gsaslis (u/gsaslis) - Readit News

gsaslis commented on Using Radicle CI radicle.xyz/2025/07/23/us... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

kuehle · 5 months ago

> I find the most frustrating part of using CI to be to wait for a CI run to finish on a server and then try to deduce from the run log what went wrong. I’ve alleviated this by writing an extension to rad to run CI locally: rad-ci.

locally running CI should be more common

gsaslis · 5 months ago

It should!

And yet, that's technically not CI.

The whole point we started using automation servers as an integration point was to avoid the "it works on my machine" drama. (Have watched at least 5 seasons of it - they were all painful!).

+1 on running the test harness locally though (where feasible) before triggering the CI server.

gsaslis commented on Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub radicle.xyz/2024/09/10/ra... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

XorNot · a year ago

The P2P is honestly a bit of a negative because the provision model looks very "default open" - which is not want anyone who wants to own the hosting experience wants.

Sure: you do have to include an identity document, but it didn't give me an overwhelming sense of safety that I couldn't accidentally expose all my private repos to the P2P network.

gsaslis · a year ago

So, if I understand correctly, you’re not so much concerned about the p2p architecture, rather than the default seeding policy? (You’d prefer that to be selective rather than open by default? )

gsaslis commented on Radicle 1.0 – A local-first, P2P alternative to GitHub radicle.xyz/2024/09/10/ra... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

viraptor · a year ago

GitHub effectively contributes a significant amount of money and work hours by hosting close to all the open source software for free, including some CI time and the collaboration features. For some projects like Nix that's a really non-trivial system on its own. It's not just the code that counts towards FOSS contributions.

gsaslis · a year ago

This is true. But what if they change their mind?

IMHO, this shows the huge dependency of all of the world’s open source software on a single company. (Microsoft, who owns GitHub).

In this context, Radicle - as an alternative way of hosting the world’s OSS - makes a lot of sense to me.

gsaslis commented on Gitlab Explores Sale reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/gostsamo

_flux · a year ago

Radicle! It's the easiest (?) way for anyone to "self host" a repo with issue tracker.

But there's of course the chance that the team developing it will be sold, even if the actual app is open source.

gsaslis · a year ago

Probably not the "easiest", and it's not really production-ready yet, *but* it is the one open source solution for hosting open source software that will never be affected by the "Explores Sale" problem - the same way that BitTorrents have never had that problem: it is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer network for hosting source code.

gsaslis commented on Gitlab Explores Sale reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/gostsamo

penguin_booze · a year ago

I've indeed used Jenkins. For all my professional uses, it served perfectly well. Newer releases come with pipeline and k8s support etc., so I'm not of the opinion that just being ancient is a disqualifier.

gsaslis · a year ago

agreed. Jenkins has suffered from a lot of problems - plugin maintenance across version upgrades being key - but it has also overcome a lot of these problems. It gets criticism just for being... "old". But it is an automation server that is as battle-tested as they come!

Also, being old gives it a huge advantage: you can bet you won't need a major rewrite of your pipelines in a couple of years when e.g. GitLab sells, or Microsoft decides GH actions aren't so free (or fast) any more, etc.

gsaslis commented on Gitlab Explores Sale reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/gostsamo

gsaslis · a year ago

I have to say "Datadog" isn't exactly as scary as "Microsoft" was, back when it bought GitHub.

Ok, they didn't kill the open source community which is what we feared at the time (because they found a way to make more money from it), but I'm still more skeptical of Microsoft essentially controlling the world's open source software than Datadog buying an open core company.

But with Microsoft now painting everything with its "AI" brush, aren't you, as open source maintainers, concerned about keeping the world's FOSS on a proprietary platform?

gsaslis commented on Gitlab Explores Sale reuters.com/markets/deals... · Posted by u/gostsamo

frognumber · a year ago

I think you are wrong. Not having a moat is a business model and a competitive advantage, and one which works well. As a customer, it gives me confidence that, if gitlab (or any similar company) screws up, I can host it myself. I go for open source precisely due to the lack of a moat.

That's what most open models rely on.

1) Hosted services are cheaper than running it myself, once I include staff time, so by default, I will go to the source vendor.

2) Even if there's a cheaper alternative, I'll gladly pay e.g. 50% more to go to the organization which wrote / maintains the product. Many companies just aren't that price-sensitive. If you pay $200k for a SWE, is saving $100/year worth it to go for gitlabknockoff.com instead of gitlab.com? Most big organizations wouldn't. The risk only comes in if gitlabknockoff was AWS, Azure, or GCP, which we're still learning what to do about.

3) There is a shallow moat in the forms of things like brand recognition, canonical URLs, etc.

If you're comfortable with e.g. a <100% profit margin, open models do just fine. Open models just mean you can't have a 10,000% markup or do an Oracle-style milking of customers. As a customer, that's why I pick open models.

Open models also mean I'm not SOL if you go out-of-business.

The friction comes in with a lot of hybrid models. Most things between open and proprietary don't work well. Datadog + gitlab are on opposite sides of this divide, and I don't see that working well.

gsaslis · a year ago

> The risk only comes in if gitlabknockoff was AWS, Azure, or GCP, which we're still learning what to do about.

Exactly! It really makes me wonder how GitLab thinks Datadog can help them defend against this risk. Then again, they're not open source - just open core.

gsaslis commented on Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative app.radicle.xyz/nodes/see... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

mariusor · 2 years ago

All good points, but now you moved the trust requirement from me having to trust the people working on the code, to me having to trust the tool that hosts the code. I'm not convinced your model is better. :P

gsaslis · 2 years ago

For me, one of the benefits of FOSS is that I don't have to trust the people. I can look at the code and decide for myself.

Not looking to convince you of that or anything though... :)

gsaslis commented on Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative app.radicle.xyz/nodes/see... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

BlueTemplar · 2 years ago

How do you find a website ?

And presumably the person hosting it will make sure that the computer hosting it is often on, for instance ISP routers and TV boxes are a good way to popularize it, since they often come with NAS capabilities :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebox

(Notably, it also supports torrents and creating timed links to share files via FTP.)

gsaslis · 2 years ago

Depends on what you mean by finding :

- finding what the domain name is ? - resolving the DNS to an IP address ?

Radicle solves both problems in theory, but more the latter than the former right now:

- there is some basic functionality to search for projects hosted on Radicle, to find the right repo id (I expect this area will see a lot more activity and improvements in the near future), - given a repo id, actually getting the code onto your laptop. This is where the p2p network comes in, so that the person hosting it doesn't always need to keep their computer/router/tv box on, etc.

gsaslis commented on Radicle: Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative app.radicle.xyz/nodes/see... · Posted by u/aiw1nt3rs

cloudhead · 2 years ago

Thanks! There is no mirroring built-in yet, though this is something we're looking into. It should theoretically be as simple as setting up a `cron` job that pulls from github and pushes to radicle every hour, eg.

  git pull github master
  git push rad master

gsaslis · 2 years ago

In addition, in order to migrate your GitHub issues to Radicle (which the above doesn't cover), there's this command-line tool [1] that should get you most - if not all - of the way there.

Migrating GitHub Pull Requests (PRs) to Radicle Patches is somewhat more involved, but that should still be possible (even if it involves some loss of information along the way, due to potential schema mismatches) ...

[1] - https://github.com/cytechmobile/radicle-github-migrate