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.
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.