hunger

sigh

All build tools are simple as long as nobody uses it. Even CMake was simple before KDE and Co. started to rely on it.

A build tool can be simple, if you use conventions over configuration. Unfortunately that ship has sailed for the C and C++ eco system decades ago... Every project is widely different from every other project out there. Heck, we can not even agree on file extensions for c++ files, let alone a directory structure for project source code to live in or the tooling we want to be available.

So you need to have every little detail configurable... and since all projects are so very different, users will need to tweak all those settings... as the first bigger project adopting abcs will dictate their defaults into your code (where you have not gone with your defaults before).

Seriously, you need a language leadership team that considers tooling as important from the very start or you will not have a simple build tool ever. See rust: There the leaders pushed for tooling from the start. Every rust project looks basically the same because of that. These strong conventions enable the language to have a simple build tool.

C++ is on thenfar side of that. Even in 2020 when introducing modules the committee choose not to mandate even the most basic interoperability features like file extensions. The cmake people had to get several compiler developers to add things to make modules toolable. And even with that effort the meson people seem to say c++ modules are entirely untoolable still.

Those evil companies block random users, just because their government made some laws about it.

I'd go for open source projects. They usually have bigger code bases and good practices, that they enforce on their contributors with code reviews and such.

It's a good way to get feedback on your code, something miss out on personal projects and get much less of in university and corporate projects.

Github login does not help much... devs are on github, not on random forgjo instances. That's where they see your project. Github is also where they put their fork of your project when they play with it. They will write comments using github markdown and won't care whether that renders correctly or not in your forge.

And it is where they will report issues and open a PR. It is annoying, but it is how it is. When you ask them to open the PR elsewhere they complain sinde they need to set up an account there and copy ssh key and similar things. You need a very dedicated contributor to go through with all that.... especially if it is just a few lines of drive-by fixes.

I never said that you can not run a project elsewhere, my point is that you will get way more interaction on github.

Try pushing your project to github and compare the interactions you get from both forges.

That unfortunately requires setting up email... I have not bothered doing so on my boxes in a very long time.

The biggest factor to me is developer attention. I had a project on gitlab and pushed a README.md with a link to the gitlab instance into github. I got about 10 times more reactions from github, incl. PRs (where the person had grabbed the code from gitlab and did a PR on github anyway) -- even in this setup. Mirroring a project to github tilts that even further.

Not being present on github means a lot less users and contributors. As long as that stays this way there is no way around github.

I hope federated forges can move some attention away from github, making other forges more visible... but I am not too optimistic :-(

The blocking certain countries is a US legal thing. It effects any forge in the US and probably in more areas close to the US. As soon as a forge gets big enough to show up on the radar of government orge they will need to do similar blocking.

You can not really blame github for that part.

Rustfmt is not very configurable. That is a wonderful thing: People don't waste time on discussing different formatting options and every bit of rust code looks pretty identical.

Why would they need to share ssh keys? Ssh will happily accept dozens of allowed keys.

It gets rid of one more SUID binary. That's always a win for security.

Sudo probably is way more comfortable to use and has way more configurable, too -- that usually does not help to make a tool secure either:-)

When I last checked (and that is a long time ago!) it ran everywhere, but did only sandbox the application on ubuntu -- while the website claimed cross distribution and secure.

That burned all the trust I had into snaps, I have not looked at them again. Flatpaks work great for me, there is no need to switch to a wannabe walled garden which may or may not work as advertised.