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Gnome has moved to GitLab

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Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#51

Post by ufo »

parvenu74 wrote: post #11

Was Github ruled out because it's not free enough in spirit or are the Gnome folks just wanting to run things on-prem?

GNOME and Debian are very committed to free software and Github certainly was always out of contention for them due to being proprietary software.

As discussed on the article, GitLab also wasn't an option for them before the change from a CLA to a DCO. The CLA meant that although gitlab was licensed under a free software license, GitLab Inc. had permission to relicense future versions of GitLab as proprietary software, without needing to obtain permission from the original contributors. This meant that GitLab used to not be sufficiently free "in spirit" for Debian and GNOME. (While this might seem a bit paranoid, Debian and GNOME want to avoid the worst case scenario of GitLab being acquired by a company that isn't as friendly to software freedom.)

All in all, I think GitLab is doing a great job at working together with free software projects like Debian and GNOME and I am sure all the involved parties will greatly benefit from this collaboration.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#53

Post by shmerl »

foepys wrote: post #12
asdsa5325 wrote: post #9

Here's the link to the repos, which was strangely not included in the blog post: https://gitlab.gnome.org/explore/groups

The whole blog post was made to sound like GNOME moved to gitlab.com, so I guess not including the link was intentional.

Mesa is also moving, but they explicitly mentioned it's a locally run instance of Gitlab, not gitlab.com.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#54

Post by paulie_a »

takluyver wrote: post #49
paulie_a wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like gnome was utilizing bugzilla anyways. They had one bug that was 11 years old.

The maximum age of a bug in a bug tracker is not really a meaningful metric. All software has bugs, and all large, widely used software has some problems or limitations that no-one is working on. You can close those issues to tidy things up, but that's also a good way to annoy people. So the only conclusion you can really draw from "one bug was 11 years old" is that they had been using that issue tracker for at least…

It was a persistent and substantial bug, people jokingly suggested getting it a birthday cake because it was so neglected.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#55

Post by ufo »

ovao wrote: post #43
lambda wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you’re only really committing to git You don't use github just for git. You use it for issue tracking, pull requests and code review, CI hooks, wiki, github pages, kanban boards, bot integration, and so on. That's all stuff that locks you in to Github, and is non-trivial to migrate to another provider.

It’s a given that the more GitHub features you use, the more difficult it is to move away from GitHub. It’s also a given that you can reasonably limit the extent to which you use GitHub and thereby limit the difficulty in transitioning to another solution. The idea that it’s GitHub locking you in rather than you locking yourself in to GitHub is the argument I take issue with. But no quarrel at all with Gnome choosing…

The whole reason GNOME wanted to switch is because they wanted to have all the extra features (issues, etc) in a single place, as is provided by Github and Gitlab. Their old cgit interface already did a good job at hosting their git repositories.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#56

Post by watwut »

rcoveson wrote: post #35
ovao wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By committing to use GitHub, you’re only really committing to git. git supports multiple remotes for the purposes of mirroring — use that feature .

> By committing to use GitHub, you're only really committing to git. Make sure you also tell your users not to use GitHub's comments, issue tracking, pull requests, release system, favorites/watches, or authentication. So you're suggesting that the new home for the GNOME project's code be GitHub, without the GitHub.

Issue tracking is optional, if you disable it users wont be able to fill issues. You can easily ignore release system (by not using it) and I am not sure what you mean by authentication. As for pull requests, it is reasonable to expect contributors to submit them wherever your readme points to.

I don't mean to say that gnome should use github, I think that it is overall better if there is no single dominating company for open source. Just that organizing so that github is git hosting only is not that hard.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#57

Post by FlorianRappl »

Slippery_John wrote: post #22

Unrelated, but GitLab has a pretty slick cookie notice. Tells you exactly what they're doing and lets you opt out of non-essentials.

Thought exactly the same, even though removing the "functional" cookies made the cookie appearance re-appear. If the banner requires a cookie I would have expected this cookie to be in the "essential" section.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#59

Post by vetinari »

ovao wrote: post #25
parliament32 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because Github is a closed-source company that can remove you, your repo, or your group at any time, for any reason. Committing to a hosted service is a bad idea (see: Sourceforge). That sort of thing isn't acceptable to a project like Gnome.

By committing to use GitHub, you’re only really committing to git. git supports multiple remotes for the purposes of mirroring — use that feature .

Gnome is already being mirrored to Github. You can do your pulls from there.

Meanwhile, they want to use the bug tracker and other features too.

Re: Gnome has moved to GitLab

#60

Post by artursapek »

kazz wrote: post #40
Slippery_John wrote: post #22

Unrelated, but GitLab has a pretty slick cookie notice. Tells you exactly what they're doing and lets you opt out of non-essentials.

I really wish more people would implement cookie notices like theirs. I really like the one that https://www.bosch.us/ uses too.

Are there really people who appreciate these redundant notices? Do you need a notice that a website uses TCP/IP too?
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