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Proposal for GitLab to support ActivityPub (docs.gitlab.com)

submitted 7 months ago by HKayn@dormi.zone to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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The end goal of this proposal is to build interoperability features into GitLab so that it’s possible on one instance of GitLab to open a merge request to a project hosted on an other instance, merging all willing instances in a global network.

To achieve that, we propose to use ActivityPub, the w3c standard used by the Fediverse. This will allow us to build upon a robust and battle-tested protocol, and it will open GitLab to a wider community.

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[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 42 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Being able to create issues and discuss merge requests on various source hosting sites without having to create an account on each would be a huge step forward! Especially since M$ has taken over Github and is well on its way to become the defacto centralized Git hoster.

[-] density@kbin.social 10 points 7 months ago

well on its way to become the defacto centralized Git hoster.

If this isn't Github already, what is?

[-] shrugal@lemm.ee 2 points 7 months ago

I don't think anything is yet, because thankfully interop and decentralization are core design principles of git itself. But it does become more centralized the more parts of the workflow we move to these platforms, like project planning, reviews and build processes. We are not at the point where you can't reasonably use anything but GH, but that's definitely M$'s goal, and we're getting closer imo.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 20 points 7 months ago

Hold on, are we trying to decentralize an intentionally-centralized point for an already decentralized source versioning system? 😅

[-] HKayn@dormi.zone 21 points 7 months ago

Not quite.

A project's repo would still be in one centralized location, like gitlab.com. But you'd no longer need an account on gitlab.com to make a pull request.

[-] dsemy@lemm.ee 19 points 7 months ago

He's saying Git is already decentralized, GitLab isn't.

A project using mailing lists for development can already receive patches from (pretty much) any mail server (while still having a central Git repo).

It's kinda surprising it took this long for this to come to Git "forges" TBH.

[-] Nyfure@kbin.social 13 points 7 months ago

afaik, PRs arent decentralized as they arent git features, as such so far you need an account on the same git-platform e.g. github to be able to use such features.
Having such features decentralized would be huge.

[-] syscall@programming.dev 4 points 7 months ago

I don't think of GitLab as super centralized (compared to GitHub) because you can run your own instance. Communication between GitLab instances would be huge