fixed per day by LLMs, we’ll know they’ve matured into a solid, reliable resource.

cdrini• 11 months ago

Is the version on Forgejo closed to public contribution?

pmontra2• 11 months ago

FFmpeg seems to have dealt with that problem when they still were on github. This is the paragraph at the end of the readme:

Contributing
Patches should be submitted to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list using git format-patch or git send-email. Github pull requests should be avoided because they are not part of our review process and will be ignored.

An agentic LLM bot is likely to have no problems at creating a patch and mailing it but it's a major pain for most human developers. Furthermore they can ban source email addresses and vet potential contributors before letting them in the mailing list.

BlueTemplar• 11 months ago

Why is it a major pain? Isn't it part of git workflow?

Or is this because most developers got complacent in only using GitHub and similar?

Aurornis9• 11 months ago

The paragraph at the end of the README was letting people know that the GitHub PRs are unmonitored, not suggesting it was a problem.

mmmmbbbhb• 11 months ago

I have to say you're exaggerating, ignoring prs isn't such a chore.

dspillett• 11 months ago

If you are ignoring all of them. Filtering PRs to see which are worth having might take time in a large popular project. Even if it isn't much time, it is more than zero. You also have to deal with all the other comms associated: people submitting genuinely useful patches which accidentally get rejected querying (maybe politely, maybe not) and people who submitted less useful ones bitching about their rejection, both to the project and in public forums.

qwertywert_• 11 months ago

Can't get past cringe anime girl

Aachen4• 11 months ago

Try opening a bug report? https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis?tab=readme-ov-file#suppo...

Compared to Cloudflare and Google, you can actually talk to a human here and they might (I have no reason to believe the opposite) actually care about niche browsers whereas Google seems to test their products on browsers other than their own engine only after release (presumably people will get annoyed about these breakages/outages eventually and switch to a their browser or a rebrand thereof). There's no such conflict of interest here. I'm not aware of a better thing to use than Anubis or a self-written equivalent (my understanding is that it's a simple sha2 PoW)

delta_p_delta_x2• 11 months ago

The comments on this page are a complete cesspool.

A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it), others splitting the finest of hairs over software development groups and company politics, and more.

Self-hosting is generally good, well done to FFmpeg. Many large projects self-host, and my own ex-company has physical servers in the city we work at that can be unplugged if necessary.

I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.

And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.

Aurornis9• 11 months ago

Self-hosting is generally good

I’ve contributed to a number of projects that try to self-host, with mixed results. It gets frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds, or when the self-hosted solution goes down for a week because the admin is on vacation and missed something.

I’ve contributed to one server that feels the need to periodically delete dormant accounts for some reason. Every time I come back to the project I find myself creating a new user account.

With the anubis-protected servers the anti-bot protection has a lot of false positives, so occasionally I have to switch browsers just to not deal with page load failures.

One server adopted some black list that had my home IP in it for some reason, so I was just banned from accessing the server without a VPN.

It all just feels old and tiring after a while compared to the breath of fresh air of just using a site like GitLab or GitHub that simply works.

I understand why they’d want to do it, but I don’t think it’s without some tradeoffs.

strogonoff6• 11 months ago

Contribution-wise, I find Sourcehut’s approach[0] very sound: you could never have troubles with your account because you don’t need one in the first place. If you want to contribute, create a patch and send it to respective mailing list.

As a positive side-effect, a contributor is compelled to write a reasonable explanatory message to maintainers and keep the patch minimal and contained (compared to a typical Github PR with a dozen of commits mixing together fixes, features, newlines and indentation changes all over the place).

[0] They did not invent it, obviously—it is what Linux kernel, the origin of Git, had (has?) been doing for a long time!

hulitu2• 11 months ago

server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds,

Welcome to DE, where _every_ page takes several seconds to load.

Aachen4• 11 months ago

frustrating when someone’s GitLab (or other) server is so slow that every page load takes several seconds

That's a typical experience when the chosen solution doesn't match the available resources and desired scale. Projects like WordPress and GitLab may work for large enterprises, or when you add in enough caching that you don't have to do the large computation (generating one page) most times, but they don't work so well when you're wanting it to just work without custom solutions as a small team on a small budget

Forgejo doesn't seem to have this issue as far as I've noticed. I've hosted the predecessor (Gitea) on a potato. It's so easy to host, I think it's actually still running but forgotten about. I should check if it needs updating at some point..

bakugo5• 11 months ago

A full third of them complaining about the anti-bot protection mascot (yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it)

If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website, then in my opinion it's completely reasonable for those people to point out how immature it is. Telling people to "get over it" just makes you sound equally as immature.

delta_p_delta_x2• 11 months ago

If you're going to force people to stare at a screen with nothing but your quirky anime girl OC for a few seconds every time they visit your website

It is a damn sight better than the maliciously-compliant and deeply annoying GDPR 'we use cookies' banners, pop-ups, and dark patterns like having to uncheck thousands of 'partner' boxes.

This is merely a response to AI companies abusing scraper bots and having a callous, selfish disregard for Internet and server bandwidth. It was on this very website where I saw it put quite succinctly—AI-scraping bots have essentially started mass DDOS attacks on all small servers.

immature

Maturity is empathy, human connection, understanding, perspective, compassion, altruism, and more. Not some arbitrary 'this is a cartoon, therefore it is immature'.

25 years ago Microsoft, the professional software behemoth, decided to put a cartoon dog and paperclip with googly eyes in its operating system and office software. A major mobile OS has a cartoon robot in its logo.

Cartoons are metaphors and windows into the artist's frame of mind. They are much more mature than your shallow portrayal of them.

strogonoff6• 11 months ago

The “branding of your captcha page is immature” point is a downside unless you consider it not merely self-expression but an intentional motivator for “more mature” (which not infrequently goes hand in hand with “financially able”) people to subscribe to a commercial offering, thus helping keep an open-source project alive and in an honest business, despite competition with a VC-backed behemoth that’s become nearly a monopoly.

timeon2• 11 months ago

That is just what LLM era brings.

Macha• 11 months ago

Do these same people refuse to use Go because the homepage has a gopher mascot that could be straight from western children's cartoon courage the cowardly dog on the homepage?

FreeBSD because of the cartoon devil? Bash because of the GNU goat with the facial expression that could be read as smug or stoned? Google's logo is some printed characters in primary colours, is that too childish?

Nah, that people have such a visceral reaction to the anime girl is not just because it's "childish" as so much else of our industry is "childish" and passes without comment, or sometimes even causes criticism when it gets taken away for blandness (see all the complaints when projects redesign their logos to Helvetica work marks)

KronisLV4• 11 months ago

yes, it's a cartoon character; get over it

I think it's cute. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't cute. It's inoffensive and doesn't get in the way of the software serving its function, the only critique I could do if I wanted to is people unfamiliar with the project would get a bit confused if they only saw the character for a split second: https://anubis.techaro.lol/

I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it, that would be a nice UX improvement.

Otherwise, agreed about self-hosting and the ability to choose whatever platform aligns with your goals the closest to be a good thing!

And now everyone has to learn GitHub Actions, Gitlab pipelines, Jenkins pipelines, and more.

A part of me doesn't like the churn of new CI solutions coming in all the time. On the other hand, after learning GitLab CI, I'd generally prefer it to something like Jenkins, it just feels more pleasant. But with something like Drone CI or Woodpecker CI my non-work needs are also covered wonderfully, especially with a lot of the software I build being packaged in Docker containers, which further simplifies and somewhat standardizes things! A lot of the time I can also encapsulate most of the logic in shell scripts that are easy to run regardless of the environment (CI server or locally), which makes it even more portable.

HappMacDonald• 11 months ago

So wait, is the cartoon mascot at issue the Annubis one for the Cloudflare-like DDoS protection, or is it an actual FFmpeg mascot? Because I don't see any cartoon characters on the FFmpeg code, main, or wiki websites. But I am curious what kinda -tan they came up with. :P

userbinator5• 11 months ago

I think even Cloudflare gives you a second or two to see what's going on before forwarding you to the page behind it

Not if you have the right fingerprint - then you're not even aware the site is using CF.

jraph12• 11 months ago

The comments on this page are a complete cesspool.

I noticed this. I'm quite appalled. Definitely outside the usual HN standards.

I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.

Are people projecting their GitHub FOMO? Are people thinking that the value of the GitHub they cherish decreases with each project not picking it because of the weaker network effect?

hulitu2• 11 months ago

I suspect the very idea of self-hosting one's code instead of using GitHub is triggrering many people beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.

The cloud companies do not want you to selfhost. It is good that Ffmpeg did not experience a DDOS attack yet, because that's what happened to someone who moved his email to selfhosting. We are living in a time when companies have become like mafia.

eviks4• 11 months ago

beyond reasonable levels for reasons I'd love to get an explanation for.

Since you're ignoring the reasons by calling them unreasonable, the armchair psychology alternative won't help get you what you love

LegionMammal978• 11 months ago

I do have a sense of unease about most smaller hosting services and self-hosting solutions, in that I don't trust them to stay up in the long term, once no one is left to care about projects on them, or at least not about the old versions. (This isn't so big an issue for something as big as FFmpeg, but I'm talking about the general case.) Just try to download some old version of a minor library from the late 90s or early 2000s: unless it's been continuously using the same source control repo, the odds are better than not that the files disappeared during the intervening decades.

In contrast, whatever its faults, I fully expect public repos on GitHub to last for the next 10 years, likely the next 20, barring active removal by the author. (The biggest medium-term risk is a "GitHub is evil, take down all your repos" campaign a la Reddit.) Of course, it's not foolproof, the only way to get that would be to replicate the project in dozens of places, but I find it much better than the old status quo of files slipping away once forgotten.

__loam3• 11 months ago

Anubis is funny because I think it's in the license that you have to keep the mascot. If you want to remove it you have to pay them.

commoner• 11 months ago

Anubis has a commercial version called BotStopper that allows the mascot to be changed:

https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper

But, Anubis uses the plain MIT license, so you can modify it to remove the branding yourself: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE

If Anubis used a license with that mascot requirement, it would not be free and open source.

madars• 11 months ago

Anubis is MIT licensed so you should be able to modify it freely: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/LICENSE It would be very funny if they did that though.

0xbadcafebee2• 11 months ago

Cesspool is pretty strong language, dawg. They're critical and opinionated, sure, but so are your own comments. None of it is empirical, just personal opinion.

I personally couldn't give a rat's ass how it's hosted. Still uses a protocol there's open source clients for? Cool. Not that I have pulled the ffmpeg source more than once in my life (which I suspect's the same for 99% of the people here). I'll continue to get it packaged for me by somebody else, who will pull it from wherever it's hosted, however they can. I'm just glad it still exists.

jraph12• 11 months ago

Cesspool is pretty strong language, dawg. They're critical and opinionated, sure,

There's nothing wrong about critical and opinionated but respectful, but the comments that are now flagged, and some of the downvoted ones are very low quality, not just critical and opinionated.

cryptonector3• 11 months ago

I just wish Git itself had a more robust means of issue-handling (no, email is a 1980s protocol, it's not good enough, even if it is for Linux) and CI/CD, rather than relegating the matter to different hosts.

Just shove the issues into Git itself. That's what Fossil does for its wiki and issues, while GitHub only does it for its wiki. There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.

account4225• 11 months ago

There are several open source ways to do this with Git itself.

Yes but that's also the problem. What's the point of doing it in git if whatever choice you make is incompatible with most clients?

nine_k4• 11 months ago

1980s protocol

TCP is even older; so what? It works, as does email. It's merely a transport layer.

What is required is a well-defined standard to encapsulate relevant data into it: PR definitions, code review comments, approval / rejection votes. This all could be a zipped JSON attachment, for instance.

The code change proper can continue be passed in the patch format. Or the whole thing could arrive via an exposed API endpoint, or even be pushed by git protocol.

A tool could interpret the extracted data and update a database that powers a nice GUI / TUI, and controls a CI/CD interface.

(Now if I only had time to properly design and implement that.)

skydhash2• 11 months ago

Why all of this? You can just enforce some formatting rules and add a few script to the system mailbox to alter the message (add an issue number, send a notification when a change is accepted and merged, etc,...). No need to complicate stuff. Just send a standard plain text email that follows the rules.

elric3• 11 months ago

I strongly disagree with the issue handling & CI/CD part of your comment. Those are concerns are orthogonal to distributed version control and greatly complicate any system.

Not everyone even has to learn Jenkins/GH-Pipelines/whatever. In most teams I've worked on those are typically managed by one or two people, or by a different team entirely. And it's not even a hard skill to learn.

rustystump• 11 months ago

I love self hosting but the comments i think have to do with quality issues.

Having an anime girl show up 99% of the time one visits due to AI bot protection is not the best experience no matter how much I love anime. Saying to “get over it” is dismissive to a large group of people who disagree with you.

The comments are not a cesspool but standard hn being critical.

grep_name2• 11 months ago

It's frustrating. As someone who is into self-hosting, I was hoping to find answers in the comments to questions like:

- How self-hosted is it? Is it on somebody's computer at home? A colo? One of those university linux servers that runs for decades? Hetzner? Is there any redundancy?

- How are the costs and responsibilities for the hardware broken down?

- How is admin and patching handled?

I'm actually very curious about that stuff, but nobody's really talking about it here

account4225• 11 months ago

Oh no how dare people complain about the "cute" DRM.

kelnos3• 11 months ago

Delightful, now Anubis is giving me "invalid response" (Firefox Android). Great to see that AI bot protection is blocking legitimate use now too. Would love to check this out, but I can't.

account4225• 11 months ago

I'm sorry but the cool kids have decided that DRM is in now. Sucks to be you (and me).

rurban• 11 months ago

Well, for one it's much faster than the github mirror. Browsing files is at least 10x faster. And getting away from the mailing list send-patch workflow is huge. Though they could have that for free also.

self hosting could drain too much resources I fear.

elric3• 11 months ago

It's interesting (and a little sad) how all git "forges" (for want of a better word) converge on the same layout. An alphabetical list of files, when they were last modified, and an expanded readme file.

IMO a list of recent commits would be more useful as a landing page, or maybe even just the readme. When checking out a new project, I'm interested in what it does, not in its folder structure when its LICENSE.md was last modified.

reconvene12902• 11 months ago

I agree. My ideal forge would be SourceHut but with GitHub style PR workflow (as opposed to email).

usr11064• 11 months ago

Pick one of the open source forges that takes MRs (not using the giant's terminology, hardly ever calling git pull either...) and contribute your ideas.

That said, it's a bit like QWERTY. Maybe a bit weird, but it eases quick orientation on a new keyboard or repo if everyone uses the same layout.

grep_name2• 11 months ago

You might like cgit, git-arr, or one of the other static git generators. They generally have a different mode of navigation. They're not 'forges' in that they don't have in-built tools for things like bug-tracking and managing PRs though, but lately it seems like projects are becoming more interested in the git email workflow anyway

trialect• 11 months ago

Forgejo is great and all... up until you're trying to use your SSO with a user named 'admin':

https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/8030

then it just looks like a bad joke with all the anime girls and everything else...

quectophoton• 11 months ago

There are also some minor issues with composite actions and reusable workflows.

If I use composite actions, the logs get associated with the wrong step[1]. It's just a visual thing (the steps themselves run fine), but having 90% of your action logs in the "Complete job" step is unpleasant.

For reusable workflows there's a few open issues as well, but what happens in my case is that jobs just don't start at all, they stay as "Waiting" forever.

These issues only matter if you write your own reusable actions with YAML (the actions written in JavaScript seem to work fine), but it's worth mentioning.

Other than these two issues, I'm very happy with Forgejo and would still recommend it if people ask for my opinion.

[1] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/5049

kurante• 11 months ago

This is a bad faith comment in so many layers:

- The provided reason given was due to user accessibility concerns complicated by what likely is a breaking change.

- Even if you don't agree with the claim, a reserved name isn't unreasonable at all. Not to make a standard of GitHub, but the `admin` username is reserved there too.

- Dismissing an entire product based on a single non-critical technical limitation while simultaneously not contributing to the solution (unless you have a different username there, happy to be corrected) is fundamentally toxic.

- All the while conflating two separate products (Anubis and Forgejo) that aren't related at all.

- And that Anubis offers a non-anime girl solution, and is MIT Licensed if you really don't care for supporting the author.

I'm not going to prod at the "and everything else" part either.

FFmpeg moves to Forgejo

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