Future of git.fosscommunity.in service
Pirate Praveen Wed 20 May 2026 10:19PMPublicSeen by 60The immediate concern: we are running out of hosting credits from Infomaniak, we can continue only a few months more maximum. But before I ask Infomaniak about continuing the hosting sponsorship by giving us more credit, I want to see if there is people really interested to continue maintaining the service.
When we started with this effort to have fully Free Software as a replacement to Github.com, there was only two good options we knew about - gitlab and gitorious. Gitlab had more features and it acquired gitorious later. Later we learned about pagure (which is not actively developed anymore I think). Now the momentum seems to be with Codeberg.org and ForgeJo. But still offering more options to the community is a good idea, though it needs a lot of sustained effort.
Initially Gitlab Inc sponsored both hosting and Debian packaging work, which was dropped after 6 years. Maintaining gitlab debian package is a huge effort and impossible to do with just volunteer time. So at present the Debian packaging work is stuck, so if someone wants to continue maintaining it, they'd need to migrate to a docker based or omnibus based gitlab setup or even migrate to forgejo.
So if you are willing to continue maintaining it, please speak up now. I want to retire from maintaining this service. The last straw was the recent announcement by Gitlab about moving to fully AI based development https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/05/12/gitlab-announces-layoffs-amid-major-ai-overhaul-480613/
Update: Looks like Infomaniak has refreshed out hosting credits - we have 8196 Euro credits. So this is now mainly about volunteers - hosting costs are already covered.
Credits left is 81.96 Euro and last month invoice was 22.36 Euro, so we have about 3.6 months only left.
Next steps,
If we have volunteers, we will ask Infomaniak for sponsorship.
If we don't have volunteers, we will announce shutting down of the service
If we have volunteers, but Infomaniak don't extend sponsorship, we need to find other sponsors to continue.
Update (26 September 2026): Infomaniak added 500 Euro credits.
Once we decide on the domain, we will setup a forgejo instance on a new server in Infomaniak Public Cloud and migrate data manually (people can request us or migrate themselves).
Since git.flossboxin.org.in is shared infra for many services we won't be migrating to it as we discussed earlier (Ref: https://codema.in/d/o7ytjFpg/future-of-git-fosscommunity-in-service/57)
Would you like to volunteer to continue maintaining fsci code hosting at git.fosscommunity.in?
poll by Pirate Praveen Closed Wed 17 Jun 2026 10:00AM
We have five volunteers who stepped in to continue maintaining it. We will have a meeting soon to plan the future of this service. More volunteers are still welcome to join.
What is this poll about?
I want to retire maintaining git.fosscommunity.in. So we can continue this only if someone else step into volunteer and maintaining it. Since Infomaniak has already provided us with hosting credits till now - we might get continued sponsoring if we ask, we only need volunteers then.
If we don't get continued sponsorship from Infomaniak, then we will need to find other sponsors like FOSS United, they already sponsor other FSCI services, but last request did not include git.fosscommunity.in as Infomaniak was sponsoring it already, after 3.6 months. Current credits can last up to 3.6 months approximately, ie, only 81.96 Euros worth of credits left and monthly bill is 22.66 Euro.
Why is this important?
gitlab debian native package is not longer maintained, so we need to migrate it to a different gitlab installation method like docker or omnibus packages. We could also migrate it to a totally different software or even just create a new service and let users manually migrate if they want to as well.
We can also consider a top level domain as that would give it a more independent identity not tied to FSCI (like codeberg.org) which costs about a thousand rupees per year. For example, codema.in, poddery.com etc have independent top level domains.
What are you asking people to do?
Step into volunteer to maintain such a public code hosting service, people who volunteer can make the decision about which Free Software solution they want to use.
Choose the option(s) you favor.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| yes, I'm volunteering | 40 | 2 | ||||
| I'm volunteering if there are one more volunteer | 40 | 2 |   | |||
| I'm volunteering if there are two more volunteers | 20 | 1 |  | |||
| I'm volunteering for one time migration | 0 | 0 | ||||
| Undecided | 277 |            |
AthulSat 30 May 2026 7:38PM
I would like to volunteer for migrating to a more light weight and efficient infrastructure. Gitea is also a considerable choice along with the options mentioned. I hope other volunteers may join too.
Badri SunderarajanTue 9 Jun 2026 4:43AM
@Athul I think there were issues with the Gitea organisation due to what Forgejo was started as a community-run fork. Many people switched and even the YunoHost Gitea package got replaced by the Forgejo one. So between Gitea and Forgejo, I think Forgejo would be better.
Looking forward to co-volunteering :)
sudo_medarkSat 30 May 2026 7:18PM
I'm happy to step up and volunteer, but I'll definitely need at least one co-maintainer to help share the workload and ensure the service stays reliable.
Could you also point me to the current infrastructure configurations or server deployment scripts? I'd like to review the existing setup for contributing.
Pirate PraveenSun 31 May 2026 1:48PM
Athul volunteered already, so you have two people to take things forward.
Setup is basically just,
apt install gitlab
https://wiki.debian.org/gitlab But this is no longer maintained since Gitlab Inc has stopped sponsoring this work.
So we need to setup something new and migrate data, also because there is huge amount of spam in it, which needs cleanup. So we can tell users to migrate or request us to migrate their projects.
Badri SunderarajanSun 31 May 2026 7:06AM
I am not at all interested in GitLab but can volunteer if we are using something lighter (Forgejo as suggested sounds good, and they are working on federation too!)
Aji Ahamed Thu 21 May 2026 11:31AM
I am intrested in volunteer for maintaining the server. I have worked with gitea selfhosted and would recoment it too.
Pirate PraveenSat 30 May 2026 8:02PM
If you are not able to vote in the poll, you can request membership to https://codema.in/g/Qu3O8mSf/free-software-community-of-india-fsci-git-fosscommunity-in-maintainers
Pirate PraveenSun 31 May 2026 2:00PM
I'm starting a draft mail to Zigo from Infomaniak (he is a Debian Developer and helped us get this sponsorship). Please review/comment.
Draft,
Hi Zigo,
Thanks for sponsoring git.fosscommunity.in (available earlier as gitlab.debian.net) which offers git hosting for the public and is powered by the gitlab package from fasttrack.debian.net (another service also sponsored by Infomaniak).
The 1000 Euro hosting credits for Public Cloud offered earlier is almost exhausted, only 58.61 Euro is left which can cover us roughly 2.6 months more at 22.66 Euro monthly bill. We already ran this service for 43 months with this credit.
We would like to request Infomaniak to continue this sponsorship as many people benefit from this service.
Some statistics: 741 projects, 4,617 users (some of them are spam sign ups - so we do manual sign ups now).
Since debian gitlab package is no longer maintained after Gitlab Inc stopped sponsoring the packaging work, we are considering to migrate to another Free Software like ForgeJo.
More volunteers are joining the team to continue maintaining it.
Looking forward to a positive reply.
Thanks
Praveen
Pirate Praveen ·Sun 31 May 2026 1:35PM
@Athul thanks, we can have a meeting to discuss details after the poll closes.