I’m excited to tell you we will have hosted GitLab available for the Fedora community. GitLab is providing this to Fedora as part of their GitLab for Open Source program. With this, our community has an additional option for code and project management.
The GitLab instance will available for any Fedora-related activities. After we complete connecting the authentication system, you will log in with your Fedora account and create projects as you need them. If your team wants a group within our namespace, we can create that for you. We will follow up with guidance on how to make those requests, but in the short term, you can open a ticket in the infrastructure tracker in Pagure.
This new service is hosted by GitLab and includes Ultimate-tier features like scoped labels, burndown charts, access to CI minutes, and multiple assignees to issues.
We’re glad to provide a DevOps Platform to help make it easier for the Fedora community to contribute. It’s exciting to see their instance launch during the month when we’re celebrating 10 years of the GitLab open source project.
Nuritzi Sanchez, Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitLab
I know some of you are wondering what this means for Pagure.io and dist-git. The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team will continue to run them in a supported mode as we do now. With the availability of GitLab, CPE and the Source Git SIG will continue to explore the FESCo feedback on what could make dist-git viable on GitLab in the future. We will also look for ways to integrate Gitlab into more of our tooling to provide options for the community. Right now though, this just adds another option for you to use. If you want to keep your work on Pagure, then by all means do.
For new projects, you can choose whatever platform fits best. Pagure is well-integrated into the Fedora ecosystem, particularly fedora-messaging. On the other hand, GitLab offers Agile and devops features that can help with advanced workflows.
If you have any questions, we’re always happy to discuss them on the infrastructure mailing list. If you encounter any problems with GitLab, please open a ticket in the infrastructure tracker.
Please don’t call this a “GitLab instance”. It’s just a namespace on GitLab.com that is being paid for to have access to all the features there. A GitLab instance is quite a different thing from this.
Shall there be an announcement article on the FedoraMagazine?
Fedora’s principles are, in order: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First. Fedora is now using GitLab Ultimate; unlike GitLab’s basic plan, Ultimate is nonfree software. Would the use of proprietary infrastructure violate its first principle?
I think it would have been much better to stick with Pagure or invest in something like Gitea or Sourcehut. Woodpecker is a FLOSS CI solution that seems to be trending a bit in Gitea circles (esp. among the Codeberg community); adoption by Fedora could have really been a boon for free CI systems.
I share the concerns of @seirdy. There are other git/CI/CD tools out there which are solely and fully open source from beginning to end which would also be glad about support etc.
Nevertheless I see a value in having GitLab as an option. GitLab is an awesome platform with it’s most important features being open source. You could argue if it’d be better to host the CE edition so it’s truly open source. Then again, there is a company behind it developing quite nice features for developers with a certain amount of resources which are only available in this deal regarding the Ultimate edition. This could enable more people to utilize powerful tools for FOSS development in the Fedora community in the long run which would be great - it’s a tradeoff I think.
Next you can also discuss the incentive of GitLab and if it’s only in their best interest or if it’s a win-win for the FOSS community too.
I don’t know if this is the right place to discuss these things and also the Council and others probably have already discussed some of these things elsewhere?
This is a fine place to discuss it, although we could also move it specifically to #council topics. I share the concerns about GitLab’s open core model; I am obviously not privy to their business details, but I think their worry that making everything open source is at best short-sighted. The value is in the hosting and expertise, really.
Anyone big enough to self-host and who would do so instead of paying but is limited by their enterprise options has the resources to decide to just build that expertise themselves and implement the withheld features. So, ultimately it’s self-defeating.
But, my guess is it wouldn’t actually hurt them at all to just go all open. Look at Discourse — it’s entirely open source, but here we are paying for the Business plan, and actually considering the Enterprise one. Same with Matrix. It may be true that they needed it to get to where they are today, but the IT landscape is different from what it was a decade ago, and I think pure open source SaaS is a lot more appealing.
And this comes down to the key thing: we, Fedora, are not in the business of running a git forge — but we need one to make what we do make. So, the above all said, when it comes to this kind of tooling, we prefer open source options, but when there’s not a good option, we do the best we can. The Council actually has a policy statement on this: Additional Policies :: Fedora Docs
For git in specific, we do continue to run pagure, and will keep it running for src.fedoraproject.org for the forseeable future. That’s because the community felt really strongly that the hosting for our source packages is so close to our distro-building mission that it needs to be open source. But we’re also not planning on shutting down pagure.io, even though it doesn’t have the same level of tight connection to the distro build process. Longer term? We definitely don’t have the development resources to keep up with Github or Gitlab features. And… there are performance issues that can be frustrating. There’s no one who offers pagure hosting at scale, so choosing a SaaS vendor isn’t really an option.
Now, though, as the message says Gitlab provides an additional option people can use. And I sincerely hope that Gitlab reconsiders their open source strategy sometime in the future, and at that time we can evaluate broader use. That’s a lot more likely to happen with Gitlab than Github or anything from Atlassian!
(It’s also possible that in the future we might look at a third-party Gitlab hoster able to provide enterprise-level service for the CE offering, for src.fedoraproject.org and other key things where we feel we need an entirely open-source infrastructure. But that’s just a thought, not anything in the actual works.)
I get the sentiment but it’s the terminology that Gitlab use, you are correct though it is a namespace!
A big consideration is who would host it and maintain it, as CPE are unable to do so. The Open Source program from Gitlab opts to use their ultimate tier / open-core approach as a means to allow communities avail of features and to build their communities out. It is totally optional though to use Gitlab and Pagure remains available