GitLab is the right technology for us and a good improvement comparing to Alioth.
I think it is great that we've chosen GitLab as successor to Alioth but how
would it make you feel if you were told that Salsa is not running on Debian?
That's how I feel... Specifically I'm concerned how GitLab is installed on
Salsa.
For almost two years I've been administrating GitLab at work. I've installed
it from official Debian package and helped GitLab maintainer to bring it to
shape. I've introduced GitLab-Runner to Debian, contributed systemd support
for GitLab and helped with testing and fixing various GitLab packaging
problems in GitLab, gitaly, gitlab-shell, etc. I had no reason to believe
that Salsa wouldn't use packaged GitLab... It was a big work to get it
packaged due to large dependency tree.
Official GitLab packages should have become foundation for Salsa, right?
Sadly somehow that's not the case...
Imagine my surprise when I've found that Salsa is not using our own GitLab
package at all. When at work I was using latest packaged GitLab, Salsa was
using much newer version of GitLab than was available from "unstable" clearly
installed by other means than using official GitLab package in Debian.
I would expect Salsa admins and GitLab maintainer to work side by side yet
they are working independently...
_What makes it OK to run official Debian services on unpackaged vendor
software distributions?_
I would understand if there were no choice but Salsa admins clearly chosen to
discard GitLab package in favor of vendor binaries while Debian's GitLab
package (although not without minor problems) is useful.
At least GitLab package is built on Debian with effort to make it policy
compliant...
Aren't we sending a wrong message that packaging is not important?
IMHO we should have been working on improving GitLab package in order to make
is suitable for Salsa if it is not suitable already. What are the blockers?
Why packaged GitLab is not used to drive Salsa?
--
Best wishes,
Dmitry Smirnov.
---
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking
our potential.
-- Winston Churchill
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