Gitlab plans in September to make changes to the rules of use, according to which projects, according to which projects, Placed at the Gitlab.com hosting for free will be automatically deleted if their repositories remain inactive within 12 months. Changes in the rules have not yet been officially declared and are at the internal planning stage.
The change is aimed at reducing the costs of maintaining hosting by releasing resources for storing and processing abandoned projects and unnecessary forks. It is assumed that the maintenance of infrastructure for abandoned projects accounts for up to a quarter of all costs of the Gitlab.com hosting and automatic cleaning of such projects will save up to a million dollars a year.
before the actual removal for several weeks or months, owners claiming repositories will be sent notifications with a warning about the need to confirm the relevance of the project. Only abandoned projects plan to delete, the authors of which do not respond to warnings, there were no changes in the repository during the year, new Issue were not published and comments were not sent.
Nevertheless, some community members consider the proposed removal viciously practice, since the code from inactive repositories can be used as dependence in other projects that remain active. It is also noted that constant changes are not the goal of some authors who may well assume that the current state of their project has reached the optimal level and the code is good enough and does not require improvement, or initially discover ready -made developments that are not planned to develop, but which may be useful others.
In addition, external resources can refer to the code of inactive projects and its removal will lead to a loss of a confirmed reference copy that can be referred to (in unofficial copies, the lack of malicious activity is not guaranteed), therefore, instead of removing, it would probably be more optimal to a translation In the archival state, while maintaining the possibility of access to the code in mode only for reading. To save disk space in storing garbage forks, more effective methods of treating duplicates, for example, GitHub to exclude duplication of data stores all objects from the main repository and associated forks, logically sharing commites.