Github, Gitlab, or something else?

[Moonchild]

Well, it seems GitHub is going to go the whole Polymer/Google route after Microsoft's takeover, so I'm not sure where to organize our development in the future.
The only reasonable alternative seems to be Gitlab as it has similar features and by the looks of it can wholesale import repost and their issue tracker, but I'm unsure as to their browser support.

I think the only safe way to migrate will be to migrate to something self-hosted/on premises since these dev companies can't leave well enough alone and insist on constant change to the latest shinies. GitLab being open source should be an option to pick a version of their on premises edition that will be under our control. I'm unaware of other options at this time that provide what we need.
I'm only interested in the practical side of things. It needs to fit our requirements, and not be subject to "upgrades" that will break our use because we're not using an officially supported browser.
Any ideas?

[vannilla]

If it wasn't for the issue tracker the quickest solution is to use git's own self-hosting solution.
Some other alternatives I can think of but never tried are Gitea and Gogs.
I've seen people talk about them but I don't know the internals so I can't say if it's posible to fill the issue tracker with the existing GitHub list.

[Isengrim]

Have you considered SourceHut? I confess I don't know much about it, or whether it's a practical alternative for our purposes, but it is an alternative. I believe it is also self-hostable.

[adesh]

(some people have posted since I started drafting my reply)

I was waiting for this to be brought up. In fact, I wanted to open a thread to insist moving away from GitHub already due to them sucking more lately, and now their mobile/touch happy UI design.

For the most "compresensive" solution and in-drop replacement of GitHub, my vote goes to GitLab. But I don't like how it requires JavaScript for almost even viewing things. Also, their scripts feel a little heavy and bloated to me.

If we are going for a self-hosted solution, I'd say go for Gogs/Gitea. There UI is much cleaner in my opinion.
Although I only have experience with GitLab, and it used to offer almost everything what GitHub does, when we were using it.

[Moonchild]

I'm sorry but JS is simply going to be a requirement for this kind of thing so that really isn't an argument here. You can't ignore 1/3rd of the web languages for a complex piece of org software.

[adesh]

Yes, I understand we need JS today and it's fine by me if it doesn't choke the browser down. I was just hinting at the fact that with JS disabled as a public visitor, GitHub allows you to do a lot more than GitLab.

[athenian200]

The most promising option I can think of is actually this one, if we're switching from GitHub:

https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/

The reason is that most of the other popular alternatives are written in a language called "Go," which is basically Google's answer to Rust, and would thus not be maintainable on our end if they made undesirable changes to how it works. This is written in PHP more like some of our other infrastructure already is (the forums, Phoebus, etc), and thus might be easier to incorporate if we need something self-hosted.

It has a lot of the things we'd need for development, and seems to be an almost-complete solution. I know that a lot of people may have seen Mozilla using it on Bugzilla and thought it looked inelegant, but that's mostly because of the way Mozilla was using it mixed together with Bugzilla and their existing infrastructure just for one or two features it has. Phabricator itself seems to compare favorably to the alternatives at a first look.

[Moonchild]

My personal experience with phabricator is that it seems to be very disjointed. The way Mozilla uses it seems to be the only way you -can- use it, as it's a collection of separate tools that don't necessarily integrate with each other. There's a diff tool and issue tool, but I don't see how these things work together. I don't see how e.g. a pull request has a proper place in both the diff and tasks tool. of course it's very well possible I'm missing somethng here but it seems to be lacking the necessary project overview that is essential for larger projects like ours. e.g. I don't see a way to have issues separated by repo (which would be essential)

[athenian200]

Yeah, that's a fair point. What about something like Apache Allura?

https://forge-allura.apache.org/p/allur ... ster/tree/

This seems somewhat less disjointed than Phabricator, and Apache does have a good reputation with server software. I know I'm throwing a lot of alternatives out there, but I guess I'm wanting to make sure we get the best alternative we can and I'm not excited about GitLab (which is the most obvious alternative).

But in general, I think it's safe to say we definitely need some kind of Forge software if we're going to replace GitHub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

[New Tobin Paradigm]

There is a python git service doober that I am gonna be exploring for BinOC as Kudo is largely in charge of the dep nightmare for Fedora but it doesn't require a virtualenv or some of the more extreme pythonic horseshit aside from deps which yum will resolve. Just deps, flask, and wsgi block in the nginx.

So will let you know how that goes..

[bgstack15]

Gitlab is written in Ruby-on-Rails. It definitely gets a lot of attention for open-source projects. Fedora even picked it, despite the objections in that community about the freemium model.

The Devuan Linux community just switched off of Gitlab, because it runs like a dog, to Gitea. I like the Gitlab frontend, but then I didn't mind most frontends.

The recent passive-aggressive changes to Github are becoming more annoying. There's more whitespace, and some stuff spanning the whole width of a page, and some not, and it got weird.

[New Tobin Paradigm]

It is also highly inefficient server and browser side all around and if gitlab.com is any indication it isn't completely compatibile with us.

So imo, they can go to the fucking hell.

[athenian200]

Gitlab is written in Ruby-on-Rails.

It was originally, but these days parts of it are being rewritten in Go, and I think new parts of it are generally written in Go.

Google and Mozilla are pushing as hard as they can to get Rust and Go everywhere they possibly can. I'm not saying that it would be a deal breaker, but it just frustrates me that we're working so hard here to not have Rust in our codebase and have a browser that's independent from Google, only to possibly to be forced to rely on development tools that use Google's version of Rust. You know what I mean? Demoralizing.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Rust and Go everywhere Nomen omen ?

[Lunokhod]

Gitlab used to leave user's email addresses on display and they were also available when cloning repos. Possibly it's fixed in the last year, but I had already deleted my account on there rapidly when I noticed that.

[Lootyhoof]

What about GitPrep? Seems to use a similar UX to GitHub (and that's basically what they're going for it seems) and it's made in Perl (so hopefully not the same type of issues as would be seen in Go etc).

[athenian200]

What about GitPrep? Seems to use a similar UX to GitHub (and that's basically what they're going for it seems) and it's made in Perl (so hopefully not the same type of issues as would be seen in Go etc).

Hmm, well I would be open to that idea. it looks clean and simple, and Perl is a cross-platform language that doesn't change very rapidly at all.

The only real question is whether it meets our needs and is reliable enough. If it ticks those boxes, then it looks like an interesting option that's worth considering. I know it's tempting to choose an established piece of software that's been used by a lot of different projects, but... I don't know, I like trying things that are a little different from what everyone else uses.

[Moonchild]

Interesting. Never heard of GitPrep before. I hope it can handle repositories of our size...

[99HVYSK]

just an idea, the good old trac is also worth of considering.

https://trac.edgewall.org/

[New Tobin Paradigm]

I think whatever is offered should be the best solution available. The absolute junk offered as possibilities in this thread shows a real lack of the practical experence in project management and requirements needed to start transitioning to independent infrastructure. I also think that dumping github completely is a mistake and merely the sole reliance is what should be changed.

Github should be retained as a mirror (and bitbucket and gitlab dot com should also be setup for redundancy) but work should be shifted to a local solution. Something good and supported and most of all exploitable for our needs ie bending whatever it is to support our collective needs.

As I indicated, I am also searching for just a solution for BinOC's needs and if successful in the endevor maybe it will be what is needed collectively and maybe not but what shouldn't happen is a rush job to scramble to change to something unsustainable.

We shall see.