Few days ago, Fedora project leader, «Matthew Miller» unveiled a proposal, which raises the Pagure project migration, the collaborative development platform currently used by the project, in favor of a more modern solution.
On the proposal, The Fedora Council Board of Directors has designated Forgejo as the choice preferred to replace Pagure, although it has decided to open a period of public consultation before finally approving this transition. It is mentioned that currently Pagure (which was developed specifically for Fedora) has become obsolete and faces maintenance difficulties as it has not achieved significant adoption outside the project ecosystem.
In 2020, it was already being considered to be replaced with GitLab, but that initiative did not prosper and so this year, after evaluating various collaborative development platforms, it was concluded that Fedora needed an open source solution that could be implemented on its own servers. The best-rated options were GitLab Community Edition and Forgejo.
Both platforms, GitLab and Forgejo, they have advantages and disadvantages, but they require specific adjustments to replicate the functions of Dist Git, the Pagure-based system used in the development of Fedora, in addition to the fact that the chosen platform must be integrated with key services of the project, among other requirements.
That's why the Fedora Council chose Forgejo as the preferred solution for several reasons. Forgejo is a project managed by an independent community, while GitLab is owned by a commercial company and follows an Open Core model, where certain advanced features required by Fedora are only available in the commercial version. There is also concern that GitLab may change its policies in the future, affecting its openness and accessibility.
Another factor in favor of Forgejo is its code base, written in Go, a language more familiar to the Fedora infrastructure team, compared to Ruby, used at GitLab. This technical aspect, along with the community nature of Forgejo, was instrumental in the preliminary recommendation, although the final decision will depend on community feedback.
Forgejo is a platform designed to facilitate collaboration on projects that use Git repositories, with functions similar to those offered by GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab. It emerged as a fork of Gitea, which in turn derived from the Gogs project.
The creation of Forgejo in 2022 was a response to attempts to commercialize Gitea and transfer control to a commercial entity, leading the developers to form an independent project focused on maintaining community principles and autonomous governance. Forgejo’s code is written in Go, and as of version 9.0, new code is licensed under GPLv3+, while legacy code remains licensed under the MIT license.
Forgejo It also allows you to configure webhooks to integrate with services like Slack and Discord, It offers support for Git Hooks and Git LFS, and has tools for migrating or replicating repositories. A notable feature is its ability to use the ActivityPub protocol, which makes it possible to connect individual servers in a federated network, promoting a distributed infrastructure for collaboration in software development.
Moreover, and not least, It is also worth emphasizing that It's been a few weeks now It has been decided to grant the Fedora Spin with KDE Desktop the base edition status, bringing it up to par in support and relevance with Fedora Workstation, which uses GNOME as its default environment.
With that, Starting with Fedora 42, both editions will be presented on equal terms, which includes receiving the same level of promotion and an equivalent marketing strategy. In addition, any critical issues related specifically to KDE will be treated as a release blocker, just as serious issues associated with GNOME are.
This decision was made after an initial proposal from the developers responsible for Fedora KDE, which proposed replacing GNOME with KDE as the default environment on Fedora Workstation. During the discussions, a consensus was reached that there were no significant reasons to exclusively prioritize one environment over the other, thus allowing both options to be considered as primary.
Eventually, the developers of Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition accepted this solution and withdrew their original proposal to replace GNOME with KDE.