Re: Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[Mirko Crowther <mirko crowther protonmail com>]

I'm *AGAINST* any initiative about moving GNOME to either GitLab or Phabricator.

> In recent months we have got together to examine the possibilities for

> GNOME’s development infrastructure. We’ve spent a lot of time on this,

> because we want the community to have faith in our conclusions.

> Available alternatives to cgit and Bugzilla include GOGS, gitea and Pagure. However, these were rejected early on in this evaluation, due to their contributor levels and sustainability.

Perhaps you spent a lot of time on this, but clearly not enough. You are basically suggesting that GNOME should rely for its infrastructure, which is a very important component, on a company whose business model is to sell proprietary features for its "enterprise" edition, and whose interest therefore is to work against the "community" edition as much as possible to maximize their profits on the "enterprise" edition. Bear in mind that this is the same company that shut down Gitorious. Remember? Don't get me wrong though, I think the fact that they even have a free edition is noble on their part. But this "community" edition is no more than a bait, or a free trial, and it's only good for small teams if they really need to share some code. But it certainly is *not* a valid long-term solution for a project the size of GNOME. The interests of GitLab Inc. and GNOME are *not* aligned (or the interests of GitLab and any other free software for what matters). Remember this when you'll hit the wall with GitLab.

I'm outraged to read that you're questioning the sustainability of projects such as gitea and pagure, while you see no problem with GitLab's own sustainability. As far as I can see, gitea has its own community and development is going strong. Pagure is developed (supported?) by Red Hat and the Fedora community is already using it (the now defunct FedoraHosted has migrated to pagure). Gogs development instead seems to have slowed down, but this is likely because there is only 1 developer. Other people are still using it though, see notabug.org, so I don't know... Then there is Savannah. GNOME is a GNU project, right? Then use Savannah, that would be the right place. Maybe they suck a little bit, but instead of supporting other free software communities you're falling for some eye candy.

Anyway, I'm not a GNOME developer, so the decision is not on me. But I'm a GNOME user, I try to contribute by helping users, or submitting bug reports. I also donated to the project, and I want to know that when I support a free project, it will in turn support other free projects. That's why if this wicked proposal will be accepted, I'll stop being an active GNOME user and also invite everybody to stop donating to the GNOME project.