Issue #322: Federation protocol (conservancy/kallithea)

[Koala Yeung]

New issue 322: Federation protocol
https://bitbucket.org/conservancy/kallithea/issues/322/federation-protocol

Koala Yeung:

As you might have notice, GitHub has been acquired by Microsoft lately. And that created huge echo in the open source community because that's where tens of thousands of open source software live.

The success of GitHub model is hugely because of the network effect of the development community. The fork-PR model and issue tracker made Git based development flow approachable to all developers. And these developers constructed a network to help out each other.

Can we reproduce that network effect without a monolithic source code hosting service?

I have started a small repository (ironically, on GitHub) to discuss if we can make existing open source Git service software federate with each another. I originally only proposed to do Fork and PR. And someone else joined to also raised discussion on federated issue tracking.

The link: https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub/

I know Kallithea do not do issue tracking. But I believe members in a federation do not need to support all features that the protocol supports. They only need to support the part they can and care about.

Also we have talked about having support beyond Git. Since Kallithea supports both Git and Mercurial, it would be great to have your contributor(s) on board to discuss how we should federate.

Our discussion has started less than a week ago. The workgroup mailing list archive is [here](https://framalistes.org/sympa/arc/git-federation/). Please consider to join the effort.

Should any contributor here would like to join us, please reply [this issue](https://github.com/git-federation/gitpub/issues/5) and introduce yourself. Thanks.