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Comment by akerro | Hacker News Reader

Here, have it: https://gitlab.com/explore move your code here, thank me later.

Nothing wrong with gitlab, I personally use their self-hosted product. But just a reminder to all that they lost a bunch of data 1 month ago today [0].

However they were completely open and transparent about what happened, and they handled it as well as they could have.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...

To be clear, we lost six hours of data. Not something we're proud of at all, but I figured an exact number would be useful.

Also to be clear GitLab (apparently) didn't lose any data actually stored in git from that timeframe, "just" the data stored via GitLab itself (issues, wikis, etc).

It's of course still bad because GitLab makes a big deal of being about the "whole package" rather than just version control, but it's not the massive potential for intellectual property loss "six hours of data" implies for what most think of primarily as a git hosting service.

Not quite. I coincidentally signed up for a GitLab account that very day, at that very time period, to make a minor change to someone else's project. I (1) set up my account, (2) forked their project, (3) made the change, and (4) issued a pull request. Came back the next day and none of that was there, including my forked git repo. I had to do it all over again, and it was clear it was a clean wipeout of everything, because I was allowed to re-register with the exact same userid, etc. I know that is a rare-snowflake event, but the fact I had a repo and had even sent a pull request from it shows they did, in fact, lose some data in git itself.

The git data itself was untouched, but in the eyes of the DB there was no project that got created due to the lost DB data, so the git repo isn't hooked up. If you can give me the username and project name I can have support fix it up for you.

If you don't want to do that in this thread, feel free to email me: connor at gitlab.com

It's all good. I just replicated all the work (setting up the account, my forked repo, the change, my pull request) the next day.

This story made me grab my Github username and org names on Gitlab. :)

I partially agree.

gitlab is a very good alternative... but i think that porting of a working project (not just code) is still complicate to accomplish. Manually import items like:

- issues - projects - users

it is very expensive in terms of operation.

I know that there are products, libs and API to, let say, mirror your repository, but all those tools, after you dive into some READMEs, are just not enough.

BTW: if anybody knows how to do "1 to 1" porting from github to gitlab i will appreciate it

Migrating issues and projects is pretty trivial since GitLab has an import tool specifically to pull things out of GitHub: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_project...

Also worth noting is that you can configure a recurring one-way sync to periodically bring the slave repo up to date; this is useful for giving Gitlab a try while not committing to leaving Github as your primary hosting service.

Until gitlab decides to 'update' their ToS, at which point prepare to move to yet another hosting service. Right?

At worst, self hosted gitlab will always work.

These legal issues are real and no amount of running away and ignoring them will resolve them.

This is an intractable part of open-source software development. We can piss all over GitHub for trying to figure it out and getting it wrong, but at least they're trying.

just ssh, git and gitweb will do.

Or self-hosted FusionForge if you need more fancy stuff.

There's also Gogs as well.

Only if their terms [1] are more favorable.

I did a quick skim and didn't see anything regarding waiving attribution rights.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/terms/

OR better yet - just install rhodecode, use Git/mercurial however you want + you get awesome code review.

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