📣 Opinions are welcome 📣

[mario@eupolicy.social]

@Gina would registration be open to everyone?

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@mario nope would be tied to our gov sso (although guest access should be possible).

[mario@eupolicy.social]

@Gina but that would mean no public contributions possible :(

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@mario sorry that was too quickly answered. Long answer; we're still looking at how to give external users access. I'm hopeful that Forgejo/Codeberg will develop federation soon, that could be an answer.

[fedops@fosstodon.org]

@Gina I always suggest to do proper requirements management. List what you need and see which solution matches best.

I've been running a private Gitlab instance for several years and have no complaints. Depending on the license it can get expensive but chances are if you need that you may have to pay for getting similar features implemented in Forgejo as well.

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@fedops this. Although I'm more a fan of contributing to a project than just paying for a license.

[xiu@mastodon.spinningru.st]

@Gina GitLab being an American company, I guess that rules it out for digital sovereignty.

[erikjan@fosstodon.org]

@Gina I want exactly this for scientific code!! Maybe at eu level, with a nice url like code.science.eu

Don't want to rely so much on GitHub anymore

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@xiu that was my argument as well. The threat when self-hosting is no more updates.

(In case it isn't clear I'm strongly pro Forgejo, but as GitLab is already popular with our gov orgs it needs to be considered - which I'm aware also isn't the best argument)

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@erikjan yeah I could imagine an EU federation of code platforms at some point 🔥

[jbouter@fosstodon.org]

@einalex @Gina true, but that might be quite a few changes. There are hard requirements by the ADR that I know of for example. One of them is a mandatory 4-eye principle on code going to production. Forgejo has support for codeowners, but no option to disallow a single codeowner to push to prod.

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@jbouter @einalex yeah this is also part of what the pilot should focus on. All the rules, regulations and technical demands that a platform should be able to comply with. 🥲

[owlcode@fosstodon.org]

@Gina a big institution,like a nation, as a user could push the development and fixing of the platform at an important level

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@owlcode absolutely, and finance (think of what GitLab EE licenses cost)

[jbouter@fosstodon.org]

@Gina it is... a lot! I've been part of a few implementations and it's never easy. Both on functional and technical demand. Best of luck figuring this thing out! I look forward to working on a govt-wide git forge someday! 😁 it might be worth checking in with ODC-Noord. I think they already allow government agencies to sign up to their git environment. How they came to certain design decisions and such ☺️

[fedops@fosstodon.org]

@Gina same. It's mostly a timing issue in many cases. If you need the functionality now you may have to pay for it. If you can contract with someone to implement it for you, say over 6-12 months then everyone profits.

[jspijker@fosstodon.org]

@Gina Does it matter? At our gov institute we have an internal/private Gitlab instance, doing all the CI/CD for our (very specific) pipelines. For our public/open projects we use Github, with some limited CI/CD (mostly generating Github pages). Both Gitlab and Forgejo can do that. From a user perspective, I would be very happy with a gov owned codeplatform with basic features. For more complex stuff you can roll out an internal instance with all the needed features.

[gina@fosstodon.org]

@jspijker exactly, in which case Forgejo would be a great option. For anything more complicated an org can always set up their own GitLab (or whatever they like).

[smlx@fosstodon.org]

@Gina @jbouter Gitlab EE also has astronomical licensing costs at scale. It might be useful to consider the cost over a multi year period vs funding the additional features you need in Forgejo.

[jbouter@fosstodon.org]

@smlx @Gina yep, very true indeed. It depends very much on when you need those features and how important that mandatory support contract is