Forge federation: monthly report 7/9

October 17, 2021

Most of the work during the last month was around implementing fedeproxy in Go. It will bring fedeproxy closer to Gitea and allow both projects to share significant parts of the codebase related to federation. The October 2021 monthly update videoconference will be held October 18th 10:30am, 2021 and is open to everyone.

Software Development

In August 2021, the idea of implementing fedeproxy in Go was discussed. There was no push back, on the contrary. A month later the decision was made.

The main benefit is to re-use existing parts of the Gitea codebase that fedeproxy needs:

  • Dump/restore;
  • API interactions with a range of forges as part of the migration feature;
  • Mirroring infrastructure implemented for git repositories;
  • REST server;
  • In memory representation of issues, pull requests etc.;
  • Release process;
  • Test infrastructure;

The test infrastructure based on drone was setup.

This decision will also benefit Gitea when components relevant to the ongoing effort to support federation are developed in fedeproxy and contributed to Gitea.

More technical details can be found in the development category of the forum.

Diversity

An Experiment in simultaneous interpretation was setup to improve the language and socio-economic diversity. A simultaneous interpreter was recruited and will attend the next monthly videoconference. The goal at this point is to make sure it is not disruptive to the meeting because of unforeseen technical difficulties or a technical vocabulary that exceeds the expertise of the translator.

Details on the work done to foster diversity are available in the forum.

Collaboration

Chapril forge

Loïc and Pierre-Louis continue their work as maintainers of the Gitea based, Chapril forge. There was a shift in leadership in Chapril but it went smoothly as fare as the forge is concerned.

Communication

The September 2021 monthly event happened, with Gerben from redecentralize, Pierre-Louis and Loïc. The agenda of the meeting was loosely followed and led to discovering new software, another Gitea instance and discussing funding opportunities.

A blog post explaining the reasons for implementing fedeproxy in Go was drafted in the forum and published on the website.

The introduction of the Wikipedia page on software forges was significantly improved. There still is much work to do before this page can be considered a good article. It is important to fedeproxy because it also explains what federation means in the context of software forges.

The forum categories were slightly reorganized when sorting the uncategorized topics. The idea category is about exploring ideas that may be relevant to forge federations while the project category is where projects more or less related to forge federation are bookmarked and discussed. The workspace category is where content in draft stage (for instance this report) is refined.

The October 2021 monthly event will happen October 18th.

Transparency and funding

The NLnet grant due October 1st was not ready in time and the deadline was missed.

Half (2,500€) of the [grant dedicated to implementing federation in Gitea]() was released. The claim was approved.

The second installment of the DAPSI funds were received and distributed. The third DAPSI call was published and has a deadline on November 23rd, 2021. It would make sense to prepare an application as it would allow to fund the work after the current grant runs out but nobody is working on that at the moment.

Details on transparency and funding are available in the forum.