[FFmpeg-devel] [POLL] [VOTE] code.ffmpeg.org

[Marvin Scholz]

F (see below for my reasoning)

While I would be fine with either outcome, and had helped extensively for the
GitLab migration of VLC and at that time was quite convinced its the best solution
out there, my opinion on this has changed, and also Gitea or now its fork Forgejo
changed quite a bit and also some things on GitLabs side I got increasingly frustrated
with.

My main issue with GitLab is the enterprise edition. While I understand the need for them
to have some sensible business model, I fundamentally disagree with some of their allegedly
business features, just to name a few that I very much disagree with:

- Scoped labels (https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/labels/#scoped-labels)
- Configurable issue boards (https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/issue_board/)
- Custom fields in issues (https://docs.gitlab.com/user/work_items/custom_fields/)

Also, while I don't necessary disagree with this being a more enterprise-ish
feature, merge trains are incredibly useful for big open source projects
for merging multiple changes efficiently:

- Merge trains (https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/pipelines/merge_trains/)

Once a feature is in the enterprise edition it is really hard to get it moved into
the community edition (Free tier) and also obviously means that no open source
contributor could build such a feature and submit it upstream for the community
edition.

Also GitLabs codebase is very hard to approach as a new contributor, making it
quite hard to quickly add a missing feature or fix an annoying issue. There are
also somewhat trivial features not implemented for a very long time, just to name
one example:

- Multiple artifacts for a CI job (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/18744#note_2603279227)

Also for this feature they consider it being an "advanced" one and therefore to be
an enterprise edition feature: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/18744#note_899915876

Of course this doesn't mean Forgejo is perfect but I am personally more hopeful for its
future than I am for GitLab. So I think it would be at least worth a try to go that route.
Note also that it doesn't mean anything is set in stone, we could change again if it turns
out Forgejo doesn't work well for us…

Sorry for the long email, have a nice start of the week everyone!

Regards,
Marvin Scholz