[maconic]

Independent of Gitea (which I have nothing to do with nor have any relationship with anyone involved). Your comment "It is worth stressing that you need no software to 'host' git. Every git repository is 'self hosting', by design." worries me. Yes, technically accurate, just as notepad, webstorm, atom, vi, emacs, etc. also don't need any 'host'. If you aren't working with multiple authors, a local laptop with git plus perhaps a USB flash drive for backup is all you need. But if you plan to actually have a project that multiple people will work on, it must be hosted whether it is technically required or not IMHO :) Let's say there is no Github or Gitlab type solution... how do you send me a pull request? How do I clone your git repo? In reality, there is always a hosted repo. If you want to open your firewall and share your public IP address so that you are the "hosted" solution that I push commits to or send pull requests to then fine :) But there is always a hosted solution if there are at least two people working on the same project... whether that's gmail.com hosting your emailed zip attachments, or you opening your firewall on your laptop so other people can connect to it, etc.

[adam-a]

I took the comment as referring to hosting just a git repo on a public server. If you are working on a private project a simple option is to get a cheap VPS, give all your developers user accounts, and clone the repo into a shared folder. Everyone can pull and push with ssh and you can use Trello or whatever for issue tracking. Certainly that doesn't cover every use case, but it's worth being aware of the option and not feeling that you can't use git unless you pay github or spend a lot of time setting up a self-hosted clone of github.

[Qwertie]

How is getting a VPS and running a git server, then setting up everyone's SSH key and accounts and then setting up accounts on trello and whatever other services you need (How are you doing CI in this setup) meant to be easier than dropping gitea on a server and having everything you need in one place and with a simple GUI.

Sure you CAN use git without a web UI, We had that at work for a while and it was not a good experience at all compared to using gitlab which we have now and we now have so many features that let us get things done faster.

[adrianN]

Sending patches to mailing lists is a popular way of working that is well supported by git.

[tomsmeding]

Playing the devil's advocate: then you still need somewhere that people can get the current repository state from. This place might not need to do anything with pull requests or any other write action on the repository, but somewhere to clone from is necessary. This would then be the "hosted" repo, and the patches sent via mail are just that, patches.

[pbhjpbhj]

Sounds like you're talking around semantics. Yes, any server you connect to as a client to clone a repo is "hosting" that repo. But that can be practically any computer it doesn't need to be a _dedicated_ host in a server farm, it could be a devs laptop.

[maconic]

Exactly :)

[maconic]

Fair enough, but there is still a hosted solution, it's just hosted email instead :) I know Linux used that approach, which is seemingly ironic since Linus made git, and previously used BitKeeper. There seemed to be some problem that emailing patches to a mailing list wasn't solving to motivate the invention of git.

[dkersten]

You can email git patches though (which is essentially what pull requests are, really, just using a different interface)

[ldehaan]

you could use ngrok to expose yourself temporarily for distribution