GitLab will remove hosted projects with more than a year of inactivity

Recently the news broke that GitLab plans to modify its terms of service for the next month (in September), according to which the projects hosted on free accounts from GitLab.com will be deleted automatically if your repositories remain inactive for 12 months.

The change aims to reduce maintenance costs of hosting by freeing up resources to store and process abandoned projects and forks that are not under development.

Infrastructure maintenance for abandoned projects is estimated to account for up to a quarter of all GitLab.com hosting costs, and automatically purging such projects could save up to a million dollars a year.

The Register has learned that such projects account for up to a quarter of GitLab's hosting costs, and that automatic project deletion could save the cloud coding collaboration service up to $1 million a year. Therefore, the policy has been suggested to help keep GitLab's finances sustainable.

People with knowledge of the situation, who requested anonymity as they are not authorized to discuss it with the media, told The Register that the policy will take effect in September 2022.

Before the actual removal, within weeks or months, notifications will be sent to repository owners that request removal with a warning to confirm the relevance of the project. Only abandoned projects are expected to be deleted, whose authors do not respond to warnings, no changes were registered in the repository during the year, no new issues were published and no comments were sent.

However, some members in the community consider the proposed removal to be a bad practice, since code from inactive repositories can be used as a dependency in other projects that remain active.

It is also noted that permanent changes are not the goal of some authors, who may either consider that the current state of their project has reached an optimal level, and the code is good enough and does not require improvements, or discover initially that they are not. planned to be developed, but that can be useful to those around you.

Geoff Huntley, an open source advocate and participant in the open .Net community, described the policy as "absolutely wild."

“The source code doesn't take up a lot of disk space, for someone to remove all that code is destruction of the community. They will destroy your brand and goodwill. People host their code there because there is an idea that it will be available to the general public for reuse and remixing.

Of course, there are no guarantees that it will always be hosted there, but the unwritten rules of open source are that you make the code available and you don't remove it. We had maintainers pull the code and there was a lot of outrage in the community about it," he said, noting that other projects that depend on a pulled product will suffer.

"All dependencies cannot be compiled," he lamented.

In addition, code from inactive projects can be referenced by external resources and, by removing it, a verified master copy will be lost which can be referenced (unofficial copies are not guaranteed to be free of malicious activity), so instead of deleting, it would probably be more optimal to archive the state while maintaining the ability to access the code in read-only mode .

To save disk space when storing garbage forks, you can use more efficient methods to handle duplicates, for example, GitHub stores all main repository objects and their associated forks together to avoid data duplication, by logically separating ownership from commits.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the rule changes have not yet been officially announced and are in the internal planning stage.

Finally, for those interested in knowing more about it about the note, you can consult the original publication In the following link.


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  1.   Nonamed said

    something is happening in gitlab, in fact some projects are considering migrating to other platforms, as is the case with postmarketOS: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2022/07/25/considering-sourcehut/