I’m more excited to give today’s status update than any other so far. To get the necssary bits out of the way: this month, 368 users have joined the community, bringing our total to 10,5391. Welcome!
General news: Simon Ser joins us
I’m very excited to announce that Simon Ser will be joining Sourcehut. His role will be interesting, and representative of my vision for Sourcehut in the long-term. Simon’s responsibilities are to simply continue working on self-directed free software projects. I chose to work with him because he’s already a talented generalist and motivated member of the free software community. He’s written more about his specific plans in his own blog post, but with our support he’ll be working on projects like mrsh, Wayland, and the maintenance of large swaths of Golang’s email landscape.
Some of Simon’s work directly benefits Sourcehut, but the goal of sponsoring his work is to help populate the open source ecosystem as a whole with motivated, financially stable developers with the freedom to work at their own direction. If you’ve been following the financial reports, this kind of work is what I plan on spending Sourcehut’s profits on: directly elevating the free and open source software community.
Additionally, thanks to Denis Laxalde’s help, Sourcehut packages are now available for Debian from our new Debian repository. Thanks Denis!
git.sr.ht: web-based patchsets
Many of you recall one of the original promises of Sourcehut: web-driven tooling built on top of an email-driven workflow. This is part of the third broad phase of Sourcehut development. These three phases are: (1) build a bunch of self-contained tools which represent the primitives of a development system; (2) extend them with comprehensive APIs and webhooks; (3) teach them to talk to each other. This design takes longer to bear fruit, but the result is worth it. However, our wait is starting to come to a close: this week, I implemented patchset preparation on the web.
This is now live on git.sr.ht! Please give it a shot and let me know your thoughts. Progress is being made on the other end of this workflow as well - see the lists.sr.ht updates later on. In other git.sr.ht news, some long-requested features like release blobs and git-lfs are showing signs of life. This month, a shiny new 64TB NAS was provisioned and installed in our datacenter, and will be the backbone upon which many of these features are implemented.
lists.sr.ht
I have been working on lists.sr.ht indirectly recently, in the form of
improvements to libgit2 and pygit2 upstream. The idea is to
expose libgit2’s pluggable backends to pygit2, so that I can create a
pygit2.Repository which is backed by git.sr.ht via the git.sr.ht API.
builds.sr.ht
NetBSD folks have been helping me work through the issues, but it’s slow going. If anyone wants to have a go at it, download this image and see if you can’t figure out how to make it expand the partitions and filesystem to fill available space on first boot. It’s generated with these scripts on a NetBSD host.
That same NAS I mentioned in the git.sr.ht update, by the way, is going to be used for build artifacts soon, and likely for build caches as well, which will speed up many classes of builds. Additionally, a POWER9 server has been provisioned and installed in the DC, which I’m preparing to eventually become a ppc64le builder. I’m looking forward to seeing both in action!
paste.sr.ht
paste.sr.ht received some polish this month thanks to the hard work of Mykyta Holubakha. A public index of your pastes, access controls, and soon paste deletion are all being added to the platform.
names.sr.ht
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Note: I’ve changed the way the total users are calculated this month. Previously, the number included people who signed up but never confirmed their registration via email. ↩︎