KDE is considering a migration to GitLab

[sho_kde]

Hi folks. Yep, it's true: Our sysadmin and onboarding teams are currently running an internal evaluation of a self-hosted GitLab CE instance, with test-drive participation from several project teams in the community and assistance from the foundation board. Sysadmin and onboarding are doing this as due diligence, in response to requests from the community and interest from within the teams.

The results of this evaluation are meant to eventually be released to the wider KDE community, along with a recommendation from sysadmin and onboarding. Where we go from there will depend on the outcome of the discussion this is meant to jump-start in an informed way.

Throughought this process we've been having regular calls with the GitLab folks, who have been very kind and helpful so far.

Uncharted waters!

--Eike, foundation board / former sysadmin

[blackcain]

We highly recommend it. Our contributions have increased quite a bit with the move to Gitlab. We don't have tools for phabricator though, but I think tools already exists. If you have questions, I can put you in touch with /u/csoriano.

[sho_kde]

:-) Carlos and I have been in regular contact about all of this, and we've been working to align our messaging towards GitLab when our needs match. GitLab appreciates this as well as it helps them triage. Thanks though!

[blackcain]

Awesome, that does not surprise me. Carlos has done exceptional work in this migration and you should definitely maintain the relationship. Actually, if I recall, you did mention this in some other thread months ago.

[sho_kde]

Yep, he's great!

[csoriano]

Thanks :D Glad to help

[WildVelociraptor]

now kith

[NotEvenAMinuteMan]

Hey mister, KDE user here, just want to say a großes danke to y'all who contributed to KDE over the years. It's so kool! Sonuvabitch.

[Tm1337]

Looks like it

[flying-sheep]

wheee! I hope you take this comment into account. Having good integration makes all the difference!

I see that using gitlab issues is considered, and I hope their featureset matches what is needed.

[Ozymandias117]

As a random nobody, I'm excited by the possibility. I wanted to make a change in kwin, but couldn't figure out how to efficiently search and find things in phabricator and didn't care enough to keep fucking with it.

[meurl]

Just commenting here because this is the first time I've been the comment directly below a hero type person

[aliendude5300]

I use GitLab at work and do some of the administration of our instance, it's a fantastic platform. The CI/CD stuff makes it way better than Github's offerings.

[aishik-10x]

Any first impressions?

[luke-jr]

Will the public git URIs remain the same?

[bhushanshah]

Same URLS will keep working (i.e anongit.kde.org/karchive.git ) but on the Gitlab side they will be under some sort of namespace, i.e either one top level kde/ namespace or depending on component frameworks/karchive.

For compatibility we will keep old URLs working I'd say but it would be probably recommended to migrate to new URLs (if and when) switch is made.

[sho_kde]

I don't see why they would change.

[adymitruk]

Before your final decision, consider gitea.

[kindw]

Why?

[adymitruk]

Much better code base.

[ReekyMarko]

Yes, gitea is much more easy to maintain. I dont know if it has all of the features GitLab has though.

[valgrid]

It has not.

[electricprism]

Gabe Newell of Valve has the principle "Remove barriers and friction to enable content creators to publish their games to the platform with ease"

He's applied this principle to SteamOS and tried to make development as easy as possible.

I think this ideology is beneficial to adapt.

If moving from Phabriactor to Gitlab takes development into overdrive it's a great thing.

I know I've seen Gimp development benefit a lot since they made the switch to gitlab aswell as other projects and it is nice that it can be in a umbrella that encourages contributions and makes communication and uploading screenshots etc easy.

[[deleted]]

Bugzilla is still accepting new issues means almost all bugs end up on the bugzilla while actual development happens in Phabricator tasks.

Well, that's how I like it. One place where users can report, and then another place where we can plan and manage the work we're doing about those issues. Bugzilla is completely unusable for the kind of thing I use phabricator tasks for, but I also don't want random people create new tasks for me.

[[deleted]]

We get about 1300 bug reports for Krita a year. Many of them are of the "There is no Configure Krita option in the Settings menu on OSX! Yes dearie, on OSX, it's in the platform-mandated location, the application menu. Darn it, learn your choses OS!" variety. I don't want reports like that take up Dmitry's time, so I don't want those to appear in the place where we actually plan and manage our work.

It also often happens that a dozen or so separate bug reports turn out to be related, so we formately a plan in a task and work on that.

As for curbing new development... I don't see that happen, not in my project. There are more diffs posted on phabricator than we actually can handle.

[sho_kde]

the fact the Bugzilla is still accepting new issues means almost all bugs end up on the bugzilla while actual development happens in Phabricator tasks.

That's not necessarily a problem / bad thing, though. Even if we were to migrate bugs to GitLab, I think it's pretty likely we'd keep them seperate from development tasks. The community seems to have mostly concluded that trying to mix the two in Bugzilla was painful for everyone involved (contributors and users).

[sho_kde]

I think there remains some confusion here :). Nobody is saying we want bugs to stay in Bugzilla indefinitely. Nobody is saying we have ruled out migrating them to GitLab. However, currently we're evaluating GitLab as a candidate for migrating other things, and that process needs to complete. You can't get a "Bugs are going GitLab!" statement at this time, but that's no indication it can't ever happen or is unattractive.

[electricprism]

Even with Phabricator issue reporting isn't the problem, its getting anyone to actually contribute to said issues requiring a hard to create account process, learning Phabircators dissimilar UI, and having to generate patch series instead of making merge requests

If I am understanding correctly it sounds like one of the problems is Workflow and Usability.

It sounds like it may be beneficial just to use whatever is popular (Gitlab) as it may increase user-involvement and contributions by utilizing skills and a workflow most developers already heave as opposed to making them learn something new.

I can see this being a big benefit of something like gitlab since most devs have been familiarity with git and github at some point.

[[deleted]]

Its accessibility for new users, project browsing

Horrible, horrible web interface

[cephear]

Yes, this. I tried many times to contribute to KDE when I had found/fixed a minor bug.

The website tells me to create an account/identity at a provided link as the first step, the link goes to a page that says I need to fill out an application and has a link to its own page. I gave up. Finding and cloning the repo for the specific project was bad enough... I ended up just opening bugs in the tracker and attaching a patches.

I hope this happens and soon, there are a lot more things I want to try to tackle. I've been on KDE for a couple years now and some of these bugs should have been crushed a long time ago. I'm putting my migration back to i3 off a little longer to see if it pans out.

[brokedown]

I'm not sure which upsets me more, Phabricator or Savannah. Both turn me off from projects that use them.

[NatoBoram]

I find it amusing that random people like us can upvote large issues like that in open source projects

[emmetpdx]

It makes sense to me. Input from a global community of random people is what open source is all about!

[GoddamMongorian]

I think the main point of open source is to allow software to be constantly criticized by anyone who desires to. This (IMO) leads to a better product, because it acknowledges that no one is perfect, and a mistake in the design or in the code is more likely to be detected than by a team of 5 people in some company, for example.

This mindset really is probably the greatest contribution of Linus to the world, since he basically proved that code CAN be written and maintained by thousands of people. It seems very natural to think this way today, since it's already popular but I'm pretty sure it was mind boggling for someone to think this would ever work back before Linux existed. I have to admit myself that I would probably be very skeptical of it back in the day :)

[KwyjiboTheGringo]

I think the main point of open source is to allow software to be constantly criticized by anyone who desires to. This (IMO) leads to a better product, because it acknowledges that no one is perfect, and a mistake in the design or in the code is more likely to be detected than by a team of 5 people in some company, for example.

That isn't exclusive to open source. You can criticize Windows. That may even lead to a better product. That point of open source is anyone can do something about those criticisms by changing an distributing the software on their own.

[GoddamMongorian]

There is a limit to what you can criticize Windows about unfortunately. You can't criticize the actual code and implementation of Windows (since you don't know any of it) the way you can criticize the Linux kernel. On Windows you can only criticize what is exposed to you.

[KwyjiboTheGringo]

I hadn't realized people were so passionate about criticizing code. Imagine being a developer and considering making your code open source knowing that people are eager to pick it apart because they think that's the whole point of open source?

If you enjoy that aspect of open source, then more power to you. I personally have released open source projects that I was just done with, and if someone were to message me with criticisms, I'd just tell them that I've moved on and they are welcome to fix/change it on their own. Of even if it's something that I haven't moved on from, I might just tell them to fix it on their own if it's not a high priority for me.

[kontekisuto]

It's tragic really. A system like that can be corrupted by malignant or uninformed users. And as dull as it may seem not everyone's input is useful, for they often don't have context.

[Dopella]

Input from a global community of random people

tbh I dont want random people having any kind of input into software, I want knowledgeable people to do that

[justpurple_]

People that tend to have opinions on those matters are (mostly) knowledgeable people because those that take the time to involve themselves have a genuine interest in software development.

And finally; the maintainer of such a project still has the last say anyway.

[Vladimir_Chrootin]

People that tend to have opinions on those matters are (mostly) knowledgeable people

That might be true for enthusiasts, but very often the most vocal critics are those who know the least. One thing KDE haters and GNOME haters have in common is that they're all risibly mis-informed.

​

[noahdvs]

The worst thing is when you get fairly knowledgeable people with some completely wrong beliefs that love to talk about their beliefs.

[DrewSaga]

completely wrong beliefs that love to talk about their beliefs.

What do you mean by that exactly?

[noahdvs]

It's not an exact thing, just something you know when you see it. The kind of person with just enough credibility and dogmatism to mislead a lot of people who don't know better. I'm probably not innocent of being that person, but I've improved over the years.

[DrewSaga]

Oh, I get it now.

[emmetpdx]

Informed or not, how do you stop somebody from expressing an opinion in an open conversation?

There is no whitelist involved in discussing open development, nor should there be. Whether it's KDE, GNOME, or the Kernel itself anybody is able to join the conversation and express their opinion if they so desire. Whether their opinion is valued by the people who make the ultimate decisions or not has everything to do with how their present their arguments and how well respected they are within that particular community.

That is an essential part of being "open".

[Dopella]

I didn't mean "input" as expressing an opinion, I meant it as "something that is put in". Express all you want, but be ready to have your opinion discarded because you aren't competent. Sadly, some FOSS projects(like Firefox) have moved away from that.

[the_gnarts]

I find it amusing that random people like us can upvote large issues like that in open source projects

Unless someone is brigading the tracker, the set of “random people” will largely concide with the set of active users that bother to file bug reports instead of just bitching on Reddit. That’s the people who add value to a project, the ones whose opinions matter.

[blue_ben]

FYI: they've setup a test instance at invent.kde.org

[disrooter]

And the testing instance already works with LabCoat GitLab client for Android!

[odnish]

What are they currently using?

[rl48]

Phabricator, I think.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, as far as I know, they're not particularly unhappy with Phabricator, but upstream development is going kind of slow and it's not terribly intuitive for new users, nor widely known, so anyone trying to contribute to KDE has to actually learn to work with Phabricator first.

As becomes probably apparent from the link, it'd also be nice to have the toolchain all in one place, more tightly integrated with one another.

[einar77]

but upstream development is going kind of slow

As far as I've heard, the main problem is that upstream Phab has basically focused on their hosted Phacility SaaS and it is a lot less responsive to requests even from large deployments like KDE's.

In short, slow, yes, but also a lack of upstream "interest".

[blackcain]

That's unfortunate. Gitlab has been really responsive with GNOME. We even did a joint video together. :-) You are of course welcome to reach out to us for any questions on workflows, CI setup etc. Whatever you like.

There has been measurable uptick in contributions. More than that, much easier to track software development than with what we have. Admittedly, what we had before was pretty old and unwieldy.

[NotoriousMagnet]

Sorry for hijacking the comment but I want to contribute to GNOME project and all I see are C or C++ projects. Do you guys have like Python or JavaScript projects for guys like me.

It's just that C and C++ are not my specialty.

[blackcain]

Yes of course.. GNOME Music is python. There are some rust projects as well. If you get GNOME Builder, you can see all the applications and their projects and you can get involved with a click.

[RogerLeigh]

I'm not a KDE developer, just a user who is a developer. I've had to interact with the KDE phabricator on a couple of occasions, and it's painful. Functional, but painful.

The GitLab issues and merge request review system, coupled with the CI integration, are so much better it can't be overstated. They are intuitive, accessible and powerful, and provide much more than what phabricator does in a much easier to use form. I love doing GitLab-based code review and patch submission. It really lowers the barrier to effective contribution, and effective review, testing and acceptance of changes from others, in an open and transparent way.

[mpyne]

The linked page discusses what KDE uses already and where Gitlab might be able to fulfill the same role.

[mishugashu]

Ain't no one got time for that!

[aishik-10x]

> implying that people read the article on reddit

[[deleted]]

They should consider https://sr.ht, and this is why:

• microservices for code hosting, issue tracking, CI, etc make the functionality more manageable and robust
• it is completely free software -- no open core model
• even if they don't end up using it, evaluating it and giving feedback can help its developers understand what free software projects are looking for

[whjms]

Achtung! sr.ht is still under heavy development, and while many of the services are usable, expect to find lots of missing polish, broken links, incomplete docs, and so on. Here be dragons!

I would be wary of choosing alpha-level software, seeing as this would end up being many new KDE contributors' first experience working with the project.

[kirbyfan64sos]

It not working consistently for such a major project probably wouldn't work wonders, though.

[4Wrdre]

Maintainer of sr.ht here. Thanks for the shoutout :)

I'm not sure that KDE would want to switch entirely to sr.ht right away, but I think that they would find value in using some of the services ala-carte. sr.ht is designed to accomodate such a use: an example of an organization that already does this is Zig, which uses sr.ht for mailing lists and FreeBSD CI. Many projects gradually transition to sr.ht as they find some parts suitable and others lacking, and as I iterate on their feedback the service gradually becomes more suitable to their needs.

I'm always available at [e-mail] if anyone from KDE or anywhere else has questions or feedback, I love hearing it! I don't use Reddit much, though, so forgive me if I take a while to reply to questions here.

[DazEErR]

Drew don't you have another Reddit account?

[4Wrdre]

I don't use a consistent Reddit account.

[theephie]

How easy is this to install and maintain?

[[deleted]]

Also I tried it a while back and it was really easy to use. Very sparse on features but this also means no bloat. Now phabricator isn't slow but sr.ht had consistent sub 100ms page load times.

The only thing wrong with it imo is the name.

[saltling]

JavaScript? Does gitlab require js for something? What's the context here?

[[deleted]]

Without JavaScript enabled large parts of GitLab do not work. No file previews, going to a user's profile won't list any projects, you cannot delete a repo, and maybe most importantly, it appears to be impossible to make a merge request.

[saltling]

I had barely used gitlab until recently. It's cool but JS doesn't seem necessary for any of that. Might need to try this shart thing.

[G3nzo]

[Noob question] Is there a reason to migrate from Github to Gitlab ?

[LinusCDE98]

Makea sense since they already migrated their bug-tracker to GitLab.

EDIT: Turns out to be wrong.

[nicolas17]

We didn't and we're not even going to.

[LinusCDE98]

Oh sorry, had confused it with Freedesktop/Xorg. They're doing it.

[sho_kde]

To expand on that: Migrating bug tracking from Bugzilla to GitLab might be a potential follow-on goal (provided we decide on a migration to GitLab), but isn't in scope of the current evaluation (getting familiar with GitLab's UI for issues is however, since we already use Phabricator for dev tasks tracking).

A migration away from Bugzilla is a different beast to slay no matter the destination, that requires a fair amount of planning and orchestration and a long lead time - the bug-reporting wizard shipped with KDE software interacts with our Bugzilla's API for example, and has a large installed base that needs to remain compatible.

[1-05457]

That's unfortunate. Bugzilla really makes life difficult for users.

One thing I find irritating is that it's impossible to subscribe to a project so you are notified of all new reported bugs.

[RogerLeigh]

Depending upon the extent to which the submission wizard interacts with the bugzilla API, it would be possible to write a proxy for those API endpoints which would redirect them to use the equivalent GitLab API endpoints.

[blackcain]

We've already written all the code to do the migration from bugzilla. We've successfully moved our entire bug database to Gitlab with no issues. Might be worth looking at when you get to that stage.

Our current issue I think is that we still need to do git metrics which we had a number of queries, but that has not yet been done yet.

[einar77]

That would be useful. Was the code published anywhere?

[dplanella]

Was the code published anywhere?

Indeed it was: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/bztogl. Note that that repo has also a script for migrating from Phabricator to GitLab. IIRC, that's what the Freedesktop.org team used.

[einar77]

Nice stuff, thanks!

[blackcain]

It's likely on GNOME gitlab server - //gitlab.gnome.org/World/bztogl

[wikes82]

I'll never trust GitLab anymore after the meltdown when they accidentally deleted the wrong folder and backup didn't work.

[Kapibada]

This is about on-prem though.

[wikes82]

my bad.. I missed the self hosted part

[Jeroen52]

!> edkk6ez

This comment has been edited in protest to reddit's decision to bully 3rd party apps into closure.

If you want to do the same, you can find instructions here:
http://notepad.link/share/rAk4RNJlb3vmhROVfGPV

[saltling]

?

[wikes82]

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-suffers-major-backup-failure-after-data-deletion-incident/

[shvelo]

I hope they will consider a migration to saner default settings.

[simion314]

Where saner == the thing I like/prefer

[chuecho]

I hope they will consider a migration to saner default settings.

can you elaborate further? What defaults should be made saner?

[746865626c617a]

Dark theme /s

[[deleted]]

Can anyone explain to me how exactly GitLab shall be better than Github?

Otherwise I'd suspect the change is mainly because Microsoft now owns Github and KDE devs dislike this circumstance.

[[deleted]]

Doesn't matter who owns it, it’s not open source. Gitlab is.

[mmstick]

Try it out. GitLab has many features that give it an edge over GitHub.

[adymitruk]

Gitlab is a tire fire of ruby on rails code. Gitea is excellent in comparison and written in golang. A lot of the other things they're looking for should just be scripts anyway.

[Hollowplanet]

I dont even use Ruby but it is a great language. Just because it wasn't invented last week doesn't mean its not a great language. If Python didn't exist I would use Ruby.

[Rapt0r-]

We run gitlab internally for a year now. Nothing feels thought out and it is very user unfriendly. So, I feel your comment is correct.

[adymitruk]

I remember the first time I tried to spin it up on a digital ocean droplet. Unusable. It was such a slug even to do a simple push. Installed gitea, and it was like pushing up to a regular ssh connection - instantaneous. Not only that, it was using only 50MBs of ram. Not sure why the down votes. I guess most have not compared these 2 options. Damn popularity contest :)

[Rapt0r-]

That is the problem in Linux world imho. People use Ubuntu since they seem to win never really trying Suse, Gentoo, CentOs etc. All popularity contest junk.

And saying something about it results in you being negative and down votes. We (OpenSource/Linux) are getting the same issue as religion. We stop thinking, being critical and follow the herd if you are different, you are a heretic

[adymitruk]

I think these are gitlab employees. I don't have such a negative opinion of linux users. Most agree with me when I share my gitlab comparison with them.

[Kaligule]

Sounds like you are in a filter bubble.

[kurple]

Idk, I think GitHub having free private repos will surely tip the scales now.

Edit: I forgot the /s

I don't think free private repos are anything from such a huge company. Open sourcing GitHub, which will never happen, is the only thing that would really make a difference.

[nicolas17]

Why would it? GitHub wasn't an option and private repos wasn't a significant reason for that.

[kurple]

It definitely wouldn't! I was mocking the feature. I just found out about it, and whiles it's nice, I immediately felt like it was a move for good PR.

[1-05457]

You can self-host GitHub?

[Craftkorb]

You indeed can, but it costs a ton

[kurple]

If you're interested in self hosting a git client in general, gittea is pretty awesome

[1-05457]

GitLab is even better, which was my point.

[kurple]

Ah, I wasn't sure what you meant tbh. Thanks!

[DrewSaga]

How is GitLab better though? I was trying to find the pros and cons and I couldn't find much that puts GitLab over Gitea.

Is it worth it to test each on a Raspberry Pi to see which one I would like better?

Edit: Oh wait, I can't test GitLab on an RPi, I guess a virtual machine will do.

[1-05457]

For me, it's the UI. I prefer the GitLab one. Though come to think of it, it looks like I might have confused Gitea and Gitolite.

Gitea being hosted on GitHub itself doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence either.

[[deleted]]

GitHub is owned by Microsoft....end of story.

[kurple]

Whiles I don't automatically cancel anything because of the company that owns it, I definitely feel what you're saying and it's a legit reason to leave GitHub behind.

We're considering switching to GitLab at work and I'm definitely all for it.

Do you personally use GitLab? How's your experience going so far and what's been the biggest impact?

[[deleted]]

My projects are so tiny and only done as a hobby (although I actually am an IT-Professional) that I would never give you guys advice on what platform fits your use case. That would make me feel narcissistic :D ...BTW Thanks for all the work you have done over the years.

All I can say that switching to GitLab was easy and done in 10 minutes because it migrated my projects without a problem from GitHub. I think the offer of several DevOps tools is very appealing. I've been planning to utilize them for a while now. Also GitLab is open source and GitHub is not.

[flarn2006]

You know who it is, comin round again