I would like to open a discussion thread about the current status and future of Sourcehut. I'd be
happy if this email could stimulate a discussion with project maintainers and other Sourcehut users.

As an outsider of the project, I can get a feel about the progress of Sourcehut by reading the blog.
Last post (March 2023) is about the financials of the previous year:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2023-03-27-2022-financial-report/

Latest technical progress report, October 2022:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-18-whats-cooking-october-2022/

### Places where conversations happen

The mailing lists sr.ht-dev and sr.ht-discuss are the places where public conversations happen, so
the info I can gather are from these places.

### What's cooking on Sourcehut?

Are there open RFCs? One, to my knowledge:
- RFC Organizations (March 2023): https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CCR5CFKD4Y5CT.3RLWZWX54YMRW%40taiga%3E

Other questions:
- How was 2023 for Sourcehut?
- Is there a roadmap?
- What can users expect in 2024?

As an example, the beta release was last mentioned in May 2022. The federation of the GraphQL is
mentioned as one of the last steps blocking the beta:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-05-16-whats-cooking-may-2022/

Another example could be hire.sr.ht: my understanding is that it is an effort led by a contributor
in their free time. There are recent updates on git but no word about progress:
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hire.sr.ht

Last mention on March 2023 on the contributor's website:
https://www.willowbarraco.fr/status-update-2023-03/

To be clear, I am not particularly discussing the beta release or hire.sr.ht: I'm just trying to
give examples about project-wide progress reports that it would be nice to have.

### Non-goals of this thread

I want to steer clear of possible misunderstandings.

This is not a discussion about longstanding issues open on
https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht

This is not a discussion about Sourcehut looking "dead". Sourcehut is very lively. Has been serving
users for 5 years. And yes, though with some limitations, in some areas it is already better than
other similar projects. But it's in "alpha" status. This hints heavily at a vision behind.

This is not pointer finging. I appreciate the work of the maintainers and anyone else helping. I
support Sourcehut exactly because I believe in its mission.

### Other similar threads

Couldn't find any? But happy to receive pointers where these topics where discussed



Thanks!

On Fri Nov 17, 2023 at 3:24 PM CET, jman wrote:
> Latest technical progress report, October 2022:
> https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-18-whats-cooking-october-2022/

Kind of slightly off-topic question: how is the Mercurial
doing? What is the proportion of git.sr.ht versus hg.sr.ht? Is
there some growing or decreasing tendency? How much does it cost?

Best,

Matěj

-- 
http://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/, @mcepl@floss.social
GPG Finger: 3C76 A027 CA45 AD70 98B5  BC1D 7920 5802 880B C9D8
 
There are two kinds of people in this world: those with loaded
guns, and those who dig. You dig.
  -- Of course, the traumatically cliché uttering of Clint
     Eastwood in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966)

We will be doing the annual round-up blog post later this month, which
will cover the status of SourceHut today and our plans for next year.

> Kind of slightly off-topic question: how is the Mercurial doing? What
> is the proportion of git.sr.ht versus hg.sr.ht? Is there some growing
> or decreasing tendency? How much does it cost?

I can't speak to the last two questions, but for the first two:

1) The mercurial hosting part of sourcehut is doing OK AFAICT. The good
   and bad thing about it is that I'm the one who wrote most of it, but
   I have very simple and basic needs. So it's fine to me, has been fine
   for years, and so I haven't felt much need to do anything except some
   occasional bug fixing, or rare important upgrades like GQL support.
   To anybody else however it might seem like it's missing a lot of
   features. I encourage these people to submit patches.

2) The proposition of git.sr.ht vs hg.sr.ht is 50% personal taste, and
   50% support model. If you prefer git, use the former. If you prefer
   mercurial, use the latter. But also, if you want repo hosting
   officially supported by sourcehut, use the former. Use the latter
   only if you have more basic needs, or are OK with pitching in with
   patches for stuff that's missing. Drew has been very clear and up-
   front, since the beginning, about the fact that hg.sr.ht is
   "maintained by sourcehut community members", unlike git.sr.ht.

I hope that helps!