Will Thompson created an issue:
#190 notwithstanding, a common practical complaint about the GitHub mirrors of GNOME repositories is that GitHub has better Google juice (and DuckDuckGo birdseed) than GNOME GitLab. I tried searching for 3-4 projects on both engines and in all cases, the GitHub mirror is within the first page of results, whereas the GitLab repo page is nowhere to be seen.
I am not an SEO expert but I think it probably doesn't help that few of the GitHub repos link to the corresponding GitLab page. GitHub repos have a “homepage” URL which appears at the top of the page. I did a quick unscientific review of the first dozen or so repos on https://github.com/gnome/ and none of them link to the GitLab repo page. Some (eg https://github.com/gnome/gnome-initial-setup) link to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME, while others (eg https://github.com/gnome/gnome-shell, https://github.com/GNOME/gtk) link to wiki pages (https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell) or a project-specific domain (http://www.gtk.org/). Most projects do not have a prominent link to their GitLab repo in their README or homepage. For example, https://www.gtk.org/ has no mention of the GitLab repo, and nor does its Development tab, though there is a link (as opposed to plain-text URL) at the bottom of the Download tab. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeShell/ links to the /issues subpage but never to the GitLab repo proper.
Some projects on https://github.com/gnome/ do have a “Mirrored from” link but even these are to URLs like git://git.gnome.org/mutter which cannot be followed in a web browser.
I propose:
- Set the “homepage” field for each mirrored repo to the corresponding canonical repo URL. Based on https://developer.github.com/v3/repos/#edit it appears that sending a
PATCHto/repos/gnome/$PROJECTwith{"homepage": "https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/$PROJECT"}would do the trick, given an API key etc. - If possible, update the mirroring so that each project also shows “Mirrored from” with an https: URL.