This is the last of the series of nine reports started April 2021 when the DAPSI grant was approved. It started under the name fedeproxy and now has a better one forgefriends. Most of the activity was related to renaming the project, discussing governance and funding. Not much happened on the software side of things.
Software Development
The main branch reached a point where it implements the main features found in the deprecated python based implementation: the switch from Python to Go is complete.
The strategy to maintain forgefriends as a long standing fork of Gitea proved to not be right because the codebase is frequently refactored. A new strategy was implemented and documented. It boils down to rebasing instead of merging. Each forgefriends feature (activitypub, projectbase, etc.) lives in its own branch and they are rebased on top of the Gitea main branch on a weekly basis.
Diversity
In addition to the French interpreter, a Chinese interpreter was recruited and they will both provide simultaneous interpretation during the next videoconference.
Details on the work done to foster diversity are available in the forum.
Collaboration
Social Coding
The new Social Coding initiative decided to use the forgefriends forum for asynchronous communication and a new category will be created for that purpose.
Chapril forge
@pilou and @dachary did their duties, upgrading Gitea, participating in the monthly Chapril meeting, moderating user accounts. The machine running Gitea was upgraded from Debian GNU/Linux Buster to Debian GNU/Linux Bullseye and Postgres 11 upgraded to Postgres 13.
forgefed.io
@realaravinth reached out via the chat room about the forgefed.io project. The scope of the project is the same as forgefriends and technical discussions compared the choices and associated rationale between the two.
Governance
The Governance & decisions category was created in the forum to collect all decisions for easier reference. Its description also contains the list of community members who have access to exclusive resources, as required by the forgefriends manifesto.
A guide to forgefriends governance was written: it is a summary of how the forgefriends manifesto was applied to concrete use cases since the beginning of the project. It should help newcomers understand how decisions are made, what transparency means in the context of forgefriends and get a rough understanding of how a horizontal community works in practice.
Communication and Branding
As a followup of the decision to change the name from fedeproxy to forgefriends, all resources were updated.
It was proposed to organize a webinar on forge federation and invitations were sent to make it happen around mid-January.
Now that the 5,000€ grant earmarked for Gitea federation is complete, there were discussions on how to communicate about it but nothing was done yet.
Transparency and funding
The 5,000€ grant earmarked for Gitea federation was completed and paid in full.
There were no applicants for the third DAPSI call. Noone was interested to take the seat for the last phase of the DAPSI grant and the grant came to an end.
Details on transparency and funding are available in the forum.