... | ... | @@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ In the following the references to interview quotes are the first two letters of |
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### The forge ecosystem
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The interviewees use multiple forges for a variety of reasons but they mainly work on their software development project on a single forge. In the past years they came to experience and know about a variety of forges (GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Phabricator, SourceHut, Heptapod, redmine, etc.) (ref. AR, CJ, CP, DA, DO, GR, MA, NA, PO, ZA). All of them have (or had in the past) a GitHub account and they acknowledge the monopolistic position it occupies because it hosts the majority of Free Software projects (ref. ZA44) (ref. DA54) (ref. MA67) (ref. DO61) (ref. GR39). Although they are concerned and have reservations about GitHub (ref. NA93) (ref. DA45) (ref. MA64) (ref. CP57), none of them refuse to use it (ref. PO80). The Free Software forges (GitLab CE, Gitea) are considered to be quality software that can easily be installed and maintained (ref. CP19). In the past years, the number of self-hosted forges instances grew substantially (ref. GR93). However the interviewees noticed that only a few are open to the general public (ref. MA4) (ref. CP57) (ref. GR75): most of them have a specific focus (ref. CP57). For instance the [GitLab CE instance of Gnome](https://gitlab.gnome.org/).
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The interviewees use multiple forges for a variety of reasons but they mainly work on their software development project on a single forge. In the past years they came to experience and know about a variety of forges (GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Phabricator, sourcehut, Heptapod, Redmine, etc.) (ref. AR, CJ, CP, DA, DO, GR, MA, NA, PO, ZA). All of them have (or had in the past) a GitHub account and they acknowledge the monopolistic position it occupies because it hosts the majority of Free Software projects (ref. ZA44) (ref. DA54) (ref. MA67) (ref. DO61) (ref. GR39). Although they are concerned and have reservations about GitHub (ref. NA93) (ref. DA45) (ref. MA64) (ref. CP57), none of them refuse to use it (ref. PO80). The Free Software forges (GitLab CE, Gitea) are considered to be quality software that can easily be installed and maintained (ref. CP19). In the past years, the number of self-hosted forges instances grew substantially (ref. GR93). However the interviewees noticed that only a few are open to the general public (ref. MA4) (ref. CP57) (ref. GR75): most of them have a specific focus (ref. CP57). For instance the [GitLab CE instance of Gnome](https://gitlab.gnome.org/).
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* **CP19**: "We converge towards the notion of 'I have a software component and it runs'".
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* **CP57**: "[...] as any respectable Free Software developer trying to minimize their internal conflicts [...] you cannot be on GitHub nor GitLab.com"
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* **AR56**: "There is no tooling to handle these links, it is documented, it is a convention."
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* **AR64**: "[...] to ensure stability we pin everything and then bots suggests upgrades that can be merged on a rolling basis."
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* **AR67**: "He does the update the version [of the dependency] must be upgraded and the monkey patch breaks."
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* **CP39**: "External issue trackers: Gitea handles that well and I use it to connect with the redmine of [organization]."
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* **CP39**: "External issue trackers: Gitea handles that well and I use it to connect with the Redmine of [organization]."
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* **CP49**: "We use [the API] to produce activity reports."
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* **DA109**: "It was a CLI tool to automate manual tasks by using the GitLab and Redmine API [...]"
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* **DA52**: "<project B> has many dependencies. Some of them are hosted on other forges."
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* **NA52**: "We have some scripts to help developers automate repetitive tasks such as opening a backport issue in Redmine and opening a backport pull request in GitHub."
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* **NA60**: "To use the RocksDB example, bugs in that dependency get fixed by applying a patch to the Ceph project's fork of the RocksDB git repo, and then triggering a new build. But since that means the fork has diverged from the upstream RocksDB project's source code, the patch has to be submitted to the RocksDB project, where it might end up being accepted in a modified form, or even rejected."
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* **NA85**: "When I use Git to prepare a new branch for an update, and one or more downstream patches have made it into the upstream repo since the last update, I do it in such a way that Git automatically drops those patches. "
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* **PO110**: "At April we have an ad-hoc bot to monitor the redmine activity"
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* **PO110**: "At April we have an ad-hoc bot to monitor the Redmine activity"
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* **PO119**: "[...] I use the tig viewer: I add forks I know as remotes in Git"
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* **PO50**: "[...] I stumbled on a problem with the django-<plugin> dependency that is hosted on GitHub"
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* **PO53**: "I added an hyperlink in a comment of the issue from <projectB> to the issue of the django-<plugin> project"
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