
Gnome has moved to GitLab - fiveFeet
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/31/welcome-gnome-to-gitlab/
======
matttproud
… and closed about a bazillion bugs I filed over the years in the process
without (apparently) migrating them, too.

… though I am pretty sure they left the bugs in the source intact.

~~~
audidude
Everyone on the CC list for each bugzilla bug was notified 6 months ago that
any bug without action in over a year would be frozen instead of migrated.

(Do keep in mind that GNOME, unlike corporate projects, is largely volunteer
based and time, resources, and contributors are limited)

As the email said, you just needed to ACK a comment on the bug to keep it
alive and ensure its migration.

Given the nearly 900,000 bugs filed in the life-span of bugzilla, I think that
was an acceptable trade-off given the very small workforce.

Hopefully, the gitlab tooling will allow us to track things going forward much
better.

Personally, I think a lot of bugs in Bugzilla were just left open instead of
closed due to a difference of opinion/vision but different maintainers have
different triage styles.

~~~
matttproud
I wish it was that simple, but I never received a single notice of the
migration or my need to do anything at all as a bug reporter. (Just ran a
liberal grep on my inbox right now.)

The only notice I received was after-the-fact. Sorry.

Learning of GNOME'S cavalier attitude toward user reports and eventual product
direction was exactly why I moved off the platform in the intervening years. I
had high hopes when I was young and naive.

I realize GNOME is volunteer-based with a pillar of corporate backing from Red
Hat and similar, but it strikes me as botched that if enough will existed to
migrate to GitLab, an endeavor that requires serious engineering hours of
research and planning and execution, that nobody could have said: let's query
and build a list of unique email addresses from bug reporters and personally
email them once with a quick letter, letting them know what they need to do.
Compared to the actual migration, that is drops in a bathtub. Simple due
diligence for user-facing goodwill.

I want to be sympathetic — really.

JWZ's CADT supposition has a lot of explanatory power here combined with the
opportunity to "scrub a lot of bugs quickly".

~~~
workinthehead
Bug reporters who can't even be arsed to follow up or check in on their
reports aren't worth nearly as much as you seem to think they are.

~~~
freehunter
True, but on the other hand bugs can go unfixed for years, with developers
ignoring them or prioritizing them super ultra low. I know I've opened enough
bug reports over the years that I can't go back and check on all of them, but
I'm still hoping they'll get fixed some day.

If it's closed for "inactivity" while I'm actively waiting for a response from
the developer, that's going to annoy me.

~~~
eptcyka
What exactly do you mean by "actively waiting"? Is your act of waiting
actively in any way perceivable to anyone but yourself?

~~~
freehunter
As opposed to having forgotten about it. As in, if the developer responded,
Github would send me an email and I would jump back into the conversation. As
in I can't do anything more until the developer responds, but once they do I'm
ready to help.

There's a quick and easy way to tell if someone is actively waiting: respond
to them.

------
Slippery_John
Unrelated, but GitLab has a pretty slick cookie notice. Tells you exactly what
they're doing and lets you opt out of non-essentials.

~~~
kazz
I really wish more people would implement cookie notices like theirs. I really
like the one that [https://www.bosch.us/](https://www.bosch.us/) uses too.

~~~
artursapek
Are there really people who appreciate these redundant notices? Do you need a
notice that a website uses TCP/IP too?

~~~
jacekm
I find these GDPR notices useful. Obviously every website use cookies, but
it's nice to know what these cookies actually do. I've already encountered a
few news websites listing 100+ advertising/targeting companies whose cookies
they use. That was quite eye-opening. I also appreciate all the GDPR emails
that landed in my email box recently. I've replied to about every second of
them asking for my account/data to be erased.

~~~
mrighele
Apparently, Tumblr shows more than 300 [1]

[1] [https://gdprhallofshame.com/22-to-continue-to-use-tumblr-
ple...](https://gdprhallofshame.com/22-to-continue-to-use-tumblr-please-check-
these-2-000-boxes/)

~~~
Perseids
I can confirm from personal experience. And all of these have to be unchecked
separately, there is no deactivate all button. It's completely ridiculous. Oh
and your selection isn't restored once you leave the dialog and immediately
come back. I know sites have an interest in persuading you to let them share
your data, but some of these dark patterns are indistinguishable from black.

------
asdsa5325
Here's the link to the repos, which was strangely not included in the blog
post:

[https://gitlab.gnome.org/explore/groups](https://gitlab.gnome.org/explore/groups)

~~~
foepys
The whole blog post was made to sound like GNOME moved to gitlab.com, so I
guess not including the link was intentional.

~~~
shmerl
Mesa is also moving, but they explicitly mentioned it's a locally run instance
of Gitlab, not gitlab.com.

~~~
craftyguy
It's hosted on freedesktop.org.

------
orf
The comparison between Phabricator and Gitlab is quite interesting:
[https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure](https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure)

------
hajile
Now it's time for them to move to Node.

They currently use the JS engine from Firefox 45 (over 2 years old) and are
looking to move to 52 (almost 15 months old). Let's not forget that the update
before that was from FF25 which was from 2013.

It's past time to port your stuff to N-API and actually allow devs to have
access to standard dev tools using standard dev practices.

It would be a great change for Gnome devs too. Rather than spending weeks of
dev time trying to shim in the latest SpiderMonkey version and make sure
nothing broke, they could rely on N-API being stable, so they can focus
instead on updating the JS interface to ES6+.

~~~
kuschku
That'd mean even more of the world relying on a monopolist of ecosystem of
V8/Blink.

V8/Blink already runs 70% of browsers and a massive amount of software, don't
you think at some point it's enough with giving Google control over
everything?

~~~
matheusmoreira
Why does using V8 or Blink give Google control over your software?

~~~
ForHackernews
It means one company decides the future direction of the web. (Even more than
they already do)

------
ufo
The new gitlab setup is lovely. Browsing the source code and bugs/issues is
much more pleasant than it was before. It is giving me an itch to contribute
to GNOME somehow.

------
bionoid
The actual GitLab instance appears to be at [1], I couldn't find this in the
link or the gnome.org announcement.

Good news, though! I am hopeful it can help lower the barrier to entry.

[1] [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME)

------
itsadok
The last time I evaluated GitLab, you needed the paid version to use features
that I considered pretty basic, like merge request approvals and multiple code
reviewers[1]. I'm wondering now if the GNOME people consider these
unnecessary, or if I misunderstood what was possible with self hosting.

[1] [https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/)

~~~
cryptos
I wonder about the exact same thing. Some time ago I compared the features of
GitLab with similar solutions and found that the OSS version is pretty
limited. If you want all the nice features for big projects it is more
expansive than the Atlassian stack.

------
buster
If only all of the energy spent on Gnome bashing would be spent on bugfixing,
we'd have a perfect Gnome desktop by now. It's sad.

~~~
gnomewascool
While I agree that excessive GNOME-bashing is unhealthy, one of the problems
the critics of GNOME (disclaimer: including me!) have is that GNOME frequently
rejects submitted, complete patches, so unfortunately your argument doesn't
hold.

GNOME-supporters will probably reply to this that the (main?) reason such
patches are rejected is that they go against GNOME's design vision, which is
sort-of fair enough, but then conversely, why would you expect people who have
different preferences to work on implementing GNOME's vision, which they don't
agree with.

Fortunately, there are projects like MATE or Cinnamon which give an outlet for
the people who dislike the turn GNOME has taken.

------
parvenu74
Was Github ruled out because it's not free enough in spirit or are the Gnome
folks just wanting to run things on-prem?

~~~
parliament32
Probably because Github is a closed-source company that can remove you, your
repo, or your group at any time, for any reason. Committing to a hosted
service is a bad idea (see: Sourceforge). That sort of thing isn't acceptable
to a project like Gnome.

~~~
jacekm
Just curious, has this ever happened? Were there any cases where github
removed someone's repo?

~~~
topynate
Yes, WebMConverter. However, I gather the employee responsible is no longer
with them.

------
yrro
This is very annoying because I can no longer see the list of bugs I filed
against GNOME products. They are all owned by 'bugzilla-migration', not me!

[additional] I appear to be subscribed to the issues that I filed in Bugzilla
and were migrated to GitLab, but there's no way to get a list of all the
issues I'm subscribed to: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/12697](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12697)

------
confounded
Fantastic news!

------
gsklee
I guess we know why now:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221527](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17221527)

------
sebastian
Highly unrelated (and lots of reasons missing): I was never a fan of Gnome and
for years ended up "just going with LXDE instead" until I gave Budgie a try
about 6 months ago. I have never been happier in my life.

------
cdmckay
Where was it before?

~~~
parliament32
>Before migrating, GNOME used a broad range of tools to fulfil a number of
specific purposes – from CGit for hosting to Bugzilla for bug tracking – but
the number of tools made the onboarding experience for new contributors
cumbersome and confusing. They started looking for a single tool to meet more
of their needs to make this process easier and to improve their own workflows.

[https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure](https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure)

~~~
TremendousJudge
...did they just delete all the old bug reports?

~~~
amdavidson
I see about 14k issues:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues](https://gitlab.gnome.org/groups/GNOME/-/issues)

------
merb
it feels so slow to browse anything on this gitlab...

------
shmerl
I'm waiting for Mesa to move to Gitlab too.

------
sdsdsdsdsdsds
Slightly related, Does anyone have a virtual machine image of Ghome-
Development environment that I can use straight away. I am on a corporate RHEL
6 machine, so it has been very tough to be able to get the development
environment up and running there.

I am not even able to mame changes to gnome-terminator 1XX version because of
this.

~~~
ufo
GNOME Builder is set up to use flatpacks to be able to develop on the latest
software versions. The newcomer guide has instructions for how to set this up:

[https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers](https://wiki.gnome.org/Newcomers)

I never used it on RHEL 6 though.

------
sumedh
> Carlson proved in 1938 that this process was viable, using moss spores for
> toner. But when he pitched it to Kodak, General Electric Co., and other tech
> giants of the day, the response was, as he later put it, “an enthusiastic
> lack of interest.”

Another story where the inventor goes to big companies to sell the product and
they dont take him seriously which is kind of funny when Xerox became a big
corp, it did not take the GUI/Ethernet created by their people seriously.

------
robinhood
Too bad GitHub was out of the question just because it's not open source. I
don't think there is a single platform out there that has done more for the
open source community than GitHub. Most of the great OSS projects are on it
and it helped democratize open source participation by providing a very nice
UI and a set of robust tools that simply didn't exist before.

~~~
zitterbewegung
On the other hand Github could also become the next sourceforge.

~~~
robinhood
GitLab too, but granted, if you host your own version, you wouldn't lose
anything.

That being said, GitHub has almost no choice to keep being a good guy with the
OSS community. If they lose it, they lose the respect of the developers, and
they would lose their paid customers in the process.

~~~
jake_the_third
Another point for Gitlab is that it can be forked if the parent company goes
bad (e.g libreoffice and oracle). When looking at it with this perspective,
widely-used essential projects can live and thrive from one party to the next.

