Federation for organization, repositories and users

[jonasfranz]

See https://owncloud.org/features/federation/

I would like to see a feature like the federation feature of next cloud. It gives the ability to share repositories, organizations or users between multiple Gitea instances.

This has the advantages that business users could share their projects with other companies. This feature would reduce the management and administrativ overhead.

This makes it easier for beginners to start with Gitea.

It could uses the "Mirror"-feature of Gitea.

[kolaente]

It would probably be enough to support federated repositories

[jonasfranz]

@kolaente The federation feature make explicitly for users sense. If you want to share repositories you should use the mirror feature. But is would be very convenient for the project manager to add users from other git instances.

[strk]

See also #184 (is this a duplicate of that?)

[kolaente]

@strk kind of, but i think this one goes further

[jonasfranz]

@strk Kind of. But this issue includes a full integration of the federation feature for organization not only for pull requests.

[strk]

You mean for authorization of remote users ? As I think it's useful to split "federation" in many different small things to implement, or a single ticket would get just too big.

[jonasfranz]

@strk I agree with the idea to split this thing into many tickets. This ticket might be the user federation ticket doesn't it? But I don't want authentication for users of other platforms. I want the ability to add other users. The user will receive an invite from the user's Gitea instance. He will access the repository or organization from the his instance.

[strk]

Granting permissions to someone in a federation requires being able to identify that someone (a global address). As you mentioned owncloud I think owncloud uses "<user>@<domain>" as the identifier, but I dunno what protocol it uses for that. Friendica/GNUSocial and other OStatus implementing federations can also use "<user>@<domain>" mapping to something else via the Webfinger standard (which is open as to allow for specifying different protocols). Another community (the IndieWeb one, see indieweb.org) uses web addresses to identify people, as it's used with OpenID up to version 2.0. New OpenID (OpenID-Connect) uses again Webfinger.

[jonasfranz]

I think that the webfinger standard might be a good solution. But I think that it also could conflict with the git email of an user.

[strk]

Where's the conflict ? Rather, what I dislike about Webfinger is that it needs control of the domain root (which you don't have with OpenID URL).

[schmittlauch]

Regarding "what standard do we want to choose" I just want to point you to ActivityPub which is currently being finished by the Social Federation working group of the W3C. Some project implementing it (or currently working on that) are pump.io, Mastodon and MediaGoblin.

They don't use WebFinger though as they dislike the idea of a fixed .well-known path, but there are ideas about interoperability.