Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash • Hacker News Board

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#41

Post by xupybd » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:12 AM UTC

malikNF wrote: post #28

xupybd wrote: post #23

Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't…

>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30…

Yes you could but that is a shift in responsibility. At that point we are responsible for keeping that infrastructure running. Any failure ties up internal resources. At the scale of 1 developer and 2 freelancers it doesn't make so much sense. There are far more valuable things we can do for the business than remove that $60 USD cost.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#42

Post by xupybd » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:15 AM UTC

TheChaplain wrote: post #40

I love GitLab and would like to support them, men $19 is just way too much for a solo dev. If they had a $5 for a "Pro"-tier I'd go for it.

I second that. I could probably convince my manager to pay $5 per person even if we get no extra features. It's too hard a sell for $19. I think they could do a lot to milk their current free tier users.

We buy compute time periodically and that is a small amount I guess.

We happily pay Bitbucket for our backup storage. I'm sure we'd pay for our code storage if that was required.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#43

Post by shizzy0 » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:22 AM UTC

nirui wrote: post #24

Few years ago, I tried to un-squatting an username from both GitLab and GitHub (yes, GitHub were doing this back then), both with success. During the attempt I studied the policies for both service and noticed the difference between the two: For GitHub, they were lean towards not to release the username especially when the account is valid and not "empty"; For GitLab however, they will release the username if the acc…

I was a paying GitHub customer, but they had such a crummy private repo policy at the time (I think only 5 private repos were allowed) it forced me to make poor technical decisions: "I'll delete this github repo, keep my local copy, to open up a slot." I switched all my private repos to gitlab and stopped paying for github and was happier for it.

Later github changed its policy to something saner, but I never switched back to using github for private repos. This decision by gitlab even if it's rescinded, however, might give me the impetus to do so.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#44

Post by thinkmassive » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:25 AM UTC

pabs3 wrote: post #35

I feel like decentralised storage for git repositories needs a comeback. Has anyone tried out GitTorrent or git-remote-ipfs or similar?

Federation is under development by some smaller git server projects, like Gitea. It should provide a good middle ground on the spectrum of decentralization.

Check out progress at the latest Forge Friends monthly report:

https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/07/17/2022-07-report/

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#45

Post by onion2k » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:26 AM UTC

malikNF wrote: post #28

xupybd wrote: post #23

Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't…

>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30…

selfhost something like gitea with drone

And then set up the users

Then set up the permissions

And the hooks

And move repos to it

Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features

Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding

Etc etc

Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely worthwhile. And that's before any time lost to investigating and fixing outages, updating the software, and so on.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#46

Post by inopinatus » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:38 AM UTC

malikNF wrote: post #28

xupybd wrote: post #23

Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't…

>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30…

Transferring all the administrative burden and operational risk whilst incurring the additional expense of SRE time makes the business case here look dead in the water.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#47

Post by fendy3002 » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:38 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #45

malikNF wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30…

selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely…

People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server, even if they go to self hosted gitlab which essentially the same.

The amount of downtime, sudden server crash, problem with SSL with NAT, setting up gitlab runner, upgrading, etc. You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#48

Post by Gigachad » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:55 AM UTC

richbell wrote: post #2

The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.

Is the title really accurate though. They never made a public announcement saying they would do this. Someone just leaked an internal discussion and it blew up.

A lot of things get discussed and evaluated that never eventuate.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#49

Post by Gigachad » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:58 AM UTC

olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

Gitlab projects are way bigger than you’d expect. The actual git repo is usually not the biggest part. It’s the build artefacts and docker images. The average project I have worked with on Gitlab has been in the tens of gigabytes while active repos like the gitlab itself repo are in the terabytes.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#50

Post by simonw » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

Gigachad wrote: post #48

richbell wrote: post #2

The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.

Is the title really accurate though. They never made a public announcement saying they would do this. Someone just leaked an internal discussion and it blew up. A lot of things get discussed and evaluated that never eventuate.

The code they wrote for doing this has been public all along: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689