[HN Gopher] Arch Linux bugtracker migration to Gitlab completed
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Arch Linux bugtracker migration to Gitlab completed
Author : Foxboron
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-12-08 12:14 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archlinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archlinux.org)
| dveeden2 wrote:
| Looks like the planform they used before GitLab was Flyspray.
|
| I assume this brings better integration between SCM and
| bugtracker.
| gromit_arch wrote:
| Yes, the other big new thing also is that people can now create
| MR's for the packages aswell! So far this is working well and
| we are getting a lot of high-quality contributions :)
| 0xDEF wrote:
| How is Valve contributing back to Arch Linux considering it is
| the base for their SteamOS?
| dtx1 wrote:
| Proton, Gamescope, Linux ESync/FSync Patches are all at least
| related to valves efforts from what I can gather and as an Arch
| User I feel it's the premier linux gaming distro due to valves
| efforts.
|
| I think most of the work Valve does is upstream from Arch
| though but it's trickling down very fast (with arch, sometimes
| hours, if it's an AUR-Git package, seconds).
| Schlaefer wrote:
| On that point: How SteamOS is Contributing to the Linux
| Ecosystem - LinuxCon 2023
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7YbqrJ0_nM
|
| PS: The core of Valve's technical contribution is around the
| SteamDeck. You already know it runs Linux, Proton,
| yadayadayada. An obvious fact that only clicked for me after
| being mentioned in the presentation: if you aren't in the
| Steam store but want your app on the SteamDeck the primary
| option is a Linux version (distributed through flatpack).
| That (commercial) incentive alone is a huge benefit. Suddenly
| you can make a business case why your product maybe should
| support Linux.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| "Apart from sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public
| order, roads, the fresh water system, and public health ...
| what have the Romans ever done for us?"
| jorvi wrote:
| > I feel it's the premier linux gaming distro due to valves
| efforts.
|
| For anyone reading this: virtually every piece of code is
| upstreamed to the projects themselves (Mesa etc.), there is
| no reason to jump to Arch for gaming.
| freedomben wrote:
| Valve is a Linux and Arch MVP, and as a die-hard Linux user, my
| appreciation for them is immense. Without Valve's efforts,
| Linux user base would be a lot smaller because a lot of people
| would be using Windows. I wouldn't be able to game (since I am
| a Linux-only house) without a complicated windows VM setup. So
| just the fact that they support Linux with their proprietary
| software, and the fact that they used Arch for the Steam Deck
| (giving strong commercial incentive to game devs to support
| linux or at least proton, which IMHO is good enough) is a big
| contribution to the community. They also made the Steam Deck
| fully hackable by the owners, so you can do neat things with it
| including running all your games from some other store if you
| want.
|
| But on top of that, they contribute a _ton_ of things that
| benefit even people who never touch Steam. Valve slings
| graphics stack and GPU code, and of course Proton /Wine,
| Gamescope, and a handful of other things. They are _awesome_
| about upstreaming stuff, and when it 's not upstreamable (say
| for example a new or standalone project) they tend to open it.
| lemper wrote:
| arch resides in a special place in my heart. as long as what they
| do is reasonable, I give my support.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Yep same... I'm on Mac OS these days as a host but FreeBSD,
| Debian, and Arch are my long-distance relationship kind of an
| operating system.
| yakubin wrote:
| Same. And same selection of OS-es. :)
| freedomben wrote:
| Honest question, I'm genuinely curious, why would you move
| from Arch to Mac OS?
|
| I'm a big Arch fan but moved to Fedora because the overhead
| of managing updates in a rolling release got to be too much,
| and Fedora is very similar to Arch in conventions it follows,
| so most of my knowledge transferred over seamlessly (other
| than package manager of course). Moving to Mac OS though
| seems like it would render most of your knowledge/experience
| useless. I got stuck on a macbook for a short-term contract
| and found it maddening and confining in so many ways
| jiripospisil wrote:
| It would be great if you could use an existing AUR account when
| logging through the SSO.
| gromit_arch wrote:
| That does not work, in the future it is planned to have the AUR
| hooked up to the SSO service (so the other way around).
|
| If you write an email to the accountsupport email though (as
| instructed) you'll get an account quickly :)
| gumballindie wrote:
| Gitlab is a more suitable choice than github - not surprised arch
| mase that choice given their pattern of making good choices.
| NewJazz wrote:
| 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).
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| trufas wrote:
| They're using Gitlab CE. I assume the whole thing is running
| on their own servers.
| Foxboron wrote:
| We do. The infrastructure is obviously open-source as well.
|
| Ansible role for gitlab: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archl
| inux/infrastructure/-/tree...
|
| Gitlab playbook: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/inf
| rastructure/-/blob...
| trufas wrote:
| 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.
| Foxboron wrote:
| 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.
| arp242 wrote:
| 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.
| dnsmichi wrote:
| 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...
| Foxboron wrote:
| 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.
| roywashere wrote:
| 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!
| dnsmichi wrote:
| 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.
| Foxboron wrote:
| 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.
| pyrophane wrote:
| Gitlab's Open Source program actually seems prety good:
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
|
| They offer everything in Ultimate, including 50k hosted CI
| minutes, and the requirements seems reasonable (basically,
| everything needs to be public, have an open-source license, and
| you can't profit from add-ons or services).
|
| The drawback is that it looks like you have to apply for it to
| use it.
| freedomben wrote:
| Neat, I only wish their pricing for commercial was more
| reasonable. The bundling they do makes it a complete non-
| starter for people or companies who don't use the CI/CD, for
| example.
| dnsmichi wrote:
| GitLab team member here.
|
| Next to using GitLab.com SaaS, Open Source Program members can
| also choose to self-manage their GitLab instance -- like Arch
| Linux.
|
| > The drawback is that it looks like you have to apply for it
| to use it.
|
| This is a requirement, yes, but should not take too much of
| your time. You can learn how the process works in
| https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-rel...
| paddy_m wrote:
| FYI, the "Learn More Link" on [1] results in a 404. It links
| to [2]
|
| update: ahh I see there is a "migration" popup on the 404
| page.
|
| [1] https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/
|
| [2] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/developer-
| rel...
| openthc wrote:
| Another unfortunate thing of their Open Source Program is that
| companies that make open-source (MIT, GPL) and have a
| commercial offering as well (eg: GitLab themselves) are not
| allowed to use their Open Source Program.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Seems reasonable enough though.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| Well, yeah. The point is to give free access to free projects
| that don't make money _because_ they don 't make money and
| can't pay for Enterprise.
|
| If you have a commercial offering, you can probably afford to
| pay for your tools.
| shmerl wrote:
| Congrats! I wish Debian would do it too.
| sytse wrote:
| They already do I think. See https://salsa.debian.org/public
| and https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/09/19/debian-
| customizes-c...
| shmerl wrote:
| For the source code yeah, but not for the issue tracker.
| Debian's issue tracker is very archaic and annoying to use
| when needed.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I'm glad it's not just me. I've given up on bug reporting
| to Debian on at least ~two occasions because the email sent
| via reportbug simply wouldn't go through without any
| indication as to why. Fortunately somebody else was more
| successful and all got fixed.
| shmerl wrote:
| I never understood why it has to be so clunky. Some
| people might like this old style e-mail workflow, but I
| find it irritating.
| xbpx wrote:
| Arch sends distribution news every week or so, usually in one or
| two paragraphs.
|
| https://archlinux.org/
|
| I've followed the gitlab migration and every package and
| distribution change that warranted community notification for
| more than a decade.
|
| It's such an empowering feeling to have tracked all the changes
| to the distribution over a decade. The Arch maintainer culture
| has managed to provide consistent high quality communication and
| documentation.
|
| Most of the news doesn't require action on my part, being a
| subsystem or package I don't use. They use the news channel
| sparingly and the distribution is minimal and clean. News arrives
| only every other week or so and is succinctly written in one or
| two paragraphs.
|
| It's a distribution for those who love precision and
| professionalism.
| abound wrote:
| That's one thing (of many things) I've always appreciated about
| Arch: for those rare instances where I run `pacman -Syu` and it
| fails, I instinctively go to their homepage and look at the
| "Latest News", which invariably tells me what I need to do.
| costco wrote:
| Gitlab is a great product but using it has a negative effect on
| getting contributions for an open source project outside of the
| core developers due to Github's larger user base. I have seen
| this play out many times.
| wizhi wrote:
| And the only way to mitigate the cancer that is GitHub is to
| normalize contributing elsewhere.
| sesm wrote:
| It may have negative effect on the number of issues/PRs, but
| can also act as a spam filter and the net effect can be
| positive.
| themerone wrote:
| I don't buy into this argument. If someone doesn't have the
| knowledge and motivation necessary to use another platform,
| they aren't going to be making meaningful contributions to your
| project.
|
| It might mean less bug reports from users who find bugs, but
| aren't deeply affected by them.
|
| The upside is a lot less garbage in your issue tracker.
| codemac wrote:
| This is moving the previous flyspray issue tracker to gitlab.
| It's not like they were on github before.
| hubba_the_jut wrote:
| Congrats! Arch is my first and only distro and it's amazing.
|
| Looking forward to possibly contribute.
|
| I know this is off topic but does anyone know how are we on
| having packages with lto by default and multiple -march? Is the
| new pkgctl going to allow multiple automatic rebuilds?
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| So true! I love the AUR, it is like the Homebrew of Linux. Or,
| flipped, Homebrew is like the AUR of Mac.
|
| My new company is considering adopting Linux and is considering
| Ubuntu, and I pitched Arch because I really want to use the AUR
| again. I don't like installing PPAs with Ubuntu.
| c-hendricks wrote:
| Homebrew is also the Homebrew of Linux, with the bonus that
| it works on more than one distro.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Odd that the news post didn't link directly to
| https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages which
| is what bugs.archlinux.org links to.
|
| The news post should be updated to include the above.
| reactordev wrote:
| I'm seriously impressed with Gitlab's issue system. I mean, it's
| apparent that they are great at git hosting and repository
| collaboration but the issue management system is really good.
| Epics, backlogs, stories, labels, tags, milestones, boards,
| roadmaps, it's all there.
|
| I was just having a conversation with a coworker about Jira vs
| Gitlab and why it doesn't make sense for us to switch to Jira
| over using Gitlab issues. After test driving it for a few weeks
| and now with a little "nudge" of backing from Arch with this post
| about how they have migrated to it, I was able to convince my
| coworker that Gitlab issues is more than enough for what we do
| and that adding Atlassian on top of that would only add to costs.
| FWIW, I love Atlassian Jira+Confluence duo. I don't like
| Bitbucket at all. It feels very antiquated and Jenkins-like. The
| UI theme isn't the issue, it's the layout, the nav, the
| construction that just rubs me the "we don't care about your
| productivity" way.
| oigursh wrote:
| GitLab UI is pretty bad compared to GitHub.
|
| GitHub docs are really polished in comparison too.
| calamari4065 wrote:
| I'm gonna complain here because I see gitlab employees
| commenting.
|
| It's a pretty bad look to claim that you offer a free version for
| individuals when there's not actually _any_ way to get it from
| gitlab.com. Your only option is an email capture for a free trial
| of enterprise. Even the install docs redirect you to an email
| capture.
|
| Of course there is a way to install enterprise for free, and it's
| full of nags and enterprise-only features that prompt you to
| upgrade.
|
| You have to already know what CE means and you have to find it
| through a search engine. Even the install docs barely mention it.
| I got all the way through the install process and configuration
| before I realized I'd installed the enterprise version. I only
| found CE by searching for ways to hide the enterprise upgrade
| nags.
|
| It's an extremely bad look, and people like me who care about
| privacy and open source are gonna be turned away. I explicitly
| decided against gitlab for this reason. I only came back because
| the other options are worse.
|
| I get wanting to promote the paid offering, but completely
| burying the actually-free version and _only_ offering an
| enterprise trial behind an email capture is pretty hostile. It 's
| against the spirit of FOSS and I'm very disappointed.
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