freedesktop.org migration to GitLab
freedesktop.org / X.Org | Migration Tracker
Background
freedesktop.org is an open-source umbrella organisation under the auspices of the X.Org Foundation. fd.o is host to core open-source infrastructure for putting together modern user-targeted systems, such as laptops and desktops, mobile phones and tablets, digital signage platforms, and more.
Some of the key projects hosted by fd.o include the Linux kernel's graphics infrastructure (DRM/KMS), the Mesa3D infrastructure and drivers for accelerated OpenGL/Vulkan/etc support, the Wayland and X.Org windowing systems, the GStreamer and PipeWire media frameworks, and many more.
fd.o moved to a self-hosted GitLab CE system in 2018; this is tracking ongoing issues with GitLab for us.
Goals
Ensuring the livelihood and sustainability of our projects by giving projects and developers modern features and workflows, whilst staying true to our open-source and vendor-neutral philosophy by keeping our tooling open-source and self-hosted.
Current Tooling and Replacements
Tool | Feature | GitLab feature | GitLab edition |
---|---|---|---|
Collaborators
- Daniel Stone, freedesktop.org admin, maintaining the infrastructure and overseeing projects, @fooishbar
- Benjamin Tissoires, freedesktop.org admin, maintaining the infrastructure and helping modernise development, @bentiss
- Daniel Vetter, X.Org Foundation board member, organisational and financial oversight, @danvet
Related Issues
We have a lot of overlap with GNOME's development process, workflows, and constraints in gitlab-org/gitlab#21267 (moved), so looking at their list is probably helpful for anyone interested.
Blockers
Urgent
-
gitlab-org/gitlab#215591 Improved runner-side caching to reduce cost of network egress / storage access -
gitlab-org/gitlab-runner#11950 is causing a lot of spurious failures for us; we need to do some more debug on our side but help from gitlab-runner folks would be extremely welcome
Important but not urgent
-
gitlab-org/charts/gitlab#37 (moved) Bring Pages support to cloud-native Helm charts -
gitlab-org/gitlab#23308 (closed) Default MR allow-contribution checkbox setting: as we use bots to merge, no-one's MRs can be merged unless they allow contributors to push to their branches -
gitlab-org&525 Deduplicating repository storage for existing fork networks: this would probably be quite helpful to us, as we're now seeing repository cloning shoot right up in our repository charts, which has correlated with anecdotal reports from developers that they're seeing unexpected multi-GB fetches from widely-forked repositories, indicating that each repo is being independently (and aggressively) packed -
gitlab-org&3273 / gitlab-org&3284 Performance improvement (particularly FE): many of our developers are on surprisingly low-spec machines, particularly those entering 'traditional' (non-web) OSS development from less-developed countries, or those who we bring in through initiatives like GSoC; FE performance is a common complaint and friction point, so having both network-latency and CPU-runtime impact lowered would be hugely helpful
Nice to have
-
gitlab-org/gitlab#14272 Pages flaps constantly and noisily for us, and requires manual retries; so far it's not critically bad, but anything we can do to improve this would be great -
gitlab-org/gitlab#19432 Supporting Linux kernel style workflows would help us move our kernel development (still email-based) over to GitLab, but this is currently blocked behind CN Pages as a capacity issue -
gitlab-org/gitlab#15638 / gitlab-org/gitlab#15384 Allow reporters to add labels: we do not have sensitive or dangerous labels, and with quite a low triage capacity, it would be invaluable for submitters without access to add their own labels