Wikimedia decides to transfer its repositories to GitLab

The Wikimedia Foundation, which administers Wikipedia, has officially decided to move its code repositories from Gerrit, your current code review system, to a Gitlab installation Self-hosted Community Edition.

According to the association's working group, friction with Gerrit slows development rather than favors it, leading developers to migrate to third-party hosts. However, the option to use third-party code hosting is detrimental to collaboration, both internal and external, on Wikimedia.

Wikimedia has found that the results of a developer satisfaction survey conducted over the past two years have led to complaints about the Gerrit code review system.

En particular, Gerrit's interface has a reputation for being difficult to use, according to Wikimedia, and the workflow is different from the usual industry method, so many developers don't have it. appreciated.

The Wikimedia Foundation also said that it took a while for tech staff to get used to Gerrit, setting the bar higher for newcomers to the Wikimedia community.

“This dissatisfaction is particularly evident to our volunteer communities. The obvious dissatisfaction with the code review, coupled with an internal review of our CI tools and practices, makes this an opportune time to review our code review options, ”the group wrote. working on a post from last week.

The Wikimedia Foundation acknowledges that Gerrit's workflow is in many ways the best of its kind, but “its interface suffers from usability deficiencies and its workflow differs from standard industry practices.

This creates barriers to entry for the community and slows down the integration of WMF technical staff. Also, an increasing number of people and teams (personal and non-personal) are choosing to forego the use of Gerrit and instead use a third-party hosted option like GitHub. "

According to the working group, developers are dissatisfied for various reasons, three of which are very important. They start from Gerrit to benefit from reduced friction when creating new repositories; easier installation and continuous integration self-service configuration; and more familiarity with pull request workflows.

However, if some teams or individuals are using a non-Gerrit hosting service, they will not be able to share the code with Gerrit and others, creating further confusion among technical staff, according to Wikimedia.

Unless the usability issues that users have with Gerrit are resolved, each user will continue with the project using the service of their choice. GitHub already has 152 projects related to the Wikimedia Foundation, of which 127 are the official research and data analysis teams of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikimedia Foundation turns to GitLab Community Edition, since GitLab was developed in Ruby on Rails, a free web framework written in the Ruby language.

Wikimedia Foundation qualify this code review system as "functional and extensible", and GitLab itself points out on its website that you can self-host GitLab Community Edition (CE) on the developers' own servers. GitLab CE is an end-to-end open source software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review, and more.

"GitLab is available for self-hosting, as required for parity with the rest of our developer tools infrastructure and to alleviate concerns about data privacy or third-party hosting usage restrictions," after the team at Wikimedia that GitLab reviewed. In addition, because "GitLab offers a Community Edition (CE) licensed by MIT, it adheres to the Foundation's guiding principle of freedom and open source."

Beginning October 23, 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation decided to move the Gerrit repository to GitLab Community Edition.

Also, repositories hosted on GitLab will be mirrored on GitHub, for visibility purposes, the Wikimedia working group wrote in response to another question, namely what will happen to repositories developed on GitHub if we move to GitLab.


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