Developers of the Forgejo joint development platform announced a change in their development model. The Forgejo project has transitioned from maintaining a synchronized code base with Gitea to developing its own independent code base. This decision was made due to discrepancies between the development and management models of Forgejo and Gitea.
The Forgejo project emerged on October 22 as a result of a “soft” fork from Gitea. Forgejo is hosted on codeberg.org and its code is written in Go, released under the MIT license. The fork was a response to attempts to commercialize Gitea and transfer its management to a commercial company. Forgejo continues to apply principles of independent management and community control. While it used to regularly incorporate Gitea code changes, it also introduced its own unique features. As Forgejo added more capabilities, the process of synchronizing code bases became increasingly complex.
The complete fork will simplify support, promotion of new functionality, bug fixes, and speed up the reduction of technical debt. It will also save resources previously spent on analyzing conflicts with changes from the Gitea code base. However, this complete branch will make it challenging to use Forgejo as a direct replacement for Gitea and complicate the transition from Gitea to Forgejo. Nevertheless, the API in Forgejo will remain compatible with the API of Gitea.