MCET-SEC 5: Repo revisited
In the second part of my series of articles where I’m creating something I’ve called MCET-SEC: a modern cost-efficient toolchain for a small but savvy software engineering company, I have chosen Gogs as a repository for my company CODEFUSION. It is running smoothly since a month or so and we are hosting first projects under it. First feedback from the developers started to come. And it was quite critical. There is one aspect my devs are not found of. The way the pull requests are commented. They were used to the way Bitbucket does it. Where you can comment and engage in a discussion on every single line of the pull request separately. Like this:
And in Gogs they got single conversation board per whole pull request. So they ended up commenting like this:
- File x/y/z/class.cs
- Oh, no!
- Jadi, jadi jada.
- This needs to be changed.
- File a/b/c/soemething.js
- WTF? Are you crazy?
- Do not do it!
And so on. And yes, I see their pain. I admit, I have not gone deep enough in feature checking when I’ve done the research. My bad. But maybe there is a hope? And it seemed there is. We were not the only ones thinking it should be implemented. There is a feature request for that. From 2015: https://github.com/gogs/gogs/issues/1644
And what do we learn from the request?
Gogs creator was pretty blunt about this: “Choose GitLab if you need feature-rich Git hosting! Seriously! Or just pay GitHub, it’s just $7/month with unlimited private repositories. Or fork it, and do whatever you want!”
Well, it is like it is. Gogs is open sourced but under single person maintenance. There is only one person deciding what’s good and what’s bad. I knew about it when I’ve done the research but I have chosen to ignore it. It was not a good choice. I think I will need to spin back as long as the migration to a new system will net be so painful.
There are some good options. Involving Gogs itself. Like for example a Gogs fork called Gitea. It is community maintained and the feature we are looking for is already present there. Here is how they explain why did they forked Gogs: https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/
And here is a nice comparison of Gitea features to some other open source project. It looks good. It looks like I will have something do. Everything for my developers!