GitLab.com vs Codeberg.org

[af0815]

@Thaddy: Could you give, please, the obvious reason why?

The theme is interesting. Why ?!

The project is holded by society (Verein e V.) which is accepted by german tax office as a non-profit organization.

[Olli]

This is all more than vague...

First of all, the account does not seem to be blocked right now? All we have is a statement of that person (of whom we know little to nothing?)
...
Other than the statement, there is no proof. The user may have done so himself by accident, or given to much access to a contributor, or have been hacked..... I don't say any of this was the case, but I for once have no objective information about what really happened. (And any extremely vague hint by someone else, alluding of that person self-claimed non-proven inside knowledge... well that does not help either)

Another easy explanation could be, he logged in from another browser => then you get an email, if that was you, or if you need to change your password. It contains a link, to be clicked only if it wasn't you. Maybe that got mistaken?

Hi everyone!

My name is Olli. I joined in as here seems to be some discussion about my project ("soundtouch") and also my character.

So, I wrote an account about this git-blocked-event that resulted into the Soundtouch project moving to Codeberg service here, as reply to thread that Fred opened: https://forum.gitlab.com/t/gitlab-blocked-account/74570/7?u=ollip

So why moved to codeberg in particular:
1. It seems that Codelab has policy that they can block projects, no warnings given, no explanations provided afterwards. If you make a google search "site:gitlab.com account blocked" you'll find that quite many other projects have had the same experience. I don't give advice but personally I didn't like the unnecessary mess caused to maintainers & users by a git repository just suddenly disappearing for a week, so I moved soundtouch project elsewhere. The old gitlab account is still there because some projects may still depend on it.
2. I asked other Soundtouch users for alternative git hosts, and got several recommendations to use Codeberg, so that's where I then went to.

---

Then about this "that person of whom we know little to nothing" piece  :
- to cover this gap: I am 46 years old, male as assumed gender, live in Helsinki Finland, have two kids at pre/teen age, am obviously fond of computers as the household seems to have 11 PCs when I previously counted although kids may have carried couple more in, am working among software for living, currently among weather systems in particular.

This site seems to be about Pascal, and Pascal was the 3rd programming language I knew after commodore64-basic and -assembly, and the first programming language that earned salary to myself in 1996. Delphi was wonderful, and was far-far ahead in ease of use compared to the concurrently fashionable react+npm UI development toolchains are today.

What else. Pepsi and Coke taste equally well. Am also fond of riding mountain bikes + motor bikes + kayaking. So hi to everyone.

[MarkMLl]

Welcome to the forum Olli. I'm only a bystander in this discussion but I'd suggest that (a) corporates- including (the owners of) Sourceforge, GitHub and GitLab- don't necessarily take criticism of their policies or behaviour in good grace and (b) as somebody has already said I think that anybody who selects a hosting service without careful consideration of the jurisdiction in which it resides is being naive.

Leaving aside my personal distaste for Git and my dislike of being railroaded into using it, the FPC and Lazarus projects have previously had problems where SourceForge refused to service connections from countries on the USA's shitlist. Since the projects have a comparatively small number of users in the USA and its satellites, I think it would be fair to argue that tying them to a hosting service subject to USA law and potentially dismissive of anybody else's position is unfortunate.

MarkMLl

[Fred vS]

Hello and welcome Olli.

You forgot to mention the fpc Pascal header of your fantastic library ( used by many great apps, like Audacity).
https://codeberg.org/soundtouch/soundtouch/src/branch/master/source/SoundTouchDLL/SoundTouchDLL.pas

(By the way, the code could be updated to be Unix compatible, like this one: https://github.com/fredvs/uos/blob/main/src/uos_soundtouch.pas)

Fre;D

[Martin_fr]

Then about this "that person of whom we know little to nothing" piece

It's ok, without a full CV....
Given that you care enough to respond, is the kind of tell-tale needed here.

It is unfortunate that you never got to know what it was.

After all now you don't know if it is something that codeberg would have to legally apply to. (ok, if so you would find out if they react faster).

They are in Europe and have to follow European law. If they believe, or are made to believe (even if by false claims) that your repo violates the law, then they must act. At least I believe that is the rule. I.e. they offer you there servers, and they aren't hold accountable for what you do, until such time as they learn about it.

Code: Pascal  [Select][+][-]

1.  If you make a google search "site:gitlab.com account blocked"

Most of the results seem to be help pages by gitlab.
I followed some of the others.
- One ignored a mail that told him he had to act to avoid this...
- One had code that violated some rules (not sure copyrighted or similar / quite a long story, didn't read to the end / he got replies though)

The google result I got, don't seem out of the ordinary to me...
After all, one would expect some people getting into such issues. Gitlab must follow the law.... And may have some rules on top.

Also maybe they do track suspicious behaviour patterns, to identify spammers, hackers and the like. That would be for the protection of all, and even if there was the occasional false positive, a benefit for all.
We ban spammers from the forum. Some before they even post any spam. Once in a blue moon we kick the wrong person out. When we get feedback about it, we apologize.


I do agree though that in your case communications have gone badly wrong.

[Fred vS]

Maybe it is a problem with the servers that they prefer not to admit.

GitLab has 30 million members and each one can have many projects.
Is it not "lot of" for the servers to manage all that?

(GitHub has 83 million members!)

PS:  The numbers of members come from Google : github how many members and gitlab how many members

[Martin_fr]

From Codeberg

Content that is deemed illegal in Germany (e.g. by violating copyright or privacy laws) will be taken offline and may lead to immediate account suspension.

Forks, migrations and testing repos are considered as inactive when they don't contain unique contributions and are inactive for more than a month. They shouldn't be kept for a prolonged amount of time, and thus might be removed after notifying maintainers and providing a 90 days period to ask for preservation.

Abandoned user accounts or organizations with no (or extremely few) all-time contributions may be deleted after being unused for 365 days. A warning via email is sent 1 month in advance.

The "must be active" is likely not an issue for most.

But we have still some private testing repos, that may get less frequent updates.
And a backup of the git, immediately after the svn conversion. That just sits around with no changes.

[Fred vS]

From Codeberg

Forks, migrations and testing repos are considered as inactive when they don't contain unique contributions and are inactive for more than a month. They shouldn't be kept for a prolonged amount of time, and thus might be removed after notifying maintainers and providing a 90 days period to ask for preservation.

The "must be active" is likely not an issue for most.

Hum, indeed, one month is a few short but if they give notification regularly until 90 days after first notif, well, ok.

So, to resume, maybe Codeberg for active projects who dont want to depend of USA laws and agree with EU-Germany laws.
Maybe not for mirror or backup.

[Martin_fr]

There are other considerations.

Codeberg is a "Eingetragener Verein" = registered society?

They have 200 members in that society.  I don't know if they have any paid stuff to perform duties or support. They have 32.000 Users, that may want/need support.

And then there are practical issues.

We had to decide between GitHub and GitLab. IIRC some considerations was their userbase. Had we chosen GitHub more Lazarus users may have had an account there already.
But Gitlab had the better offer for open source projects, in terms of features. (I don't have the list at hand).

Comparing a huge platform like Gitlab to CodeBerg... GitLab offers us a huge amount of free CI minutes. Could codeberg do that? Given that CodeBerg is very concerned about not wasting storage, where as again GitLab doesn't need to care about some dead repo sitting on their server.

GitLab likely has some resistance against DDOS, where does Codeberg stand?
(Given that google recently successfully defended one of their clients against a DDOS with 46million requests per second https://www.heise.de/news/Rekord-DDoS-auf-Layer-7-Google-wehrt-ab-7235554.html )

Don't get me wrong, I am all for small independent suppliers. But no one shoe fits all.

Also we have git mirrors on GitHub and Sourceforge. So we wouldn't be inaccessible.

Every developer has a copy of the git repo, it could me moved to a new host in no time.
Users would only need to change the remote url, no new download, git would pick up where it was.

The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports.

[Fred vS]

And a backup of the git, immediately after the svn conversion.

Of couuurse not now! 

By the way, after less than 2 minutes (I promise) the migration from fpc-gitlab to fpc-codeberg was done.
With the gitlab-issues.
Tip: For migration choose "Git" (not "GitLab" because it does not accept the "." in /freepascal.org/)

No tuning done yet.

To update the site, just do regularly in the fpc git-directory:

Code: Bash  [Select][+][-]

1. > git push --mirror https://codeberg.org/freepascal-org/fpc/source

https://codeberg.org/fredvs/freepascal

[Fred vS]

There are other considerations.
:::
The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports.

That is not a big issue, there are converters for this or, like Codeberg propose, link the issues with GilLab issues (see in the fpc migration in previous post).

[Martin_fr]

There are other considerations.
:::
The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports.

That is not a big issue, there are converters for this or, like Codeberg propose, link the issues with GilLab issues (see in the fpc migration in previous post).

"The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports."

This was meant in the context of GitLab unexpectedly and permanently locking us out, so that we would not be able to access anything.

[Fred vS]

There are other considerations.
:::
The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports.

That is not a big issue, there are converters for this or, like Codeberg propose, link the issues with GilLab issues (see in the fpc migration in previous post).

"The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports."

This was meant in the context of GitLab unexpectedly and permanently locking us out, so that we would not be able to access anything.

Imho, the best would be to have a independent "issue-site" hosted in one of your server (if fpc has one).
(By the way, where is hosted Lazarus forum?)

I did not check yet if GitLab gives the possibility to use a external issues-site like Codeberg does.

.

[PascalDragon]

Welcome to the forum Olli. I'm only a bystander in this discussion but I'd suggest that (a) corporates- including (the owners of) Sourceforge, GitHub and GitLab- don't necessarily take criticism of their policies or behaviour in good grace and (b) as somebody has already said I think that anybody who selects a hosting service without careful consideration of the jurisdiction in which it resides is being naive.

Leaving aside my personal distaste for Git and my dislike of being railroaded into using it, the FPC and Lazarus projects have previously had problems where SourceForge refused to service connections from countries on the USA's shitlist. Since the projects have a comparatively small number of users in the USA and its satellites, I think it would be fair to argue that tying them to a hosting service subject to USA law and potentially dismissive of anybody else's position is unfortunate.

This is after all the main reason why we went with GitLab instead of GitHub: if push comes to shove and either our own projects or users of our project are cut of then we can set up a GitLab instance ourself and just move things over.

There are other considerations.
:::
The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports.

That is not a big issue, there are converters for this or, like Codeberg propose, link the issues with GilLab issues (see in the fpc migration in previous post).

"The only issue would be getting and moving all the bug reports."

This was meant in the context of GitLab unexpectedly and permanently locking us out, so that we would not be able to access anything.

Imho, the best would be to have a independent "issue-site" hosted in one of your server (if fpc has one).
(By the way, where is hosted Lazarus forum?)

FPC has its own servers which is where the mailing lists and the main website are hosted. I think the Lazarus forum and the wiki are hosted on a different server provided by the Lazarus team. And then there's the FTP server. All are located in Europe.

[af0815]

I think "GitLab vs Codeberg.org" is not a discussion for the fpc/lazarus project. The settlement for this projects were done.

But my question is, why should Codeberg avoided as Thaddy wrote.

For me is a git hoster in Europe a good thing and i have no problem with the german law. I know it a little more than the US. law. I think i can give them a chance with my small projects.