GitLab: a case study in how to destroy a community and by extension destroy trust in your ability to survive. https://decafbad.net/2022/08/03/gitlab-a-case-study-in-how-to-destroy-a-community-and-by-extension-destroy-trust-in-your-ability-to-survive/ #ADayInTheLife #Computers #Gitlab #misc
@loke That's unfortunate. They did have remarkable retention though, so I'm glad they restored the project.
@craigmaloney I much prefer the #GitLab transparency (their employee handbook and policy documents are all open source), reliability, authenticity (no deceptive ads anywhere), and dev tools (free CI-CD and static hosting), to #SourceForge's clickbait garbage pile. All you had to do to revive your neglected repo was a touch and push once a year. Not much to ask for all that free stuff.
@hobson Thanks for sharing.
@craigmaloney very kind of you
@craigmaloney uggghh i think i have a project or 2 there (free). i’ll have to check in the morning. thanks for the heads-up
@craigmaloney well, it seems they have reconsidered and come up with an alternate scheme.
https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1555325376687226883
Interestingly, this appears to be based on read, rather than write, inactivity, which is also a better idea.
As for the broader implications and inferences, well, I may not extrapolate as far and fast as you do (for good reasons you disclose), but I will now be wary, as will many others, and ultimately that may amount to self-fulfilling prophesy regardless. Sigh.
@uep Thank you. That's good to hear.
@craigmaloney You mentioned Sourceforge. They removed one of my projects because it was dormant (or possibly because my user was dormant, I don't know if I had logged in for a few years).
I noticed it because I wanted to show some of my old code and the repository wasn't there anymore. I contacted Sourceforge and they were able to restore it again for me, which was lucky because I had no other copy of the code.
So I agree that what gitlab did was bad, but it's like they saw the mistakes Sourceforge did and just decided to do the same.