Sr.ht becomes Sourcehut | Hacker News Reader

Sr.ht becomes Sourcehut

sourcehut.org

289 pointsBoulth79 comments

As of posting, the info on this site is very lean, but going forward sourcehut seems to be the name for the software suite of the service 'sr.ht'. The linkage is implied by the quote on the site that "sr.ht is a hosted instance of sourcehut provided for your convenience".

The impetus behind the branding clarification seems to be this HN thread [1]. For more history, see the the debut announcement [2] and its corresponding HN thread [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929709#18930413 [2] https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458908

Seems to be otherwise - https://meta.sr.ht is now branded as "sourcehut". I'm guessing sourcehut.org is a marketing page while sr.ht continues to be the service domain.

Well, the default config itself has been updated with the new name [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] -- this what you'd self-host, and is also what's hosted out of 'sh.rt', but we're splitting hairs to pedantic, and both of us are mostly right.

It seems 'sh.rt' will continue to be the service domain while the software (but not the identities of the artifacts) have been renamed for ease, and it's all being done in a way to maximize benefit and minimize breakage.

Definitely glad that he changed it. I was concerned about that holding his growth back when he did the Show on Lobsters. Also, some people can't access sites with weird domains due to corporate firewalls. A .org might prevent that.

Looking back at the thread, it looks like the new name was suggested back then by neuromanc:

https://lobste.rs/s/cqangw/sr_ht_hacker_s_forge_now_open_for...

I like how the proposed name fit with the existing one. Good example of backward compatibility, but with project names. ;)

I imagined someone asked if "sr.ht" was pronounced "sourcehut" and he said "uhhh... Yea!"

Funny to see it came from reddit, thanks.

lobste.rs ≠ redd.it

I think this is a bad move.

There is already:

SourceTree

SourceView

SourceForge

TheSource

SourceCode

SourceDaddy

OutSource

By adding more "Source", you are just diluting value of source brand.

It will be interesting to see how many more "Source" untill we stop using Source at all?

Same is the thing with "Git" and Docker escaped this issue by prohibiting use of "Docker" in non docker owned companies.

GitHub, GitLab, Gitea. Those all work fine. As long as you can easily tell the difference between them.

Agreed. Taco Bell, Del Taco, Taco Cabana, Taco Bueno, Del Taco, Fuzzy's Tacos... and it keeps going.

"Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars. Now all restaurants are Taco Bell. "

Pizza Hut...

My wife still misses Taco Tico, and every time I call some other restaurant that, she's incredibly disappointed.

So yeah, there's more to branding than a single word of the name.

> you are just diluting value of source brand

"Source" is not the brand, it's the literal description of what most (all?) of these products and services deal with.

The prefixes/suffixes make the brand. Having a very relatable/descriptive term like "Source" in that brand adds clarity.

Mercurial support, fuck yeah:

https://hg.sr.ht/

This is the killer feature for me.

Why Mercurial?

Here’s a list of Mercurial features that I think are really cool:

Revsets – a domain-specific language for querying your commits

Templates – a domain-specific language for altering the output of almost every command. Putting together these two you can do things like this: http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/customising-mercurial-l...

Evolution – a distributed and safe way to share rewrites (think automatically recovering from upstream rebase without any git reset --hard and no git push --force).

Absorb – automatically amends an entire stack of WIP commits at once by picking the right diffs from your working directory based on which commits’ contexts they fit best.

Curses interface for hunk-picking – a unified interface for splitting diffs for any purpose: whether to revert working-directory changes, write a new commit, uncommit parts of a commit, or amend a commit with more diffs. Just add --interactive to any of those commands and start picking hunks!

A fairly rich built-in web interface – hg serve and point your browser to http://localhost:8000 and you’re good to go.

Lots of support for monorepos – indeed, this is the main reason that Google, Facebook, and Mozilla are all pouring work into hg and are using it.

A consistent UI – this one is more subjective but often-touted feature of Mercurial. If a command accepts a revision/hash/tag/bookmark; it always uses the -r/--rev flag for it (and you can also always use a revset for any command that accepts a revision). If a command allows hunk selection, it always uses the -i/--interactive flag for it. The help for every command fits in about a screenful.

Give it a try! Mercurial is neat!

> a domain-specific language for querying your commits

Meanwhile I google "how to print commit history git" for the 100th time...

I admit, I do `hg help revsets` with some regularity, because I do need to look up the right functions that can perform the query I want, but it's really just a reference check, not a check on the syntax of the language.

Just use gitk...

i threw this alias in my .gitconfig early on, and it's gotten the job done so far...

  hist = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset %s%C(yellow)%d%Creset %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset [%an]' --abbrev-commit --date=relative

It's also dying [1]. Git's the only version control system that's got legs [2].

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

[2] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

I hope you're not just justifying to yourself why you shouldn't learn about something new and interesting.

I'm well aware that everything is git.

This doesn't mean that everything should be git.

Isn't Facebook investing heavily? I'm more interested in 'good' than popular, when it comes to virtually all personal tech decisions and am inspired by this thread to try out Mercurial, especially as I want to move everything to a sourcehut/sr.ht instance.

So does Mozilla.

Perhaps the search trends are more an indication of how often people shoot themselves in the foot with git and have to search for a way to unshoot their feet vs. how seldom that happens with hg.

Or perhaps they're reflecting GitHub's dominance in the forge space and the fact that they only offer git, so a whole lot of people are more-or-less forced to learn something about git, so searches...

Or perhaps they're reflecting something about hg users preferring other search-engines than Google...

Drawing any sort of conclusive correlation between those Google search trends and actual usage or desire to use one or other distributed VCS is a fool's game.

Mercurial seems to be a "nicer" version of git, which doesn't seem to be enough of a difference to avoid the git bandwagon.

Projects like pijul interest me, since they work in a fundamentally different way. Pijul is a "nicer" version of darcs. Git killed darcs not by being nicer but by being faster, and pijul is also faster than darcs, so maybe there's hope ;)

(Of course, most of git's momentum came from huge projects using it, like Linux and Xorg; yet being huge is precisely what forced those projects to favour speed at the cost of "niceness". If a "nice" system existed that was fast enough to handle Linux, Torvalds would probably never have written git).

> Lots of support for monorepos – indeed, this is the main reason that Google, Facebook, and Mozilla are all pouring work into hg and are using it.

They are improving mercurial[1], but are they using it ?

[1] https://code.fb.com/core-data/scaling-mercurial-at-facebook/

Yes

I honestly did. But since my employer uses git, i ended up forgetting all the hg routine during the week.

In the end, it is nicer, but not as nice to miss it that much over git (granted, i do know by heart all the dances to make git bearable, since I have to use anyway)

Besides speed and github, git really hasn't gotten much going for it. Unfortunately the latter is too big of a force.

Git UI is just terrible. I am sad that Microsoft chose git for VFS and not mercurial. Mercurial would have worked great for their windows mono-repo

> A fairly rich built-in web interface – hg serve and point your browser to http://localhost:8000 and you’re good to go.

Also works properly out of the box for ad-hoc sharing.

I literally never managed to get `git daemon` to work to share stuff between two machines or with colleagues, I've no idea what is wrong and it doesn't provide any human-readable let alone actionable information, all I know is that even from the same machine the git client can't connect to the git daemon. That's it.

Good choice. It's memorable.

I signed up as a paid user when it was last on hacker news. Got an email invoice. Then for the life of me could not remember what the service was called. Finally gave up trying to use it.

For me it's the opposite. Can't forget sir hat, too pictorial to forget.

sourcehut on the other hand is one of too many source somethings. It's more prefessional for sure and if it is the official name we can still keep sir hat as a nickname I guess.

"All features work without JavaScript" oh hello there, my new friend. :)

Indeed, I haven't seen a single script tag in any of the pages.

It's written in Python, using Flask, https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/30/Why-I-built-sr.ht-with-Fl...

There is javascript for progressive enhancement on some pages. E.g. submitting comments on tickets by pressing Ctrl+Enter, or selection of ranges of lines in git blob view.

For example: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut.org/tree/master/conten...

But everything is designed to work well without JS first.

I was especially impressed and made happy by the absence of Google Analytics script (at least on the one page I checked.)

I was personally hoping for "Sir Hat", with a Shovel Knight-style mascot.

It's not too late! No reason sourcebut can't have a shovelknight-esque mascot, right?

I keep thinking of highly memeable Eurovision singer Serhat : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serhat_(singer)

How about Sir Topham Hatt? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_Controller

I love the minimalist info-dense UI. Thank you for avoiding modern UI trends.

Minimalism is a modern UI trend :)

If by minimalism you mean flat design I agree, but it's usually not information dense.

"brutalism"

As an architecture enthusiast and a fan of brutalism I am having trouble connecting this word with UI.

This style of UI reminds me of something different... a late 80's/early 90's simplicity. Yet it's still stylish. I am hesitant to call it retroism because it will cheapen the movement to do that. It's refreshing and unique.

Mr. Devault is serious about software craft. He's worth your $10 if you are considering. I am a early adopter of his works.

I agree says one die hard sway user.

What I am currently doubting is whether there is enough niche of people like us who are willing to pay for these [non-mainstream] projects/devs for future sustainability.

There's no obvious way to donate from sourcehut.org.

You can set up (and pay for) an account here: https://meta.sr.ht/

If you don't want an account, there's some donation information here: https://drewdevault.com/backers

Your form for registering is not using TLS:

  action="http://meta.sr.ht.local/register"

Looks OK if you use the form at https://meta.sr.ht/register

Fixed, should be deployed momentarily. Thanks!

I hope you're using the Upgrade-Insecure-Requests CSP setting!

On your /tutorials/set-up-account-and-git.md you really should not encourage default ssh-keygen.

Please update with either `ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -a 100` or `ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -o -a 100` or

I think your case is better made to openssl than to me.

Could you take care of the Flash of Unstyled Content in Firefox? The page first renders with no css and then with css. I solve it by putting a blank script tag, you could still keep your promise of it working without js.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/47348262/604511

The UI seems very usable. I wonder how the performance stacks up against something like gogs.

One of the main things I don't like is the email focus. I think one of the best things the modern git websites have done is replace email with merge requests which are just so much easier to use, tag, and search. I get that this is a tool made for those old devs who still want to do everything from mutt though.

Balls, I thought this was really nice until I read your comment.

That patch page is pretty indecipherable.

I shall claim that difficulty in using email for these things is mostly because of unfamiliarity. Keeping patches and discussion together can work really well. It tends to do better for record-keeping, especially. It may take a bit of getting used to, but when you are used to it, it’s a sane and reasonable approach in most cases. (Not all, but most.)

The nice thing about email is that you're free to render and interact with it in any way you like. Yes, you could use mutt; or you could use Webmail if you prefer; or you could run them through some automation scripts; or through some custom CLI/GUI/mobile app/Web service/etc.

GitLab and GitHub also send you emails but they provide a sane UI to use as well. The only benefit I see to email is it serves as a central notification location so I dont have to check every website to see what is new.

> The only benefit I see to email is it serves as a central notification location so I dont have to check every website to see what is new.

I agree that email is good for notifications.

Surely "checking Web sites to see what's new" was solved with RSS/ATOM?

(Again, once the data's out there, the UI is your choice; e.g. I convert RSS/ATOM to maildir so I can use my preferred email client for everything; I put HackerNews (HNRSS and HNNotify), subreddits, youtube channels, etc. into the same folder as my mailing lists)

Source: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-announce/%3C201902062237...

For a website trying to convince me it's good to host my projects using it, it was incredibly complicated to get from the homepage to any repo to see it in action (note: on a phone).

I've opened the homepage, didn't see any obvious links, went to sr.ht, saw just a login/register screen. I went back, continued scanning for a usable link on sourcehat.org, and ended up leaving the whole thing in frustration.

Still curious, I took my laptop and only then have I figured out that images link to example repositories on click. As a result, my first impression can be summed up as "unintuitive".

Funny how as I clicked on the "100% free and open source software" button my brain subconsciously branch-predicted the layout of a GitHub page. The payoff was worth the stall.

For some reason this name puts me in mind of Chicken Cottage. https://chickencottage.com/

Sauce Hut would be a good name for a takeaway chain, barbecue, jerk, or Dutch-style fries maybe.

I like the minimalistic approach though I'd recommend to align horizontally the content for higher viewports, e.g. `body { max-width: 1140px; margin: 0 auto }`

Great branding! How about a logo contest? ;)

Friend of mine made this one:

https://sr.ht/ekPb.png

The official logo is this :)

https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut.org/tree/master/logo.s...

(which is just a circle, like the favicon)

I have a feeling the first one will take off in ways you would never see coming... delivered by a process server

My idea, https://ibb.co/nmKymTW - it's a 1.9kB svg but I'm sure it can be reduced to something manageable.

Cool to see another big flask project. I'd love to see a lighter and snappier alternative to gitlab.

Like Gitea?

As the owner of e.ht, welcome to the world of obscure short TLD’s!

Interested how you pulled that one off, since .ht domains are supposedly constrained by the DNA to have at least 3 characters (3 - 63 chars).

Sr.ht only has 2 before the .ht. So even that violates that rule.

Most registrars won’t let you search under three chars. Reach out directly to the ccTLD managing group and see what they have available a-z-0-9. With enough persistence you may find one.

Much better, nice!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com