Thanks again for following SourceHut during the alpha! I hope you’re all enjoying the service. Remember to send me your feedback, good or bad! Another month passes and another 430 users join our ranks, bringing our total to 8,990 - just shy of 9,000 strong. To our new members: welcome! And to the 874 users who’ve chosen to pay for their account despite the alpha level of quality the service presents today, a special thanks: your support is the reason I’m able to work so hard on the service and free software in general.
aerc
Direct progress on SourceHut has been somewhat slower than usual this month, because I’ve been focusing on pushing a side project to its initial pre-release: aerc. I normally don’t mention my other projects in these articles (though if you’re interested, I suggest checking out my blog), but given the deep focus on email in SourceHut’s design I find that aerc may be relevant to your interests. It’s an email client for your terminal and it offers many design improvements over existing mail solutions. Please check it out if you have the chance!
Back to your regularly scheduled updates.
Mercurial conference update
Ludovic and I attended the Mercurial conference in Paris, and met many of the Mercurial developers. I’d like to extend my gratitude to them for putting on such a great event, and to Ludovic for coming along to make me look like less of a moron! I learned a lot about hg thanks to the patience of the Mercurial devs. We spent a lot of time talking about their plans and discussing design directions for hg.sr.ht. Our offering stands to become the premier hosting destination for the Mercurial open-source community, and I was glad we had a chance to set our course carefully towards that end.
todo.sr.ht
A big update comes today for the bug tracking service: it now has an API and webhooks! The documentation is available here.
todo.sr.ht is the last major SourceHut service to receive these features, putting a bow on this workstream and unblocking a lot of others. The first of these now-unblocked workstreams is an overhaul to dispatch.sr.ht, which will bring us lots of long-awaited features. Check out the design doc I posted to sr.ht-dev the other day.
Feedback welcome!
git.sr.ht
Just minor news on this front: with git.sr.ht now growing to over 6,000 repositories, it has outgrown its old VM. To accommodate for this, I’ve provisioned a new host in our datacenter and given half of it to git.sr.ht, giving it a lot of room for future growth. Thanks for enduring a couple hours of partial downtime this week as I migrated to the new server.
Also, thanks to ~ignaloidas for putting git.sr.ht through a stress test with a repo designed to break web interfaces - found and fixed a few bugs thanks to that!