lswcap
In developing related projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, it has officially decided to convert the code repository from open source Gerrit to GitLab.
The Wikimedia Foundation revealed that in the results of a developer satisfaction survey conducted over the past two years, complaints about Gerrit, a code review system, are growing. Many developers dislike it because it is inconvenient to use and differs from the mainstream method of the workflow industry. In addition, as it takes time for new employees to get used to Gerrit, the Wimimedia community also had a problem with increasing barriers.
They also say that an increasing number of teams and individuals are using Git hosting services like GitHub instead of using Gerrit for making new repositories smoother and getting used to continuous integration configuration settings, self-service preparation, and pull request format workflows.
However, if some teams or individuals use non-Gerrit hosting services, they cannot share code with Gerrit, creating unnecessary confusion among technical staff, making it difficult to maintain code standards across repositories. At the same time, there is also a requirement that all software distributed in a Wikimedia production environment must be hosted and distributed in Gerrit.
As long as the usability problem that users have in Gerrit is not resolved, users will proceed with the project using the services they want. GitHub already has 152 projects related to the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Wikimedia Foundation’s official research data analysis team is working on 127 of them. Therefore, the Wikimedia Foundation paid attention to GitLab’s community edition. GitLab is a code review system written in Ruby that is evaluated as functional and scalable, and GitLab can self-host on a private server. Also, since GitLab provides the MIT licensed community edition, GitLab adheres to the Wikimedia Foundation principles of freedom and open source, which is one of the reasons for choosing GitLab.
Accordingly, on October 23rd, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to switch the repository from Gerrit to GitLab Community Edition. Many projects are hosted on GitHub, but when asked why they didn’t do it, the Foundation said that GitHub is the first tool you need to join the Wikimedia technology community, and that GitHub has neither free software nor self-hosting. And backup, data integrity check controls are not allowed, and access to basic storage settings and configurations is not guaranteed over the long term. It also added that it is mirrored on GitHub for visualization of storage hosted on GitLab. Related information can be found here .
Add comment