* I didn't follow the Gitea drama too closely, but my understanding is that Forgejo was a fork born out of that situation
* I've heard the SourceHut guy is a controversial figure, so avoiding it because of that isn't unreasonable. I will just say that "spite forks" tend not to last very long
EDIT: actually, ignore my pointless negativity. I realize now that there really aren't that many open source code forges out there, so if you're willing to make one, then go for it!
Maybe validate the idea by prototyping whatever features you want atop Fossil first?
Might want to see if you can catch rkeene on libera#tcl for a few minutes at some point - IIRC he has his own Fossil+CI type setup with custom BuildKit integration to produce binary artifacts and enjoys talking about it if he has time.
Also the tcl/fossil/etc. crew tend to not care about forks/"NIH"/custom versions/etc. because the whole hardware background thing means those are just something you gotta do sometimes.
(this is -not- me trying to sell you on using fossil in your final approach or anything, mind, just musing on what might make your experimental phase more tractable and mentioning a community I like who might be amenable to chatting about it :)
I've thought about prototyping with Fossil; not sure if I'll do it because I'm also building a sandboxing build system that should slot into CI easily. We'll see.
I haven't dug into CI design much, so I could be wrong, but CI seems pretty easy to do on top of a sandboxing build system and a VCS with hooks. One thing I know for sure is that I'm not going to use YAML. :)
But I do take inspiration from the Fossil guys; for example, my VCS will have a bug tracker, wiki, and other project management stuff built in. It will also allow multiple checkouts and be one self-contained binary. It will also use SQLite for storing information about commits and other small things.
It will, however, depart from Fossil's format to handle large files. And binary files too.
So rest assured that I'm in touch with the Fossil guys. :)
Also worth noting even the enterprise edition of GitLab is source-available, it's just licensed differently and is found in the 'ee' folder of the GitLab source.
* I didn't follow the Gitea drama too closely, but my understanding is that Forgejo was a fork born out of that situation
* I've heard the SourceHut guy is a controversial figure, so avoiding it because of that isn't unreasonable. I will just say that "spite forks" tend not to last very long
EDIT: actually, ignore my pointless negativity. I realize now that there really aren't that many open source code forges out there, so if you're willing to make one, then go for it!