I no longer maintain my Emacs projects on SourceHut

2024-01-27

On 2022-04-07 I moved all my Emacs projects from GitLab to SourceHut: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2022-04-07-all-emacs-projects-sourcehut/. I am now undoing that decision. My code is on GitLab and GitHub, with the latter as the de facto primary source.

Why the change:

• The SourceHut web interface does not show any kind of indication that a message has an attachment. Last time I tried it, I had to download an mbox file and extract the patch from there. This was helped by the fact that I knew what I was searching for, but the experience was not pleasant anyway.
• Many users are reluctant to subscribe to my project’s mailing list and instead email me directly. This is fine, as I do get the work done eventually, but it beats the point of having a public inbox if I am the only one who reads those messages anyway.
• Personal emails for package maintenance make it more difficult for me to apply filters. I cannot easily go from “personal” to “packages” and thus have trouble prioritising tasks.
• Users replying to mailing list threads frequently do not “reply to all”, so the filter I have for SourceHut lists does not apply and my inbox is noisy again.
• Coordinating work between my “official” SourceHut-based repository and the de facto GitHub one is a problem, because a user on one may not be aware of what a user on the other is doing.

There are other papercuts as well, but I understand SourceHut is still in “alpha”, so I will not list them here.

What happens to the Git repositories on SourceHut?

I am no longer updating them and plan to delete them in the near future.

What about the mailing lists?

I will continue to reply to messages sent there, but I will eventually ask people to use other media. If you do not want to use a Git forge to report an issue or send a patch, then do it via my personal email: https://protesilaos.com/contact.

Will you host your own Git server?

I want to do this at some point because I am mindful of the issues with proprietary Git forges. But this is a task that requires knowledge and resources. So it will not happen soon.