July 15, 2019 by Drew DeVault

What's cooking on Sourcehut? July 2019

Hello again, and thank you for your support during SourceHut’s alpha! This month, our ranks have grown by 352 users, bringing our total company to 9,342 users. The big 10K looms over the horizon! I have some very cool developments to share with you this month.

git.sr.ht

The first and perhaps most exciting development is the availability of code annotations on git.sr.ht. This feature allows you to upload a list of annotations to your repo, which can link from function references to their definition (and vice versa), or link to ticket IDs referenced in comments, or anything else you can dream up. The system is quite flexible and should grow easily to support any number of cool use-cases you can dream up.

I’ve written a longer article on my blog which goes into detail on the implementation. If you’d just like to get a quick feel for the feature, here are a few cool annotated repos for you to browse:

Documentation for annotations can be read here. First-party annotators are available for C and Go, and the community is working on annotators for Rust and Python as well. I hope to extend this feature to hg.sr.ht soon as well. If you write an annotator for your favorite programming language, please let us know on the sr.ht-discuss mailing list!

todo.sr.ht

Ivan Habunek has come along with another great patchset this month, this time adding per-user access control lists to your todo.sr.ht trackers. This is similar in implementation to the corresponding lists.sr.ht feature, and can be used to set up private ticket trackers with your collaborators, post-only security trackers, banning troublesome users, and more. I’ve also added support for adding and removing labels over email (by replying to the notification with “!label example” on the last line), and Paul Wise has improved our notification’s email signatures to be RFC 3676-compliant. Thanks for the patches, folks!

lists.sr.ht

A number of improvements have recently landed in lists.sr.ht. You can now search through patchsets and apply bulk updates to them, and can search them via the API as well. Another little feature, the ability to search by the sender’s timestamp, is also going to be useful for discovering the email thread which corresponds to a git or hg commit. Post-only mailing lists (with restricted browse permissions) now also show a more useful summary page to users who may post but not read the emails.

builds.sr.ht

debian/stable now refers to the newly-stablized Debian Buster, and Debian Bullseye has been added as debian/unstable. There is also a patch in my inbox from Simon Ser adding FreeBSD 11.3 support, which I plan on applying later this afternoon. Luca Weiss has also made some changes adding support for cloning repos into a different name than the URL’s basename, which along with improved support for private repos has fleshed out our GitHub integration a bit more. Thanks to both!

man.sr.ht

The realization of this workstream is still a ways out, but I wanted to mention that there have been patches and discussion hanging about on the sr.ht-dev list for overhauling man.sr.ht’s repo storage mechanism. Ryan Chan has been working on moving man.sr.ht’s git repos into your git.sr.ht account, so that you can use git.sr.ht to browse their history and files like any other git repo. We also plan to make wikis available by adding them as branches of existing repositories. This workstream is looking promising and should be completed soon, and acts as exploratory work which will influence similar overhauls for other services in the future (notably dispatch.sr.ht).

meta.sr.ht

Some initial experimentation has been undergone with single-sign-on, which will address the problem of having to log into every *.sr.ht site separately. However, more problems were found than solutions, so this will take some time yet to complete. Once this is out of the way, the plan is to then add multiple email addresses per account and user groups (organizations).

Interesting projects using SourceHut

I’d also like to briefly mention a few cool projects which have moved to SourceHut. First, Alpine Linux has finished their migration to their own lists.sr.ht instance. Additionally, the well known pkgconf software is now available on SourceHut.

Welcome to SourceHut! If you’ve got a project of your own on SourceHut that you want to share, feel free to post about it on sr.ht-discuss. I want to know about the cool stuff you’re building!