Hello again! Another month into 2020, and SourceHut development continues at a strong pace - a pace I expect to pick up a bit in the coming weeks. We’re joined by another 443 users this month, bringing our total to 12,757. Welcome to SourceHut, everyone! And to our older members, thanks for your continued support.
General News
Our meetup at FOSDEM went well - thanks to everyone who attended! I’m glad I got to meet more of you in person, and we had a great chat going over the plans for the future and getting your feedback on what’s important to you.
In terms of general development, there are a few news items. First, you will probably have noticed that subtle design changes landed throughout the services early this month. These changes brought us into 100% compliance with the WCAG accessibility standards, which is a feat that no other code forge can claim. We score higher now on standard tests of performance, accessibility, and web standards than any other code hosting service. SourceHut is now objectively the fastest, lightest, and most accessible service in the biz. I even fielded a bug report from a Lynx user last week!
Search support has also been improved throughout the site thanks to Ivan Habunek’s hard work, and special thanks to Denis Laxalde as well for his improvements to builds.sr.ht search. Documentation for the new features is coming soon.
I’ve also been working with some community contributors whose aim is to improve Markdown support across the site, bringing support for CommonMark and aligning our implementation more closely with what you may have come to expect from your experiences on the rest of the web. These require changes careful testing, so please be patient while we work on them.
git.sr.ht
A cool new git.sr.ht feature landed this week: attaching files to annotated git tags. This allows you to attach compiled executables, PGP signatures, and so on to your releases. Check out the user documentation here, and the API docs here. This is the first of several planned features which utilize the new blob storage infrastructure - additional features coming soon include git-lfs support, build artifacts, build caches, and a “SourceHut Pages”-like service.
More subtle changes to git.sr.ht include detecting if your repository has a license, which leads to our wiki page with suggestions on how to choose one. I also added support for LibreJS for the few (optional) bits of JavaScript on git.sr.ht, which along with the other changes brings SourceHut’s score for the GNU ethical repository criteria into pretty good standing.
builds.sr.ht
Denis Laxalde, in addition to his work on improving builds.sr.ht search functionality, has also implemented RSS feeds for each page. You can obtain RSS feeds for your user page, any combination of build tags (useful for per-project RSS feeds), and for arbitrary search queries. Thorben Günther also implemented a small bugfix which resolved a long puzzling issue with build status emails - related to UTF-8 email addresses.
Image-specific updates:
- Debian builds with custom repositories now also automatically include the source repos.
- FreeBSD builds no longer use
-cpu qemu64, following upstream fixes to AMD EPYC support. - OpenBSD images now include X11 headers.