As an alternative, I mailed nixos1+inbox@discoursemail.com as described in About the Inbox category, which does create a thread in the Inbox category, yet only the commit message makes it through - patches are silently dropped.
Please provide working ways to submit patches through mail.
I’d like to keep it until we have a better alternative.
Who would like to help make that possible?
I’m thinking
self hosted forge that functions as a mirror
enable opening PRs on the new forge so that they are forwarded to GitHub and commit status gets synced back by a bot
run CI on the new forge
The infra team has their hands full with the current infra, I believe, so I think the right way to do this is to first develop this separately, and when it’s shown that (1) and (2) work, work with the infra team to integrate it and make it official.
Besides supporting users who have objections against GitHub, this has the additional benefit of improving the robustness of our infrastructure against certain risks, and creating an opportunity to make a forge work better for us as a distribution.
I understand the motivation and appreciate the desire to make contributions more accessible for everyone.
That said, I would like to offer a different, and admittedly opinionated, view.
Personally, I think this forum category should not exist. It sends the wrong signal about where contributions should go. Yesterday, I took the time to apply a few patches that had been sitting on the forum for months without feedback and it took extra effort just to make them apply cleanly. Then, within less than an hour in a Github PR, they were reviewed. That alone is a clear indicator that the forum is simply not the right place for patch submission or code review.
Between 2019 and 2025, we have seen about ~11 users post roughly ~17 patches on the forum. While I respect the intent behind enabling alternative contribution paths, I honestly do not think it justifies building and maintaining a self-hosted forge. That energy could be better invested in improving the existing infrastructure, which benefits the much larger group of contributors already working on GitHub.
Now, to be clear: I would definitely prefer having our own official forge for all contributors, not just as a mirror, but as the canonical platform. That would be a much better long-term solution. But until we reach that point, GitHub provides strong value, especially with its free CI/CD infrastructure, which is something we rely on heavily. It is not perfect, but it works well enough for the vast majority of us.
Let’s focus our limited time and resources on making that main path even better instead of supporting a parallel track that sees very little engagement and introduces additional overhead.