@realaravinth asked in a review if a forgefriends modification would be upstreamed. In this specific case I don’t think it will in the near future because it is about a feature that has no purpose other than helping with federation. It will take time to explain why it is useful. And to be honest I’m not yet sure how to properly argue for it
It will however be easier to upstream integration tests for the dump-repo / restore-repo codepath. There are none at present and I ran into a bug yesterday where it fails if there are no pull request. The kind of failure that would easily be spotted by integration tests. And since those integration tests are required for the JSON export / import feature that is being worked on, I intend to propose a pull request for that in the next few days.
The main roadblock for me to propose a pull request still is that Gitea is hosted on GitHub and I do not have an account there. Progress is made to complete the migration to gitea.com, but there still is a blocker. In the meantime I’ll have to find someone willing to handle this pull request on my behalf.