[nightpool]

Forejo is/was a soft fork of Gitea due to some licensing / trademark bruhaha that I think got blown somewhat out of proportion. (And Gitea was famous for using Github instead of dogfooding their own software, which I've always thought was a pretty strange choice). I'm not familiar enough with the development roadmap of both teams to make a good call on whether following the fork is a good idea or not, but I know a lot of projects are just bandwagoning on the fork due to generally frustrating Gitea governance. GitLab is open core and I know a lot of people are frustrated with their UX and with their high resource consumption for self-hosting (although I would expect YJIT probably made a big improvement here). I've only seen maybe one project use Gogs seriously, I don't get the sense that it has the same level of adoption as the other three.

[lotyrin]

Yes, Issue with GitLab is their "Enterprise" maximalist feature set. Seems like they want to be the solution for the entire SDLC for every conceivable team.

I remember thinking a decade ago "wow these guys are biting off a lot to chew, maybe in a decade they'll be able to tackle all these things in a comprehensive way" and my opinion now is they are still probably a decade out. I appreciate their ambition and wish them luck, but it's not for me.

If if a project requires more maintenance than I could potentially do by myself in a pinch because of complexity or having a massive supply chain of dependencies that keep it on a treadmill I will hesitate to depend on it.

[cyberpunk]

A decade out? They do Code, Artifacts and CI basically that all works.

What missing sdlc features are going to take them a decade to write?

[MrJohz]

In fairness, I've not used GL in a couple of years, but before that I used it a lot, and it all worked, but it never worked very well. Issue organisation was painful, and there was always some new trick that made it slightly easier but never enough (boards, nested workspaces, sprint tools, etc). CI had about a hundred different ways of doing the same thing, because every so often the GL devs would realise their current system wasn't quite general or powerful enough, and add a new way of defining DAGs, or a new way of sharing jobs, or a new way of managing environments. You didn't need to switch, but trying to figure out how all these different approaches interacted by reading the docs was a nightmare.

In general, the documentation and UI were painful, and trying to figure out how to do something usually took me to a GL issue that would describe my problem but either be closed (with little indication of whether the feature was added or what form it had taken in the end), or open with no discussion apart from a bunch of comments from a community manager saying "a bronze supporter said that this is a blocker for them". Trying to figure out where features or configuration lived in the UI was also like pulling teeth, especially with GL's love of icons to explain what everything is.

So it's not that the features are missing, it's that they're all half-baked, and it would take Gitlab another ten years to polish them off and round them out.

[l0b0]

Just about every week I find "new" GitLab bugs which, after a quick search, turn out to be 5+ years old, with lots of community engagement, but seemingly zero movement from GitLab itself. I wonder what GitLab devs actually work on, because none of the new features in the last couple of years seem as impactful as fixing one of those bugs would be. (I still prefer it to GitHub, especially the CI model.)

[lotyrin]

It's not about features or if they work it's about the conceptual load presented to the user by the quality of how those features are integrated, how much configuration they require to do only what you want them to, ask of you only what you want them to, and no more.

When I'm interacting with a maximalist system designed to be everything to everyone, I still only want to have to worry about the things I care about.

They do seem to hold this as a value, but it's secondary to the maximalism.

[ptman]

There is a plan for hosting gitea on gitea: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

[account42]

Yes but the project is almost a decade old. If they can't use it themselves by now why would anyone else.