And thanks for all ! This week, I decided to replace my old software forge inDefero by a Gitea instance. inDefero project was started in 2008 by Loïc d'Anterroches after Google decided to stop GoogleCode. Unfortunately, it was discontinued some years after because Loïc was almost alone to develop it and don't earn enough money with it (even with a SaaS/pay option). Plus, when you do the same things for a long time, and not necessary related to your core studies, you want to do something else. Written in PHP5, it has a lot of features :

• Multi CVS support : SVN, mercurial, git, monotone
• Tickets
• Code review
• Wiki
• Full Open Source
• Nice design

It's fast and extensible, can be run on a low power server. This is why I really, really thanks Loïc for his hard work. More than ten years after, I still can run it (with some patches) !

Nevertheless, web technologies evolve too fast and I don't want to run PHP5 anymore (nor create a container for it). I wanted something light & fast, something I can hack, something nice for the eyes. After looking on all available forges, I decided to test Gitea. I don't know Go programming language, so I can't patch it, but I was really impressed to see how fast it is (on a low power server). Concerning UI, it's a clone of Github, but it's almost the case for all competitors... Not really nice or innovative, but it's okay. The funny fact is that I can't compile it by myself because it take too much memory... Fortunately, the precompiled binary works like a charm !

Why not Github (or other online forge) ? More than code hosting, Github offers a community. It has become the reference for all developpers (you can even run your own company instance !). I'm pretty sure I would get more contributions to my projets if I put them on it. From a technical point of view, it works very well and offer all you need (except project management). So, the reason to not choose an external forge is more a philosophical decision : it's better to keep your projects/data in your own home more than elsewhere, to have a full control on it (ok, git is by design a distributed software). It's the same for the blog in comparison of Facebook/Instagram/Whatever... Sure, it's less fast, can have some downtime and I had to take care on backups and administration by myself. It's the price of freedom.

The new address for my projects is more generic : forge.soutade.fr. I tried to map old inDefero URLs to redirect in the new one, but didn't migrate tickets & user accounts (sorry everybody).