Dear community members,

Since our last news earlier in summer this year, we've been working heads-down in a number of major overhauling efforts, which are now slowly converging.

In a nutshell: it is all about the way we provide the community with tools to productively and effectively collaborate! :) The code hosting side of OpenCores had always been rather central to the platform, and its community. Twenty years ago (yes, two-zero) the site started with sharing via FTP, then CVS came, and then it got replaced by SVN. Which is still a viable solution for some, but it is undeniably phasing out.

When Oliscience acquired the portal to push it to the next level, it became quite clear quite soon that the company had to commit to two major actions in this area: (i) provide support for more modern version control, (ii) extend the "mere" collective file-sharing capabilities to something more "DevOps cycle" oriented.

If you are as curious as we are about things in life, you will immediately start asking yourself many questions: how, why, who, when... etc.

Well, the how and (with) who(m) struck us the most: it's a big challenge to steer such large and diverse community to something greater. So we needed to partner up with ambitious forces. This is why we looked almost immediately at GitLab. It is not on us to praise the strength of that company, their results speak by themselves, we believe! That is why we decided to share the burden with them.

What we have done so far was to migrate our bugtracker to a self-hosted instance of GitLab, which runs via an API from our "good old" OpenCores web interface. We took the opportunity to clean-up the bugs' database along the way. It was a lot of effort with years of stacked dusty posts here and there! {yes, we also tried to restore the OpenRISC Bugzilla database, but sadly we did not manage, sorry guys}

The goal is to complete the migration in the coming months, and allow users to automatically migrate their SVN projects to GIT in GitLab.

We will also offer the capability to auto-import projects from other code hosting platforms, as yet again we strive to keep the consistency of the OpenCores IP Cores portfolio. We will keep for the time being a moderated project creation request, as we want to differentiate from other providers, and try to keep the quality of the projects we host, as high as we can.

Speaking of quality, it emerged from many of you giving constructive feedback to us that project quality assessment matrices are crucial for many professionals working with Open Source IP Cores. This is another reason why we decided to team up with the GitLab folks and explore together what we like to call "Continuous Verification" (CV), which is a method to automatically run standardized benchmarks on gateware Cores.

Here is a link to the official news on the GitLab blog: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/12/03/welcoming-opencores-to-gitlab/

David Planella, Director of Community Relations at GitLab mentions: "We're thrilled to welcome the OpenCores community into GitLab, in what we think will be a mutually beneficial and productive relationship. We love Open Source, technology and community, and we're honored to be a part of OpenCores' advances in the gateware hosting and sharing capabilities of their portal with git. But if there is an area where the two communities align the most is in innovation, and we'll be looking forward to contributing OpenCores' pioneering goal of bringing Continuous Verification to digital designs on their portal."

Now: a call to action... please go out there and give the new bug tracker a try! And continue looking at the site, the fora, and the news for more features in release announcements!

Do you have feedback? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us! https://opencores.org/contact

We hope you'll enjoy and make good use of the new tools! We've put a lot of effort and (geeky) love to get them running!

Best,

/:/ OC-team