[RFC]: Move the Crystal Linux project to GitLab

[SomethingGeneric]

Date proposed

10/23/2022

Link to merge request if applicable

No response

Short summary

We've been trialing GitLab for a while now, and I don't believe there's anything left to do except actually perform the migration.

Motivation

Self-hosting the project will give us better control over our data, more fine-grained access control, and most importantly, cool features to integrate development of the project as a whole.

Changes

• Move all repositories from this org to GitLab
  • I'm happy to write a bot to do this, as I already have for Ikeda
• Move all repositories from the packages org to the PKGBUILDs subgroup on GitLab
  • See above
• Update mlc-workspace and mlc-repo
• Archive(?) all repos here and in the packages org, and leave readme notes for the new locations
• Update website and other profiles (YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Fosstodon, etc) to point to the new URL

These points were added in post by @not-my-segfault , hi!

• Configure GitHub/Gitlab.com OAuth
  • Google OAuth too, if people are interested 👀

Drawbacks

In theory, GitHub is a source of discoverability for us. However, given that we've gotten some press and YouTube coverage, in addition to having fairly good SEO on our website and social media, I don't think that should be a primary concern.

Some people have expressed dislike for GitLab's UI, but I don't think the learning curve (if there is one?) really warrants being stuck with GitHub's limitations (see: ISO ci failing randomly without GitHub announcing changes in API limits)

Alternatives

Not really, we informally decided a while back that there aren't really any other serious competitors to GitLab as far as hosting for ourselves.

Unanswered questions

What else will we need to do in order to move fully off of GitHub. I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

[axtloss]

shouldn't this be something we do after the stable release? considering it's in like a month already, we shouldn't do big infrastructure changes like these

[fries1234]

wouldnt it be harder to do this after a stable release. breaking changes like these after a stable release would be quite stressful.

[ihatethefrench]

shouldn't this be something we do after the stable release? considering it's in like a month already, we shouldn't do big infrastructure changes like these

This would be much less effort than you would think, surprisingly enough. I don't think we'd suffer any more than when we deployed bellator

[fries1234]

plus i already wrore an rfc bot for gitlab

[fries1234]

but yeah uh what would we call the repository to put the rfc issues in. since uh gitlab cant have repos with dots in the name, so .gitlab wont work.