Here's the story:
GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts
They plan on saving a quarter in hosting costs by doing this.
I'm curious what the opinions are on this.
Update: GitLab has modified their approach based on some feedback.
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Oldest comments (43)
Probably good for the environment. As long as this kind of thing is done thoughtfully with principles of least surprise, it's probably a good norm in a lot of cases.
Well, just when I thought I'd use gitlab as a mirror for my projects 😂
Better go find an alternative now 👀
I don't currently use GitLab, but if I did I'd help them free up space by moving repositories elsewhere.
Some repositories might be dormant because they just work. Relatively small tools that do 1 thing very well may not see many issues, PRs, etc, but may have many users. Albeit, anything of moderate complexity will likely see bug reports and feature requests along the way. But it is possible for simpler tools to have large user base with little such requests.
In other cases, some repositories may be source code to replicate experiments from a journal article or conference paper. These won't change and shouldn't change once the article has been published. Such repositories are deliberately dormant but serve a purpose.
Do they have a plan to avoid breaking things, like making it read-only or something, or is it just YOLO let's break the internet?
I'm not sure
texhas seen any commits in the last yearI think if the inactive repositories where nothing happens incur such costs on them, making them read-only won't change a lot. So yeah, they will be effectively breaking the internet potentially.
I've been a big fan of Gitlab since years - actually the oldest post on my blog is the one from 2013 about installing Gitlab instance. But their recent decisions and marketing is... weird and disheartening for me. I'm not leaving them yet, although I feel a bit less secure about hosting some of my code there.
Besides, it's really hard for me to understand what are the real cost of hosting non-active repositories (unless they are huge). Sounds like a flaw in their architecture.
They should freeze dormants project instead, deleting code is too harsh. Imagine someone have a vital piece of code hosted there.
Just freeze them on a kind of S3 Glacier hosting, cheap when few reads occurs. If trying to access it, display a confirm message to revive the repo.
Not a vital piece, but I think I do have a few there. Mostly GitHub through. Worth logging in some time, and maybe move some to GitHub.
Or IPFS which is free. They just need to redirect it to cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/:cid/:repo_path
Docker did something like this a few years ago -- and I lost some images that just worked. Ohh well.
hum, what defines "activity"?
because I can set a CRON job to create tags artificially or pushing empty commits and "bon appétit" 😈
More seriously, the costs are probably too high and they did not anticipate that. From the Ux perspective, it's kinda bad to downgrade the service, but I guess they don't have the financial power of GitHub/Microsoft.
It's right there in the linked article:
A tiny shell script called by a simple cron job should suffice
Looks like an okay definition of active. Although deleting really seems a little drastic. I guess they might also test the waters and see how the community reacts. Even if they increase the time period for dormant projects they still might end up saving a significant share of their hosting cost.
hmmmmm guess I need to move my projects elsewhere.
Ever since I read this article stating their weird PEO policy (fart in venezuelan spanish hahaha) dev.to/luismejiadev/renuncie-a-mi-... I've been kinda HMMMM with them as a brand/company, this might be the actual push to finally get a github account and move some of my repos there. I've been reluctant cause I like the fox logo (I'm a simple panda) and being a bit of a hipster.
oh well!
They updated the article--they've scrapped the plan and are considering moving inactives to slower storage instead.
Smacks of a desperate move by a company which might be (just a wild guess) financially unhealthy, otherwise I wouldn't know why they'd do something like this ...
If you want to advertise to the world "we're not trustworthy and not reliable as a company", then this is the perfect way to do it. No, this is a terrible idea, and the very best way to lose existing customers, and scare away potential new ones.
Well anyway, to be honest the advantage of GitLab over Github has always eluded me.
It depends a lot on what constitutes a "dormant" project (and in turn, the abuse mechanisms to mark repos as non-dormant even though they would technically be dormant...), but in general I suspect the result is going to be a lot of disgruntled users who switch over to GitHub or self-hosted instead.