alt Hacker NewsIf I could make my own GitHub
Comments
> PR approval is too boolean. The PR is approved or it's not approved. Real code review, like real life, lives in the middle
This is have-your-cake-and-eat-it. PR approval is a permission so is a boolean. Of course it is. Either the code can be merged or it can't.
What's being described really here is just something to make you feel slightly better about yourself whilst approving code you hate ("we should revisit this..."). Just open a new ticket.
> If I clone a repo, I want a pretty limited history for that repo when I clone. If I start to go back in time, spin up a worker to go fetch that stuff from the VCS when I need it.
You want blobless clones:
git clone --filter=blob:none <url>
> Well Y Does Some Of That
yes but tangled.org really does do most of that!
1. JJ as the VCS: tangled supports stacked PRs using jj change-ids. https://blog.tangled.org/stacking , we use it a lot to build tangled itself: https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/pulls
2. Raspberry pi as a forge for a long time: also check, the git server shim is super lightweight, its just an XRPC layer over git repositories + an sqlite3 database. there are folks running it on a riscv board with 512 megs of RAM.
3. Actions are critical and they should be runnable on my local machine: IMO this ask is slightly misplaced. it is mostly your build-systems' job to be hermetic, run anywhere, handle cross-builds etc. it would be really cool to "promote" results of such builds to the forge itself.
Does this conversation exist in 2026? If we can all code everything quickly and SaaS has no value then just build your own in a weekend and put GitHub out of business?
There is a fundamental contradiction here.
> There are a lot of tools that do parts of this. I want someone to take them, put them all together and fit them up.
But just a few inches earlier, the author stated:
> Everything tools always turn into crap.
This seems like a contradiction to me.
I think there's a gap in the market for a much simpler type of git service. All I need is a remote host to which I can push projects for others to see. I don't particularly want pull requests, actions or anything like that.
Maybe a way of facilitating "releases" with compiled binary assets (built locally and uploaded).
Forks can be handled by people cloning the repository and uploading a new project.
When the solution becomes the problem, an opportunity for disruption opens up. Lots of chatter around this right now. I'd be curious to see if any of the many alternatives popping up gain traction before Github course corrects.
I would use RFC2822 as the underlying format to store any kind of message (pull request, review comment, issue etc.), and of course when displaying messages use CommonMark to style them. Any metadata goes into headers, and Message-ID/In-Reply-To/References headers can be used to link them all together. Using this well defined format you can then decide how to best store and transport all the messages, maybe in a git repo as well, use email, or whatever else works.
I personally think Gerrit works much better than whatever GitHub et al. have for code reviews. As for CI, I would try to keep that out of it as much as possible; just hooks to start a pipeline and to display the result and decide whether to allow a merge or not.
There's a good argument to be made that the data for reviews could be held in git repos just as easily as the source.
It can be done incredibly easily simply by having a branch per review with a known prefix (although these will rapidly clog up the default branch namespace), implemented via git namespaces to be distinct from the main namespace, or maybe just a special branch e.g. ".reviews" that just contains commit IDs for the tip of each review branch.
It just needs someone who's invested enough to specify it and make a viable implementation, after which people might start adopting it. I guess the reason github and the various forges didn't take this approach is that keeping the review metadata within their ecosystem is what gives their platform value. If anyone could use any local tool they like for reviewing other people's code, there wouldn't be as much vendor stickiness.
EDIT: actually, I guess there are other reasons why you might want your review metadata in a different repository, such as access control and/or cross-repo reviews.
> This person has a family. This person has hobbies. This person is, at this moment, crying.
Reminded me one benefit of email-based workflow.
If I started receiving email, that's usually because I'm in the right mood to doing so. In such mood, I'll be more focused because I expect nothing else to interrupt my work.
My problem with notification is that there's a pull towards clearing them as they show up. But there's no guarantee I have the right energy at the moment.
Also, I found that most notification systems on the web are poor mimics of what email client has already archived decades ago. Maybe the old folks really got it right for using emails.
I recognise myself in this post without having realised it previously.
The PR review process is flawed, it adds something, but maybe not what it intends.
If i was making my own GitHub, i would make it possible to put one deploy keys to multiple repos, same as in Gitea. Why that doesn't work is beyond me and is a major pita with no simple work arounds
> 1. Stuff happens in the wrong order. […] You don't want the feedback loop after the commit you want it before. Let me do an enforced pre-commit hook to run the jobs remotely on the forge and provide the feedback to the user before they push.
My approach is to utilize https://pre-commit.com/ to have all checks available to run locally during commit (or push), but leave it to contributors whether they want to run it or not. If they don't, the checks still run on the forge after pushing. The upside of this approach is that it still allows contributors to commit without internet access or the forge being down.
> 3. PRs are too inflexible. I don't need 4 eyes on every change, especially in a universe where LLMs exist. The global GDP lost annually to senior engineers staring at a four-line PR waiting for someone — anyone — to type 'LGTM' could fund a moon mission.
Well, that's possible with Github and is just a matter how permissions to merge PRs are configured. Just let every contributor merge changes without explicit approval. And if you want LLM approval, make that a Github Action with mandatory success for merging.
> 4. Stacked PRs are just better. […]
Seems like Github is working on this: https://github.github.com/gh-stack/
> 8. On the flip side, since I need to be online all the time to really work with a team […]
Sure, for communication you need internet access, but working on code can be much more efficient if you can do so without relying on internet access and the forge being available.
I'd even argue working on issues and reviewing PRs should be available entirely offline too with just the state getting synced whenever internet connectivity to the forge is available.
I don’t understand why any of this would take submarine money to build. GitHub itself certainly wasn’t built with submarine money.
I really like Gerrit's workflow with diff reviews as opposed to pull requests, but unfortunately compared to something like gitea it lacks everything else we've come to expect from git hosting (issues, project planning, etc) which makes it seemingly a hard sell for many. I really wish there was a nice diff review platform kind of like phabricator but alas.
This article says git was designed for distributed version control. Then says git doesn't work for most distributed projects because there isn't high trust. But, I'm puzzled why people would still want to build software with low trust.
If anybody here does do this -- and please do -- please abstract out the VCS backend so we're not stuck with git. Let people bring their own CI/CD too. If you must roll your own CI don't use YAML, for mercy's sake; use a declarative definition (a la bazel with CUE, Skylark) or actual code.
Working on it :P I’m going to take the idea to add a ‘defer’ button to PR comments. Which is fantastic.
This makes total sense to me. Everything that makes up the state of your project should either be part of the versioned repo (git) or not be part of the project.
I created a little Github Issues replacement for myself that puts the issues within the repo so that the work and the todos stay in sync. https://github.com/steviee/git-issues
And I bet there's numerous other projects like that.
Hope you get your submarine, man! ;)
If gitlab makes even some of its current premium features free (mostly around push rules, and merge dequest guardrails), most comoanies will host their own gitlab in a heartbeat.
> Stuff happens in the wrong order. You know the PR. Commit 1: 'Feature.' Commit 2: 'fix.' Commit 3: 'fix.' Commit 4: 'actually fix.' Commit 5: 'please.' Commit 6, made at 11:47 PM on a Thursday: 'asdfasdf'. This person has a family. This person has hobbies. This person is, at this moment, crying. You don't want the feedback loop after the commit you want it before. Let me do an enforced pre-commit hook to run the jobs remotely on the forge and provide the feedback to the user before they push.
How would a pre-commit hook help? Would the developer not be crying and working late if their work was rejected by the pre-commit hook instead of the PR? Also, if the tests are so fast they wouldn’t block the terminal running `git commit` for more than a minute or two, you can just run the tests on the local machine, and you should be running them as part of your workflow.
> PRs are too inflexible. I don't need 4 eyes on every change, especially in a universe where LLMs exist. The global GDP lost annually to senior engineers staring at a four-line PR waiting for someone — anyone — to type 'LGTM' could fund a moon mission. A nice one. With legroom. Let me customize and more easily control this. If the person is a maintainer and the LLM says its low risk/no risk just let them go.
You can do this with the existing forges, you can give trusted people the right to bypass the rules. Or you could build your own small PR auto-approval bot, which hands the diff to a LLM, and if the LLM approves, the bot approves the PR on the forge.
Mostly agree with everything, but I will not stand for this slander against sweet potato fries!!!
I dream of a world of stagit + issue creation written in Rust. End
Doesn't sound too hard.
Why don't you see how far you get in a weekend with Claude.
Stuff happens in the wrong order. You know the PR. Commit 1: 'Feature.' Commit 2: 'fix.' Commit 3: 'fix.' Commit 4: 'actually fix.' Commit 5: 'please.' Commit 6, made at 11:47 PM on a Thursday: 'asdfasdf'. This person has a family. This person has hobbies. This person is, at this moment, crying. You don't want the feedback loop after the commit you want it before. Let me do an enforced pre-commit hook to run the jobs remotely on the forge and provide the feedback to the user before they push.
> I was prompted to write this after reading the good post about Ghostty leaving GitHub but it's something I've written and talked about for a few years.
Many of us were annoyed already when Microslop, 'xcuse me, Microsoft assimilated GitHub. But we have to be realistic - alternatives often sucked. Sourceforge? I find creating issues there annoying to no ends. I can use gitlab, which is a bit better than sourceforge, but I also hate creating issues there. I recently saw codeberg appears to have updated its UI (I think?), but I also find it quite annoying.
What GitHub got right were, initially, the UI; and also a focus on folks using github, e. g. making things easy/easier for them. They did not get everything right though - the wiki support I find awful. I rarely use the wikis because they are so bad.
I think the really big problem is that there are commercial interests aka private interests. Microsoft is just one example here; it is a problem literally everywhere in similar sites. In the past I pointed at the example of discussions in issues, with regards to the xz backdoor utils - and the next day after I also participated in discussions, Microsoft took it all down; though it also does not matter if it was Microsoft or the repository owner. The problem is that individuals can too easily censor potentially useful information. The issue discussions WERE useful, and they were censored. If I remember correctly, all information from back then was never fully reinstated. Perhaps people mirrored it, but I did not see a link. The point is that I think this shows that top-down control can be really detrimental. And let's be honest: how many of you trust Microsoft? We kind of need something that is de-central, works reliably and well, and also has a good UI by default and a simple (or at the least a good) workflow. And we also need to avoid the situation where private actors can hold everyone else a hostage. I have absolutely no idea how to solve the above; perhaps it requires different approaches at the same time.
The www kind of changed and I feel that private interests - aka huge mega-mega corporations in particular - made things a lot worse in the last 10-15 years here. That needs to change.
> Let me do an enforced pre-commit hook to run the jobs remotely on the forge and provide the feedback to the user before they push.
You have to 'push' the code to the forge to run it. This code is a 'branch' of the version that is on repo.
> The PR is approved or it's not approved
The code is either merged or it's not. Sure you can trivially add a snooze feature...
> I don't need 4 eyes on every change, especially in a universe where LLMs exist.
Huh, I do. Anyone thinking LLMs replace human review, when LLMs are already replacing the coders, is just vibe-coding, not building a reliable library.
> Stacked PRs are just better.
I have no idea what this really means honestly. You can stack multiple commits in a single PR. You can create PRs based on other MRs.
> A forge shouldn't do everything. Issue tracking yes. Kanban board, probably not.
The board has to live in-sync with the issues or it's not a board.
The alternative to GitHub is already here. It is called self-hosting and there are many alternatives.
The Linux kernel is not hosted on GitHub and uses cgit. Others use GitLab, or Gitea and there is also Forgejo (Which Codeberg uses) that people are using and can be self hosted.
This is why now everyone is realising why "centralising everything to GitHub" [0] was a terrible idea and now GitHub has been (unsurprisingly) run into the ground.
If I were starting such a project -- and I must resist the temptation to do so -- I'd start by taking a very close look at Gerrit.
As a technology base to fork from, probably not ideal. But its flows are something to learn from.
The PR process in GitHub has always been garbage, and its cargo cult adoption by the whole industry is sad. But also unnecessary. There were always alternatives, but GH's refusal to do proper multi-round review and its tendency to encourages giant messy merge commits with no ability to track discussions between changes is an organizational nightmare, and now with LLMs it's even more terrifying.
Every company I've worked at since I left Google has had this problem with giant "take it or leave it" submissions. Dozens of commits in one "review". No ability to properly track changes between revisions. A mess of commits that all land at once.
I don't see how one can build a serious software team structure over top of this. It's a mess. And GitLab only makes it slightly better.
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> Stuff happens in the wrong order.
Seems like there are lots of answers: pre-commits, rebase squashes, merge squash...
Feedback + commit is a loop. I often reply to comments w/ the commit sha that resolves it.