forge vs gitolite (Re: CTI - Making a decision for glibc.)

[Gabriel Ravier]

On 2/1/26 6:24 PM, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2026, Simon Marchi <simark@simark.ca> wrote:
>
>> On 2026-01-31 02:11, Alexandre Oliva via Overseers wrote:
>>> Do you have any plans to avoid the SaaSS features of typical forges?
>> Can you explain what the SaaSS features of typical forges are?
> I don't have an exhaustive list, but the computing activities that first
> come to mind, that I've already mentioned in this thread, are patch
> merging and CI/CD.
>
> There may be more, even though most of the computing done by forges is
> publishing and communication, which are not SaaSS because they are
> activities that necessarily involve other parties, so they can't be a
> single party's computing.
>
I don't get what the issue with patch merging is, exactly. It is an 
operation which the user can easily fall back to doing on their own 
machine (i.e. running git merge/apply/am themselves), of which the user 
already has to transmit all the data involved to the server even if they 
do it themselves (that is, the information transmitted to the server 
when doing a merge locally and when doing it on the server directly is 
the same), and which is trivially verifiable by them (if the server did 
something else than what would have been done locally, this would be 
trivially detectable and pretty systematically so, too). I would have 
assumed SaaSS was the result of, at the very least, one of these things 
being false.