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Gentoo Linux Begins Codeberg Migration In Moving Away From GitHub, Avoiding Copilot (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo's desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft's Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.

Gentoo announced today they now have a presence on Codeberg and are welcoming code contributions there as an alternative to GitHub. Initially it's their ebuild repository being hosted on Codeberg while eventually all Gentoo GitHub repositories will be migrated. Codeberg is based on Forgejo and hosted in Germany as a non-profit.

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[–] 10 points 6 months ago* (3 children)

Moving nixpkgs development from GitHub would be ambitious, as that repo already pushes their infrastructure limits with enterprise level support.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-core-team-update-2026-01-22/74585

I suspect the Nix org would need to garner many more sponsors to fund the hosting expenditures for an equivalent forge with matching CI/CD, PR automation, and geo redundancy. Would be nice to see.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago

    It is quite a large project to move from over ci/cd to another. I worked at EA for 13 years and we moved from Jenkins to another platform. (Jenkins suuuuucks. If you ever wonder what hell looks like, try to maintain a Jenkins instance with a shit ton of plugins, half of which are no longer maintained and you have to upgrade the instance...)

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I fully agree that nixos moving off GitHub is a nonstarter for technical reasons. The nixpkgs repo is enormous and has caused loads of infrastructure problems at GitHub over the years.

    But the NixOS foundation currently has over 300K Euros in their open collective account. They get free sponsorship from GitHub for the repo and free sponsorships covering the very expensive build and caching services too.

    https://opencollective.com/nixos

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    How does it push the limits of enterprise level support?

    And I don't think they'd need sponsors but volunteers to host the CI machines. Tapping into the community to provide those could possibly get a few. If effort were put into using some content addressed network, distribution of packages could further be spread.

    And if radicle finally supported large repositories, it could actually be hosted there and distribution would happen across all nodes willing to host the project. But that's not possible yet.

    A lot of effort is being put into building a ecosystem for a proprietary Microslop platform. It's a pity.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)

    This discourse post has more details. Essentially: Nixpkgs is an 83 GiB repository with 20,000 forks that incurs a ton of API usage from CI and bots. It turns out this caused some scaling issues. It's unclear to me if other forges would have run into exactly the same issues but if the repo can cause replication failures at GitHub it can almost certainly cause problem at Codeberg.

    Edit: For comparison, the Gentoo repository is 20 GiB and has 2.2k forks (on GitHub). The largest repository on Codeberg is 30 GiB, but that's just a blocklist data mirror with no CI.

    Edit 2: Also, since I'm reading through Gentoo's mail archives for this they also seem to be at least slightly worried:

    So far I don't think we really deliberated on [using Codeberg for the sync-friendly mirror]. The key point here is that unlike GitHub, Codeberg is running on community funding, and we don't want to abuse their resources with the huge syncing repo.

    Note that Nixpkgs doesn't have a syncing mirror. Majority of Nix users pull directly from github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago*

    The 83GB figure is the entre nixpkgs network not nixpkgs itself. Before codeberg got that far, it would take a while. It took nixpkgs 20 years to get there. The actual nixpkgs repo is 2.5GB bare and 5GB checked out. Github could still function as a read-only mirror (as in no PRs, but it's pushed to from codeberg or whatever forge they use).

    These aren't unsolvable problems. It's also a reason I hope radicle will get contributions to support bigger repos as it truly is a distributed forge.

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