Re: "Why I am retiring from contributing to FreeBSD"

On Friday, January 2nd, 2026 at 9:57 AM, Johannes Totz <jo@bruelltuete.com> wrote:

> 
> I would like to contribute more (small qol patches).
> But getting anything merged/committed is a major uphill struggle:
> https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=247749 sitting there
> for 5 years.
> 
> (at this point I don't even know which tool to use, github or
> phabricator or bugzilla?)

I've been contributing to FreeBSD for several years, and I agree that the current bugzilla/phabricator workflow is bad. This is a major issue that blocks influx of new contributors. It's too confusing.

Phorge, the successor of Phabricator, has been doing massive fixes  for PHP 8.x. PHP folks deprecates their technical debt (the notorious php stuff in the past) in 8.x so they can have better language in 9.0. These days Phorge devs spend more time on fixing deprecation issues (currently they are fixing things for 8.5) than adding new features.

As a person who opened two differentials and one bug report on we.phorge.it, the phorge/phabricator UX is bad. I think moving bug report instance from bugzilla to Phorge won't improve DX very much.

This leaves us Github/Gitlab/forgejo. Github is privately owned and their UX gets worse every year. One of the reasons zig migrated from github to forgejo was github action blocked CI runs for months due to their bug in sleep script. GitLab has too many features and their web interface is very slow. This leaves us forgejo, and I love it except for their css styles.

Currently we've set up forgejo-dev.freebsd.org, but there is no official plan for migration yet. I hope the migration happens soon so we can work on our own patches rather than getting stressed from our current workflow.