Re: [gentoo-project] Repo mirror & CI: official statement wrt GitHub

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 3:52 AM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>
> W dniu sob, 09.06.2018 o godzinie 09∶50 +0200, użytkownik Ulrich Mueller
> napisał:
> > > > > > > On Sat, 09 Jun 2018, Michał Górny wrote:
> > > To those who believe moving out of GitHub is the only thing to do,
> > > I would like to remind you of two things. Firstly, if Microsoft
> > > indeed has malicious intent, then they've already won because you've
> > > let them fragment the community. Secondly, how do you know that
> > > GitLab won't be sold to another 'big player' soon enough?
> >
> > GitLab is free software though, so one can always host one's own
> > instance of it. This is not possible with GitHub which is proprietary.
> >
>
> ...and how is this relevant when people are moving to gitlab.com rather
> than their own instance?  Also, isn't GitLab partially proprietary?
>

I was at a conference this weekend and chatted quite a bit with a
Gitlab employee about some of this.

My understanding is that Gitlab is open core.  The core part is the
same between their proprietary and FOSS products (I have to take his
word for that, but he is in a position to know and I trust him - knew
him well before he worked for Gitlab).

The proprietary part can be licensed for self-hosting, or the whole
thing can be hosted by them.  Right now they're offering both of those
options to FOSS projects for-free if they don't have paid contributors
(I imagine Gentoo would qualify at present if we wanted to pursue
either).

A rough comparison of the features of the various options can be found at:
https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

While there might be some proprietary features that we might find
useful, it seems like just the core could be a viable Github
replacement, and that is 100% FOSS (however, I have not actually used
it - I'm going by the feature list).  We could still use gitlab.com
for hosting, but as long as we're taking backups/etc we would always
have the option to move back to self-hosting.  We would simply not use
the proprietary features, other than things like support/etc (hey, if
they're willing to offer us SLAs/etc for the hosting and all that no
reason we can't take advantage - that doesn't really come with any
cost to us long-term).

I think the key is to maintain the ability to self-host at a later
time if we wish, which means avoiding the proprietary bits, or using
them only for non-core stuff like is done with Github today.

All that said, I haven't used the gitlab core functionality
personally, so I can't vouch for how it stands up on its own against
github.  I might go deploy it in a container or something to try it
out.

My understanding is that the main barrier to having Gentoo infra host
gitlab is ruby - they don't like ruby (I don't know all the reasons -
they're probably good ones).  If github.com is offering free hosting
that would be a way to get out of that problem.  On the other hand, if
something bad does happen down the road, there is always the chance
that we'll have to move to self-hosting without a lot of warning, and
that means having to deal with ruby whether we like it or not (or lose
stuff like issues/PRs/etc that aren't in git itself).

Now, mgorny basically did a lot of the github stuff on his own
initiative.  That isn't an option with gitlab.com since the distro
would probably have to formally apply for access.  I'm also not sure
how user accounts and such work in that scenario.  I think they
usually charge by the user - so presumably people can't just create
their own accounts and just go to work the way they can on github.
Even if we aren't paying the provisioning process might be more
top-down.  In any case, it seems like any move to gitlab would
probably have to be a bit more official, even if it is just one more
additional service we offer and not a full migration.

I think mgorny has the wait-and-see strategy right - it isn't like
github is going anywhere anytime soon.  If the CI features of
gitlab/etc are useful that might be a reason to consider applying to
use it even as just an add-on.

-- 
Rich