The end goal of this proposal is to build interoperability features into GitLab so that it’s possible on one instance of GitLab to open a merge request to a project hosted on an other instance, merging all willing instances in a global network.

To achieve that, we propose to use ActivityPub, the w3c standard used by the Fediverse. This will allow us to build upon a robust and battle-tested protocol, and it will open GitLab to a wider community.

  • Carighan Maconar
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    2011 months ago

    Hold on, are we trying to decentralize an intentionally-centralized point for an already decentralized source versioning system? 😅

    • KaynOPA
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      2411 months ago

      Not quite.

      A project’s repo would still be in one centralized location, like gitlab.com. But you’d no longer need an account on gitlab.com to make a pull request.

      • @dsemy@lemm.ee
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        1911 months ago

        He’s saying Git is already decentralized, GitLab isn’t.

        A project using mailing lists for development can already receive patches from (pretty much) any mail server (while still having a central Git repo).

        It’s kinda surprising it took this long for this to come to Git “forges” TBH.

    • Nyfure
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      1511 months ago

      afaik, PRs arent decentralized as they arent git features, as such so far you need an account on the same git-platform e.g. github to be able to use such features.
      Having such features decentralized would be huge.

    • @syscall@programming.dev
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      411 months ago

      I don’t think of GitLab as super centralized (compared to GitHub) because you can run your own instance. Communication between GitLab instances would be huge