Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 131 posts

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

#71

Post by raverbashing »

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…

$60 is nothing compared to a developer's salary

Sure, you could setup with 4 machines and think this is costing you only $40 per month, if you take out all the maintenance and setup time

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

#72

Post by jonathanstrange »

eslaught wrote: post #15

I've had open source projects be dormant for 10 years only to get a question pop up out of the blue from someone who found it useful. I hope that Gitlab and other hosts of the open source community think hard about this before implementing any policy like this. There are projects that are useful, and stable, but for whatever reason do not have a lot of users. There is no reason to let those projects die, or force the…

It would also punish programming languages with good long-term support. For example, Ada has been deliberately designed for long-term maintainability. Many Ada packages haven't been modified for years because they are finished. They work as intended. Unless someone finds a bug, there is no need to update or change them.

Not everybody considers constant feature creep desirable.

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

#73

Post by lol768 »

There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice for OSS.

There may have been reasons to do this in the past (e.g. lack of integrated CI) but I'm not convinced those arguments really hold anymore in 2022. If you're a maintainer and prioritising interoperability and the lowest barrier to entry for potential contributors and you don't care about it being proprietary/owned by MSFT you pick GitHub. If you're prioritising a FOSS stack, good tooling offering and low-weight pages with excellent performance, you pick something like SourceHut.

For everyone reliant on software published by maintainers who have already made this decision historically, it's reassuring the right decision has been made here, but a bit worrying they were needing to consider a step this far in the first place. Combined with their poor pay for engineers (discussed to death here on HN already), it does make you think a bit about their finances.

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

#74

Post by linspace »

fendy3002 wrote: post #47
onion2k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server

People underestimate consistently how complicated is to build reliable things, hardware or software. There is a world between "it works for me" and "it works for all"

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

#75

Post by ddevault »

lol768 wrote: post #73

There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice…

If you believe that it's important for free software to use free software infrastructure (and you should[0]), then there is no choice but to do so. Infrastructure like GitHub is primarily a function of network effects and the only way to overcome them is to cast your lot appropriately. A maintainer who "doesn't care" if their infrastructure is proprietary is not doing a good job.

[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

Note that GitLab is not really the answer to this problem. It's open core, subservient to its investors, and pulls a lot of stupid shit like this. If you want the GitHub-style workflow and UI, go with Codeberg or another Gitea instance.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

lol768 wrote: post #73

There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by tanepiper »

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.

Yes, GitHub is $4 a month for Pro and it does give some additional features (mostly more Action minutes and protected branches)

GitLab has nothing to compete against that.

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

#78

Post by pooper »

linspace wrote: post #74
fendy3002 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server People underestimate consistently how complicated is to build reliable things, hardware or software. There is a world between "it works for me" and "it works for all"

And dysfunctional organizations. I worked as a contractor at one place where we simply used the shared file server as a git remote.

Reasoning was if the file server was down, it would come back up quickly because it affects everyone. I didn't understand this reasoning until I got emails from the database team saying the database servers stopped working and every development team now needs to change their connection string from machinename-abc.corp to machinename-bcd.corp

How in the world someone could write an email like that is beyond me. Ok machines crash all the time but why can't they reuse the same name for the new machine?

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

#79

Post by pooper »

shizzy0 wrote: post #43
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 switche…

I had forgotten why I default every little hello world type repo I create on GitHub to public. I knew there was a reason I started doing that but had forgotten.

The five slots were precious and I didn't want to waste them.

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

#80

Post by benjymo »

shizzy0 wrote: post #43
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 switche…

I'm doing the same for the 5 user limit on GitLab currently.

But the pricing is just too steep for me to justify setting up, e.g. an extra user for some automated tasks.

Post reply on HN