This is quite a long post. The executive summary is that freedesktop.org now hosts an instance of GitLab, which is generally available and now our preferred platform for hosting going forward. We think it offers a vastly better service, and we needed to do it in order to offer the projects we host the modern workflows they have been asking for.

In parallel, we’re working on making our governance, including policies, processes and decision making, much more transparent.

Some history

Founded by Havoc Pennington in 2000, freedesktop.org is now old enough to vote. From the initial development of the cross-desktop XDG specs, to supporting critical infrastructure such as NetworkManager, and now as the home to open-source graphics development (the kernel DRM tree, Mesa, Wayland, X.Org, and more), it’s long been a good home to a lot of good work.

We don’t provide day-to-day technical direction or enforce set rules: it’s a very loose collection of projects which we each trust to do their own thing, some with nothing in common but where they’re hosted.

Unfortunately, that hosting hasn’t really grown up a lot since the turn of the millennium. Our account system was forked (and subsequently heavily hacked) from Debian’s old LDAP-based system in 2004. Everyone needing direct Git commit access to projects, or the ability to upload to web space, has to file a bug in Bugzilla, where after a trip through the project maintainer, eventually an admin will get around to pulling their SSH and GPG (!) keys and adding an account by hand.

Similarly, creating or reconfiguring a Git repository also requires manual admin intervention, where on request one of us will SSH into the Git server and do whatever is required. Beyond Git and cgit for viewing, we provide Bugzilla for issue tracking, Mailman and Patchwork for code review and discussion, and ikiwiki for tracking. For our sins, we also have an FTP server running somewhere. None of these services are really integrated with each other; separate accounts and separate sets of permissions are required.

Maintaining these disparate services is a burden on both admins and projects. Projects are frequently blocked on admins adding users and changing their SSH keys, changing Git hooks, adding people to Patchwork, manually applying more duct tape to the integration between these services, and fixing the duct tape when it breaks (which is surprisingly often). As a volunteer admin for the service, doing these kinds of things is not exactly the reason we get out of bed in the morning; it also consumes so much time treading water that we haven’t been able to enable new features and workflows for the projects we host.

Seeking better workflows

As of writing, around one third of the non-dormant projects on fd.o have at some point migrated their development elsewhere; mostly to GitHub. Sometimes this was because the other sites were a more natural home (e.g. to sibling projects), and sometimes just because they offered a better workflow (integration between issue tracking and commits, web-based code review, etc). Other projects which would have found fd.o a natural home have gone straight to hosting externally, though they may use some of our services - particularly mailing lists.

Not everyone wants to make use of these features, and not everyone will. For example, the kernel might well never move away from email for issue tracking and code review. But the evidence shows us that many others do want to, and our platform will be a non-starter for them unless we provide the services they want.

A bit over three years ago, I set up an instance of Phabricator at Collabora to replace our mix of Bugzilla, Redmine, Trac, and JIRA. It was a great fit for how we worked internally, and upstream seemed like a good fit too; though they were laser-focused on their usecases, their extremely solid data storage and processing model made it quite easy to extend, and projects like MediaWiki, Haskell, LLVM and more were beginning to switch over to use it as their tracker. I set up an instance on fd.o, and we started to use it for a couple of trial projects: some issue tracking and code review for Wayland and Weston, development of PiTiVi, and so on.

The first point we seriously discussed it more widely was at XDC 2016 in Helsinki, where Eric Anholt gave a talk about our broken infrastructure, cleverly disguised as something about test suites. It became clear that we had wide interest in and support for better infrastructure, though with some reservation about particular workflows. There was quite a bit of hallway discussion afterwards, as Eric and Adam Jackson in particular tried out Phabricator and gave some really good feedback on its usability. At that point, it was clear that some fairly major UI changes were required to make it usable for our needs, especially for drive-by contributors and new users.

Last year, GNOME went through a similar process. With Carlos and some of the other members being more familiar with GitLab, myself and Emmanuele Bassi made the case for using Phabricator, based on our experiences with it at Collabora and Endless respectively. At the time, our view was that whilst GitLab’s code review was better, the issue tracking (being much like GitHub’s) would not really scale to our needs. This was mostly based on having last evaluated GitLab during the 8.x series; whilst the discussions were going on, GitLab were making giant strides in issue tracking throughout 9.x.

With GitLab coming up to par on issue tracking, both Emmanuele and I ended up fully supporting GNOME’s decision to base their infrastructure on GitLab. The UI changes required to Phabricator were not really tractable for the resources we had, the code review was and will always be fundamentally unsuitable being based around the Subversion-like model of reviewing large branches in one go, and upstream were also beginning to move to a much more closed community model.

gitlab.freedesktop.org

By contrast, one of the things which really impressed us about GitLab was how openly they worked, and how open they were to collaboration. Early on in GNOME’s journey to GitLab, they dropped their old CLA to replace it with a DCO, and Eliran Mesika from GitLab’s partnership team came to GUADEC to listen and understand how GNOME worked and what they needed from GitLab. Unfortunately this was too early in the process for us, but Robert McQueen later introduced us, and Eliran and I started talking about how they could help freedesktop.org.

One of our bigger issues was infrastructure. Not only were our services getting long in the tooth, but so were the machines they ran on. In order to stand up a large new service, we’d need new physical machines, but a fleet of new machines was beyond the admin time we had. It also didn’t solve issues such as everyone’s favourite: half of Europe can’t route to fd.o for half an hour most mornings due to obscure network issues with our host we’ve had no success diagnosing or fixing.

GitLab Inc. listened to our predicament and suggested a solution to help us: that they would sponsor our hosting on Google Cloud Platform for an initial period to get us on our feet. This involves us running the completely open-source GitLab Community Edition on infrastructure we control ourselves, whilst freeing us from having to worry about failing and full disks or creaking networks. (As with GNOME, we politely declined the offer of a license to the pay-for GitLab Enterprise Edition; we wanted to be fully in control of our infrastructure, and on a level playing field with the rest of the open-source community.)

They have also offered us support, from helping a cloud idiot understand how to deploy and maintain services on Kubernetes, to taking the time to listen and understand our workflows and improve GitLab for our uses. Much of the fruit of this is already visible in GitLab through feedback from us and GNOME, though there is always more to come. In particular, one area we’re looking at is integration with mailing lists and placing tags in commit messages, so developers used to mail-based workflows can continue to consume the firehose through email, rather than being required to use the web UI for everything.

Last Christmas, we gave ourselves the present of standing up gitlab.freedesktop.org on GCP, and set about gradually making it usable and maintainable for our projects. Our first hosted project was Panfrost, who were running on either non-free services or non-collaborative hosted services. We wanted to help them out by getting them on to fd.o, but they didn’t want to use the services we had at the time, and we didn’t want to add new projects to those services anyway.

Over time, as we stabilised the deployment and fleshed out the feature set, we added a few smaller projects, who understood the experimental nature and gave us space to make some mistakes, have some down time, and helped us smooth out the rough edges. Some of the blocker here was migrating bugs: though we reused GNOME’s bztogl script, we needed some adjustments for our different setups, as well as various bugfixes.

Not long ago, we migrated Mesa’s repository hosting as well as Wayland and Weston for both repository tracking and issue tracking which are our biggest projects to date.

What we offer to projects

With GitLab, we offer everything you would expect from gitlab.com (their hosted offering), or everything you would expect from GitHub with the usual external services such as Travis CI. This includes issue tracking integrated with repository management (close issues by pushing), merge requests with online review and merge, a comprehensive CI suite with shared runners available to all, custom sites built with whatever toolchain you like, external web hooks to integrate with other services, and a well-documented stable API which allows you to use external clients like git lab.

In theory, we’ve always provided most of the above services. Most of these - if you ignore the lack of integration between them - were more or less fine for projects running their own standalone infrastructure. But they didn’t scale to something like fd.o, where we have a very disparate family of projects sharing little in common, least of all common infrastructure and practices. For example, we did have a Jenkins deployment for a while, but it became very clear very early that this did not scale out to fd.o: it was impossible for us to empower projects to run their own CI without fatally compromising security.

Anyone familiar with the long wait for an admin to add an account or change an SSH key will be relieved to hear that this is no longer. Anyone can make an account on our GitLab instance using an email address and password, or with trusted external identity providers (currently Google, gitlab.com, GitHub, or Twitter) rather than having another username and password. We delegate permission management to project owners: if you want to give someone commit rights to your project, go right ahead. No need to wait for us.

We also support such incredible leading-edge security features as two-factor TOTP authentication for your account, Recaptcha to protect against spammers, and ways of deleting spam which don’t involve an admin sighing into a SQL console for half an hour, trying to not accidentally delete all the content.

Having an integrated CI system allows our projects to run test pipelines on merge requests, giving people fast feedback about any required changes without human intervention, and making sure distcheck works all the time, rather than just the week before release. We can capture and store logs, binaries and more as artifacts.

The same powerful system is also the engine for GitLab Pages: you can use static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo, or have a very spartan, hand-written site but also host auto-generated documentation. The choice is yours: running everything in (largely) isolated containers means that you can again do whatever you like with your own sites, without having to ask admins to set up some duct-taped triggers from Git repositories, then ask them to fix it when they’ve upgraded Python and everything has mysteriously stopped working.

Migration to GitLab, and legacy services

Now that we have a decent and battle-tested service to offer, we can look to what this means for our other services.

Phabricator will be decommissioned immediately; a read-only archive will be taken of public issues and code reviews and maintained as static pages forever, and a database dump will also be kept. But we do not plan to bring this service back, as all the projects using it have already migrated away from it.

Similarly, Jenkins has already been decommissioned and deactivated some time ago.

Whilst we are encouraging projects to migrate their issue tracking away from Bugzilla and helping those who do, we realise a lot of projects have built their workflows around Bugzilla. We will continue to maintain our Bugzilla installation and support existing projects with its use, though we are not offering Bugzilla to new projects anymore, and over the long term would like to see Bugzilla eventually retired.

Patchwork (already currently maintained by Intel for their KMS and Mesa work) is in the same boat, complicated by the fact that the kernel might never move away from patches carved into stone tablets.

Hopefully it goes without saying that our mailing lists are going to be long-lived, even if better issue tracking and code review does mean they’re a little less-trafficked than before.

Perhaps most importantly, we have anongit and cgit. anongit is not provided by GitLab, as they rightly prefer to serve repositories over https. Given that, for all existing projects we are maintaining anongit.fd.o as a read-only mirror of GitLab; there are far too many distributions, build scripts, and users out there with anongit URIs to discontinue the service. Over time we will encourage these downstreams to move to HTTPS to lessen the pressure, but this will continue to live for quite some time. Having cgit live alongside anongit is fairly painless, so we will keep it running whilst it isn’t a burden.

Lastly, annarchy.fd.o (aka people.fd.o) is currently offered as a general-purpose shell host. People use this to manage their Git repositories on people.fd.o and their files publicly served there. Since it is also the primary web host for most projects, both people and scripts use it to deploy files to sites. Some people use it for random personal file storage, to run various scripts and even as a personal IRC host. We are trying to transition these people away from using annarchy for this, as it is difficult for us to provide totally arbitrary resources to everyone who has at one point had an account with one of our member projects. Running a source of lots of IRC traffic is also a good way to make yourself deeply unpopular with many hosts.

Migrating your projects

After being iterated and fleshed out, we are happy to offer to migrate all the projects. For each project, we will ask you to file an issue using the migration template. This gives you a checklist with all the information we need to migrate your GitLab repositories, as well as your existing Bugzilla bugs.

Every user with a freedesktop.org SSH account already has an account created for them on GitLab, with access to the same groups. In order to recover access to the migrated accounts, you can request a password-reset link by entering the email address you signed up with into the ‘forgotten password’ box on the GitLab front page.

More information is available on the freedesktop GitLab wiki, and of course the admins are happy to help if you have any problems with this. The usual failure mode is that your email address has changed since you signed up: we’ve had one user who needed it changed as they were still using a Yahoo! mail address.

Governance and process

Away from technical issues, we’re also looking to inject a lot more transparency into our processes. For instance, why do we host kernel graphics development, but not new filesystems? What do we look for (both good and bad), and why is that? What is freedesktop.org even for, and who is it serving?

This has just been folk knowledge for some time; passed on by oral legend over IRC as verbal errata to out-of-date wiki pages. Just as with technical issues, this is not healthy for anyone: it’s more difficult for people to get involved and give us the help we so clearly need, it’s more difficult for our community to find out what they can expect from us and how we can help them, and it’s impossible for anyone to measure how good a job we’re actually doing.

One of the reasons we haven’t done a great job at this is because just keeping the Rube Goldberg machine of our infrastructure running exhausts basically all the time we have to deal with fd.o. The time we spend changing someone’s SSH keys by hand, or debugging a Git post-receive hook, is time we’re not spending on the care and feeding of our community.

We’ve spent the past couple of years paying down our technical debt, and the community equivalent thereof. Our infrastructure is much less error-prone than it was: we’ve gone from fighting fires to being able to prepare the new GitLab infrastructure and spend time shepherding projects through it. Now that we have a fair few projects on GitLab and they’ve been able to serve themselves, we’ve been able to take some time for community issues.

Writing down our processes is still a work in progress, but something we’ve made a little more headway on is governance. Currently fd.o’s governance is myself, Keith and Tollef discussing things and coming to some kind of conclusion. Sometimes that’s in recorded public fora, sometimes over email with searchable archives, sometimes just over IRC message or verbally with no public record of what happened.

Given that there’s a huge overlap between our mission and that of the X.Org Foundation (which is a lot more than just X11!), one idea we’re exploring is to bring fd.o under the Foundation’s oversight, with clear responsibility, accountability, and delegated roles. The combination of the two should give our community much more insight into what we’re doing and why - as well as, crucially, the chance to influence it.

Of course, this is all conditional on fd.o speaking to our member projects, and the Foundation speaking to its individual members, and getting wide agreement. There will be a lot of tuning required - not least, the Foundation’s bylaws would need a change which needs a formal vote from the membership - but this at least seems like a promising avenue.