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Comment by NewJazz | Hacker News Reader

How many distros now have their own GitLab instance? I know Alpine, Arch, and Debian do. Any others?

Plus Freedesktop, GNOME, U-Boot, and probably more I am not aware of.

At this point, even if GitLab decided to close down their CE offering, I think there is enough momentum in the community to keep it going (at least for a little while).

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GitLab team member here.

> How many distros now have their own GitLab instance?

Open Source project partners are listed in https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/partners/

More insights into GitLab for Open Source in https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ and the Open Source program handbook page in https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-rel... -- created an MR to update the section at the bottom with Hacker News examples. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/merge...

Here is a post of the git migration to Gitlab on their tech blog written by Levente Polyak (Arch project leader).

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/09/11/migrating-arch-linu...

Mentioning it as it never did well on HN, but probably interesting in light of this post.

Yesterday, I first heard of the screwed-o-meter:

https://rachelbythebay.com/fun/som/

Plugging in for GitHub gets a score of about 90%. GitLab is in the mid 30%'s. (Assuming Arch is keeping a backup mirror of the bugtracker, etc on a private instance somewhere.)

That seems good enough to not bother with actually hosting it yourself. I'd rather they spend volunteer time on stuff other than applying security patches to a giant beast of a web service.

They're using Gitlab CE. I assume the whole thing is running on their own servers.

We do. The infrastructure is obviously open-source as well.

Ansible role for gitlab: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/tree...

Gitlab playbook: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/blob...

I guess it makes sense but still, brave to be running all the infra on Arch ;)

This is really clean! I'll definitely be using it as a reference for IaC done right. Congrats on the migration.

A lot of effort is spent on packaging the stuff we need for our own infrastructure so we can run it in prod. Gitlab is one of these exceptions but generally it's been working well for us.

We're using GitLab EE in Arch.

No idea how you can get all the way up to 90% for GitHub. You need to click all but two checkboxes for that, and that's clearly just bollocks.

VLC is also using their selfhosted Gitlab. And just as on the Arch gitlab, they had to turn off autoregistration due to spam and are resorting to manual validation instead. Sad!

GitLab team member here.

Spamcheck is available for all tiers https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/reporting/spamchec... For licensing reasons, it can only be included in EE, and not CE. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/-/issues/6259#n... You can run GitLab EE with the free tier as well.

That is not great. Currently this makes the barrier of entry for new people to contribute to projects using gitlab quite a lot higher.

There is also a huge volunteer cost here where we have to manually make accounts.

Thanks for your feedback. I copied it into the Arch Linux migration issue in the Open Source Program group https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/developer-relations/...

yeah but many FOSS orgs are run in a way that they state in their own bylaws that they would not use proprietary infrastructure and communication tools in order not to scare away Free Software purists. Then they get overrun by spammers and the whole project might get laid on ice because of it.

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