
Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab - l2dy
https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2017-11-01-gitlab-transitions-contributor-license.html
======
glutamate
> GitLab, a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises, ...

This claim is false. The linked survey shows that GitLab has a 2/3 market
share in self-hosted Git providers. Not every enterprise self-hosts a git
repository.

~~~
dominotw
I bought this up on HN in the past[1], but it gets instantly downvoted( by
gitlab employees?) , my comment was a response to CEO claiming how their
marketing is honest[2].

They also declared Gitlab CI as number one CI by excluding Jenkins because of
their made up defintion of "modern" .

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240)
2\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654)

~~~
YorickPeterse
You are most likely getting downvoted because of statements such as:

    
    
        > These guys are not honest people, just copycats under the guise of "open".

~~~
dominotw
You are right. Thats how i felt but that was unnecessary to say here. Deleted
that from my comment.

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WD-42
As someone who has attempted to contribute to the GNOME project, this makes me
super happy. The current process is archaic: attaching patch files to weird
bug trackers and then sorta just waiting for someone to get back to you... A
proper pull request system with code review would lower the barrier of entry
for contributions to these projects significantly.

~~~
johannes1234321
Then you also didn't work on the kernel, the community where git came from ;)
There you have to attach the patch to a weird e-mail and hope somebody picks
it up.

But it's true - a pull system is nice for drive-by contributions. In some
projects I noticed that after being listed in GitHub (be it as mirror or
primary place) the number of contributions improved, but also many low-quality
contributions came in.

~~~
carussell
> a pull system is nice for drive-by contributions

Did you mean a patch system? With a patch, you just send upstream the patch,
and you're done. Pull-based syncing is good for (and was designed for)
frequent collaborators. As a one-time contributor doing pull requests, after
you've cloned the repo and made your changes, you have to set up some public
remote so that others can pull from, push up your changes to that remote, send
upstream a message that it's ready for them to pull, and make sure that remote
maintains uptime until at least upstream has had an opportunity to pull, at
which point you can then do whatever you want with it. It really doesn't make
a lot of sense to use this workflow for anything but frequent collaborators,
where the setup costs are supposed to pay off later, after you've shared your
_n_ th change.

Or did you mean it's nice in the sense that increases the volume of
contributors, because there's a long tail of people who are familiar with and
only know how to deal in pull requests?

~~~
sitharus
That’s a super complicated way of describing ‘push the fork button’. You
really don’t have to worry about all of that.

------
jwildeboer
They claim that Fedora requires a CLA. Which is simply not true. Fedora was
one of the first projects to completely remove the need for a CLA. Seven(!)
years ago. See [https://opensource.com/law/10/6/new-contributor-agreement-
fe...](https://opensource.com/law/10/6/new-contributor-agreement-fedora)

~~~
sytse
Fedora requires an FPCA. In the comments below
[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-
dco-l...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/11/01/gitlab-switches-to-dco-
license/#comment-3595989527) we say the following about that: "While FPCA may
not be a typical CLA with regard to rights and restrictions, this is not the
only factor we looked into. We also were looking into whether there were terms
in general, other than commonly used open source terms. Our analysis took into
account that non-legal users do not always understand the nuances of legal
language and can be deterred by any CLA, restrictive or not, if they do not
understand the terms."

~~~
jwildeboer
I understand your position. But it hurts me a bit to see all of the hard work
we put into replacing the Apache style CLA with the FPCA and our messaging
around it to make sure we explain it in transparent ways being reduced to
"doesn't really matter, it's still just a CLA if you're not an expert" :(

~~~
sytse
Mmm, I'm sorry to hear that. I agree that between CLA's there can be vast
differences in the terms. We did not intent to detail those differences in our
blog post. BTW Have you considered changing it to a DCO?

~~~
richardfontana
I've casually suggested this to some people involved in Fedora. FWIW I think
it would be a good idea, and I think at this point the retention of the FPCA
by Fedora is mostly a matter of inertia.

But I share jwildeboer's sentiment, having been directly involved in the
drafting of the FPCA to replace the old Fedora CLA. If one looks at the FPCA
in historical context, it may be clearer that it is intended as an "un-CLA".

One could argue that the DCO is a type of CLA. I know some people who call the
DCO a contributor agreement, at least, and if it _is_ a contributor agreement,
it is one that refers to licensing of what's being contributed.

Anyway, kudos to Gitlab for switching to the DCO!

~~~
sytse
Thanks! I've tried to make an update to the rationale document
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/xklo7gqca1k9jcn/Screenshot%202017-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xklo7gqca1k9jcn/Screenshot%202017-11-15%2011.49.49.png?dl=0)

~~~
jhurewitz
It has been updated.

------
jwilk
The title says "Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to
GitLab" but unless I'm missing something, there's nothing in the article about
this supposed migration.

~~~
marenkay
> Debian and GNOME both plan to migrate their communities and open source
> projects to GitLab

1st paragraph.

------
Dunedan
I can't help to think that Gitlab is more and more eating Github's lunch. I
wonder why we see so little from Github to get out of that situation.

~~~
akerro
Because github still has 99% of that market. Just look at how many
repositories opened by Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, NSA, GCHQ and 100s
of others big players are on Github and how many on Gitlab.

~~~
dalore
People/companies go to GitHub to be social. It's the Facebook of computer
code. That's why all the big players are there, so they can share/market
themselves. It's also where a lot of programmers put their code so they can
show it for interviews. That's why there are so many public repositories
there.

~~~
johnnycarcin
Totally agree with this. This is the reason that I self-host with Gitea but
mirror everything to Github.I essentially use Github as a forwarder to my
Gitea instance.

However, I have seen a drastic decrease in interaction (PRs, issues, etc) with
my self-hosted repos even though you can auth with your Github credentials.

------
mathw
I don't actually understand this. Are they referring to the agreements for
contributing to GitLab itself, or for contributing to things hosted on GitLab,
which surely have nothing to do with the hosting at all?

~~~
jlgaddis
Yeah, I'm not sure what they mean by "migrate their communities".

I'm not exactly real clear on "... and open source projects" either. Debian
used to use Alioth [0] pretty extensively. Maybe they're getting rid of that
and moving everything that was on there to GitLab.

I get that this is a press release but it could be a bit more informative,
IMO.

[0]: [https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth](https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth)

~~~
absoluteHNnoob
From Debian News
([https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/](https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/)):
yes and it is going to be named Salsa
([https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa](https://wiki.debian.org/Salsa)).

------
akavel
The rationale analysis they published via the linked article is interesting:

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zpjDzL7yhGBZz3_7jCjWLfRQ...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zpjDzL7yhGBZz3_7jCjWLfRQ1Jryg1mlIVmG8y6B1_Q/edit)

------
jhasse
GNOME already started, check out
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME)

~~~
connorshea
Their infrastructure tracker has a lot of interesting info about the move[0].
You can also read through the development mailing list, it has a lot of
discussion about the GitLab migration.

At GitLab we're tracking the blocking issues they've brought up in this
issue[2].

[0]:
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Infrastructure/issues](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Infrastructure/issues)
[1]: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-
list/](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/) [2]:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/35287](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/35287)

------
ausjke
An active gitea user here, gitlab is too heavy for my person self-hosting
site, at the moment, github for social coding, gitea for personal repo, tried
but not jumping on gitlab and do not see a need for that.

~~~
marenkay
... pair that with Drone and/or GoCD.

Personally I avoid using GitLab for professional and private use as it is
using Omnibus packaging and comes with a whole bunch of software that usually
is neatly packaged by any Linux distribution.

------
Ruud-v-A
I was under the impression that Debian is in the process of moving to Pagure
[1]. The reasons mentioned in the LWN article are not invalidated by Gitlab's
announcement of dropping the CLA.

[1]: [https://lwn.net/Articles/724986/](https://lwn.net/Articles/724986/)

~~~
connorshea
Based on the Debian Wiki, plans have since changed[0] (unless this page is
outdated?). That LWN article is from June, the wiki article was last edited in
September.

My understanding from the mailing list is that they're planning on using
GitLab, at least that's what I heard last. I could always be wrong.

[0]:
[https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#Deprecation_of_Alioth](https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#Deprecation_of_Alioth)

~~~
vbernat
You are right. Part of discussion starts here:
[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2017/10/msg00264.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
devel/2017/10/msg00264.html)

------
bobajeff
I remember reading awhile back that email was better suited than GitHub for
large projects (eg. Linux). Wouldn't that still be the case with GitLab?

~~~
tremon
Probably this link: [http://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-
kernel...](http://blog.ffwll.ch/2017/08/github-why-cant-host-the-kernel.html)
?

In that case, yes, that applies to GitLab too. The main problem is how GitHub
and GitLab manage subprojects: GitLab forks are strictly hierarchical in how
they manage pull requests and contributions (you can only submit patches from
your repo to the single repo that you forked from).

But that may not be an issue for per-package repositories like Debian has on
alioth. Debian does not have a monotree like the Linux kernel, every (source)
package is a standalone project so the same objection does not apply here.

~~~
DouweM
Note that "you can only submit patches from your repo to the single repo that
you forked from" is no longer true for GitLab starting with 10.1 (released
October 22, see
[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/22/gitlab-10-1-released/#me...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/22/gitlab-10-1-released/#merge-
requests-across-forks)), and hasn't been true for GitHub for a while (perhaps
forever).

------
sytse
Previously discussed the blog post
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15602564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15602564)

------
shmerl
I'd really appreciate Web based way of Debian bug reporting. It doens't need
to replace the current one, I suppose they can make some Gitlub plugin for
e-mail method.

~~~
teddyh
GitLab is not replacing DebBugs, it is replacing _Alioth_.

~~~
shmerl
It could compliment it, not replace may be.

------
jwilk
GitLab is unusable without JavaScript enabled. It's disappointing to see free
software projects even consider adopting it.

~~~
jancsika
Just navigated my own running instance of gitlab-omnibus with Firefox's
javascript.enabled set to false. It looks fine to me-- I can navigate, view
the issues, and presumably post comments.

What is it that you are claiming is unusable without JavaScript?

~~~
jwilk
I can't register, because the "Register" tab on
[https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in](https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in)
doesn't work.

Issues (such as [https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/json-
glib/issues/26](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/json-glib/issues/26)) show the
initial message, but not the comments.

(I'm sure that's just tip of the iceberg.)

------
ericfrederich
From where? Article doesn't mention where they're migrating from.

~~~
passivepinetree
From the email patching system. It's a tried-and-true model, but it tends to
be unfriendly to new contributors.

------
0xFFC
Although unrelated, but with recent migration to Meson in Gnome ecosystem I
really want to contribute to their code base in my spare time. Autotools was
just like hell to work on!

------
MrFurious
i guess that debian and gnome are preparing her nuclear reactors for execute
gitlab, :P

------
jbverschoor
Great news for GitLab!

