What advantages do people like from Gitlab as opposed to just using git? I'm not too familiar with gitlab/github, so I'm sure it's a naive question, but I'm wondering what the main value-add that's missing from the basic tools is?
Great news for KDE and open source. Self-hosting with something like GitLab, Gitea, etc is still an option if you are dealing with an open-source project like GNOME, Xfce, etc. This allows you to control your data, source-code and the server if it goes down with the sys-admins to maintain it and you can still mirror your official repository from GitLab/Gitea to GitHub.<p>It isn't a good idea to 'centralise everything' [0] on a server or VM instance that you don't own, which is why self-hosting is better for companies and open-source projects than on GitHub.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803</a>
Jumping onto one of the most popular source control platforms is a really good move for KDE, but I'm a bit disappointed to read this. Phabricator is a really excellent piece of software, and seeing large projects like KDE running on it gave me hope that it would have a long life ahead still.
Since there's other large open-source projects on GitLab too (namely GNOME) I think it would be pretty neat if there was some sort of ActivityPub-esque federation between GitLab instances, to foster a sense of community in an application that's more distributed than GitHub is. You miss out on a lot with so many teams living in their own bubble.
Hopefully with the coordinated move to gitlab and the now greater existence of Gitlab instances, there will be a push towards ForgeFed[0] which will allow cross-instance merge requests, forking, issue creation and more.<p>I imagine it would make collaboration between different instances / groups easier e.g a KDE developer won't have to create an account on Debian's gitlab in order to fork a project or create an MR, but simply stay on the KDE instance, do all the work there and then submit a cross-instance MR.<p>0: <a href="https://forgefed.peers.community/" rel="nofollow">https://forgefed.peers.community/</a>
I think this is great but the "Why KDE moved to GitLab" section is downright weird - doesn't seem to provide any clear reason why and mostly talks about how hard it is. Why put that section in if then to not properly address it? It is almost counterproductive because it makes me really wonder now why when they can't actually state a clear advantage.
There's certain projects that you could leave and come back to after a few years and they're largely the same. But it's amazing how much more reliable, efficient, and user friendly KDE Plasma is even in a few short years.
Has anyone built a bridge that mirrors issues between Github & Gitlab? (the codebase can obv. just be synced via git itself)<p>Would be awesome if you could pick your platform without losing all the devs who only use one platform or the other to discuss issues.
I think it's a mistake for them to leave phabricator. This product is quite easy to get ci/cd going on. There are apis to submit back to tickets. it's highly customizable. Also the damn system never breaks; even when you think it broke. Git pull and run the migration tool. boom. Its a PHP system after all. Probably one of the most well written and methodical codebases out there. Also the community fixes bugs regularly, especially if they're simple and easy to replicate.
My small problem with gitlab is that the website is slow and heavy JS, especially having to use it on mobile (expectable that you can respond in issue trackers from mobile).<p>GitHub is comparatively faster and less cluttered UI.<p>I know this is not a significant problem. But I mentioned it since Gitlab people are sometimes commenting here. :)
How fitting: One of the most over-engineered desktop environments moves from one obscure hosting facility for the most unnecessarily complicated version control system to another.