The main difference is mainly in who contributes and the speed of development right now, who knows what'll happen in a few months. The main issue is that the sole maintainer of Gogs has a habit of going missing for months at a time, this normally wouldn't be an issue if he gave other contributors write access to the repo, but he doesn't. He actually removed a few the first time he went missing.

Right now, the initial release was pretty much just a cleanup effort to get the codebase ready for the new changes that are coming down the line. If you look at the PRs open for 1.1 there's a lot of goodies coming that I'm looking forward to.

The maintainer seems to be doing a stellar job and giving it away for free. It's a bit childish to talk about someone going missing for a month. If he got paid for it, he's be legally entitled to a vacation that's just about that long.

I can't help but think about the open source maintainer burnout that has been featured so many times. Let off your project for a couple of weeks and you have all sorts of people demanding write access to the repository. That must be up to the mainatiner and his or her vision for the project.

Don't misunderstand me. Fork away. Forks are the social contract open source software stands on. But please, for the sake for the health of everyone around us, think of what language you use. Someone hasn't "disappeared" just because they're offline for a while. Make him or her proud or their community and what they did in the meantime instead. That's also a fork, just much less of the "I took my stuff and left!" vibe.

And I realize I'm overreacting to the choice of a few words on a project I've never been involved with and never seen before, it's just that some forks are just hostile for no apparent reason whatever and it's so unnecessary.

I thoroughly disagree with you on this, it's not childish when a whole lot of people are using your software in production to want the software to be maintained by more than one person. Bus factor and so on. He frequently goes away for not just one month, but several. That's not healthy either, but it's his project and he runs it as he sees fit, which obviously the community at large disagrees with.

And forking is exactly how open source is supposed to work, you disagree with how something is run and you fork it. A lot of contributors weren't happy with how things were and they forked it, it's how open source should and does work.

And yes, I do think you are overreacting. I've been following and using Gogs for over a year now and the maintainer going away for months at a time has been very annoying, so I'm happy to see Gitea work.

Well, say what you want but I see 33 open PRs and 1039 closed ones on the original gogs repo. Doesn't look like an unmaintained repo to me.

Yes, this is what it looks like when he hasn't disappeared for three months straight.

Three whole months? How dare he!

/s

Let me reply as someone who's used Gogs for a year.

The main dev seems to be a good guy and it was always a good experience to communicate with him on bugs/features or pull requests.

He is a single point of failure, though. There were quite some active contributors to Gogs. They work on Gogs quite a lot, fixing bugs and improving it. Even simple fixes like typos don't get merged for weeks. And that's when Unknwon is available. When he's gone, he's just gone and other developers have no idea if the project is dead now, or not.

Most of the recent activity in Gogs development came from the people who now work on Gitea. I hate that this fork happened because I really don't like the Gitea name and logo.. but that's where the development is happening now..

As it is a fork of Gogs and Gogs haven't progressed too much since then, You can have a look at the commit log to have a rough impression about what have been improved. Last time I checked it had about 400~ more commits, which were mostly bug fixes.

I did a quick analysis of the two projects and it looks like the changes between them are quite massive. Here's the overall breakdown.

Graph of commits over the last year:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/year.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/year-cummulative.png

Less noisy graph that only shows master vs master:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/master-vs-master.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/master-vs-master-cummulative...

Total commits:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/total-commits.png

Changes in the last 3 months:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/summaries+trees.png

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/trees.png

Contributors in the last 3 months for Gogs:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gogs-contributors.png

Contributors in the last 3 months for Gitea:

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-contributors.png

What kinds of changes were made that needed number of files to grow by a factor of 22? Or 27 if you just count go files?

The number of files didn't grow by a factor of 22. The screenshot shows how many files were modified in that time frame. In the case of the screenshot, it showed what happened in the last 3 months. This is what was modified in the last 72 hours.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/summaries+trees-72hours.png

This is the entire history.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/summaries+trees-history.png

Which shows the number of unique Go files to have ever existed to be 407 in Gogs and 1,753 in Gitea.

I'm guessing some files were moved around. I'll do a bit more digging and update if I find anything interesting.

Edit:

This a diff from the point of divergent to the latest commit for each branch.

Gogs (69 commits with 106 diffs):

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gogs-diff.png

Gitea (528 commits with 2,062 diffs):

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-diff.png

The number of files is thus big because Gitea have its dependencies on the vendor/ folder, but Gogs no.

Even this is the case, Gitea has a lot a bug fixes that are still pending on Gogs.

Thanks for the info. So if you look at the vendor diffs, it accounts for 1,479 out of 2,062 diffs.

https://gitsense.com/gogs-gitea/gitea-vendor.png

So the difference isn't as drastic as it appears.