I witnessed the split of gogs and gitea and while the maintainer of gogs was indeed rarely active and merged PRs very slowly, they at least examined the code and made a proper review with suggestions.
The gitea guys wanted to move a lot faster and in the process neglected quite a bit of code review and product planning. Apparently this continues to this day as evidenced by the PR you linked.
This, and the many trivial CVEs that were discovered in Gitea made me look for alternatives. I think that right now the best free and OSS solution is https://github.com/theonedev/onedev. It even has CI/CD built-in which is cool!
Can also recommend checking out onedev. Seemed much lighter weight to me than gitlab, and it didn't choke when handling large amounts of data like gitea seems to. Not used the CI besides some basic tests, but it looks pretty capable from what I've seen.
Ah sorry, Drone CI (https://www.drone.io/) in order to run automated tests / builds from repo's in gitea. Gitea does not require it but even in my homelab setup I like to auto build / test the stuff I commit.
I'm using this for personal projects, so I'd prefer a free solution. GitLab has a self-hosted version but it's not clear what's available and what requires a license.
The second reason is that GitLab's minimal resource requirements[0] are just overkill compared to OneDev[1] which can run in a single container with an embedded database.
FWIW, GitLab has an entirely OSS community edition, and you can run the enterprise edition just without licenses - I do this personally.
You have to run your own CI runners, but if you can self-host GitLab that ought to be no problem ;)
I agree though, it's very resource heavy - my personal instance has 8G RAM and 4 vCPUs and only two people use it. It has that much RAM because without it, it would randomly fail (usually during/after package upgrades).
An open core model is just bad. Gitlab shows advertisements for features it does not offer and if you want to integrate an already existing feature you won't be able to mainline it.
Gitlab is a capable software (albeit slow and prone to security issues especially with enterprise features) and it is what most people right now are used to and that's why we offer it, but for personal use gogs, gitea or onedev (or many other solutions I won't even try to list) are way better. I run gitea on my 2G RAM VPS next to a dozen other services. I would need double or triple the resources to run gitlab alone.
It's not ideal, I agree - the main reason I use it over lighter & more open services is the integrated CI. I've considered replacing it with sourcehut, but I don't have available hardware to dedicate to the VM-based CI.
onedev I did not know about, and looks exceptionally tempting on that basis.
Genuine question: why has CI become so prominent that even small projects cannot live without? You have a small instance with 2 people using it. Why is CI a deal breaker?
I used gogs before gitea and when it split I watched for a few months and then switched.
The gogs maontainer was unreachable for many month multiple times and the gitea fork os very active. It implements features I care about and even though they move fast and break configs the problems are documented and I had only a few minor problems over the years, a few of them werent even their fault.
So I'm a happy gitea user even when there are things I dislike.
I agree with this too. I witnessed the split too and feel exactly the same.
Interestingly, NotABug have not switched to Gitea and is still running Gogs.
The gitea guys wanted to move a lot faster and in the process neglected quite a bit of code review and product planning. Apparently this continues to this day as evidenced by the PR you linked.