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Thanks for the information. I know there has been talk of getting bitcoin core off of github. What's the rationale for moving it, and what alternatives are available, if you know?
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I'll start by pointing out that you don't need a "full-service" to just host code.
You can just expose a bare Git repo over any plain ol' HTTP server with something like
python -m http.server -d /path/to/repo.git
There's technologies like WebDAV and more modern ones that even allow write access.
Indeed, I believe this was the way that Linus Torvalds hosted his autority-copy of the Linux Kernel in the early days of Git.
That being said, there are plenty of alternatives.
Hosted:
- GitLab, but I believe they don't offer as much free stuff as GH.
- GNU Savannah, supported by the GNU Foundation. Your project must be FOSS under fairly strict Richard Stallman rules.
- SourceForge will get an honorable mention because it was THE Big Daddy back in the days. Massive enshittification caused them to slide into obscurity.
- JetBrains, Atlassian and other smaller players have offerings too, but perhaps too private-code focused.
Self-hosted
- Gitea, definitely my favourite. I use it for private code hosting that doesn't leave my network, but can supposedly scale to handle public projects.
- GitLab has an open source "community edition". Never used it.
As for rationale for moving something like Bitcoin Core off GitHub, I don't really see one at present. There is no smoke indicating a shutdown is on the horizon, so it doesn't justify the cost of a preemptive migration.
If a shutdown happens out of the blue, like I said, reemerging on another website is trivial, but they can shut down that too until the only thing left is a Gitea instance, or indeed a bare repo, hosted over Tor.
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Great information. Thanks!
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clonefor a reason - everyone who does that downloads the entire repository, with its entire history and all branches.