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by ahartmetz 72 days ago
Well - my perspective is the KDE project, which has a team of capable admins who take care of hosting. The project has always been more or less self-hosted (I remember SUSE providing servers) and even provided hosting for at least one barely associated project, Valgrind. I think Valgrind bugs are still on KDE Bugzilla.

It's admittedly not really practical for most projects, but it could be for some large ones - Rust, for example.

3 comments

I mostly work on PostgreSQL which has always selfhosted but PostgreSQL is a big project, for smaller projects it is much less practical. Even for something decently large like Meson I think the barrier would have been too big.

But, yes, projects like Rust could have selfhosted if they had wanted to.

KDE uses Phabricator, or at least did the last time I contributed. Worked pretty well in the collaboration aspect for submitting a change, getting code owners to review and giving feedback. I was able to jump in as a brand new contributor and get a change merged. The kind of change that would have been a PR from a fork in GitHub.

However I got the distinct feeling the whole stack would not fit as well into an enterprise environment, nor would the tooling around it work well for devs on Windows machines that just want to get commits out there. It's a perfect fit for that kind of project but I don't think it would be a great GitHub replacement for an enterprise shop that doesn't have software as it's core business

KDE uses GitLab now, the change-over was mostly in 2020 with some less commonly used features staying on Phabricator a while longer.

I use a self-hosted GitLab instance in a commercial setting (with developers on Linux and Windows) as well. It's a software department of a non-software company. Fairly small. The person or persons in charge of GitLab have set up some pretty nifty time-savers regarding CI and multi-repo changes - I'd prefer a monorepo, but the integration makes it bearable.

We still use KDE's bugzilla. One of the reasons that Vagrind was initially developed was to help with KDE back when many developers didn't really understand how to use new and delete.

These days sourceware.org hosts the Valgrind git repo, buildbot CI and web site. We could also use their bugzilla. There isn't much point migrating as long as KDE can put up with us.