14 DAY TRIAL // Back in November, KDE announced that it would be moving to GitLab as part of a massive migration, and today the company confirmed that the first phase of the process is finally complete.
In other words, the KDE community can now use GitLab on a normal basis to contribute to the project and help improve the project overall.
The migration to GitLab wasn’t by any means something that can just happen overnight, as more than 1,000 repositories have been migrated.
And this is the reason KDE wanted to do the whole thing in stages, using custom tools for bulk updates that were supposed to help during the process.
“The migration started by moving some smaller and more agile KDE teams that were very interested in testing and providing feedback,” Nuritzi Sanchez of GitLab explains in a detailed post about KDE’s migration.
“After this cycle was completed successfully, KDE started migrating teams with a larger codebase and more contributors. Once all of the major issues were resolved, they made the final switch for all remaining projects they planned to move. The sysadmin team documented the results after each step and shared them directly with the KDE community to receive feedback and gather consensus on how to proceed.”
Next stop: phase two
According to the official stats, the KDE project is currently the home of over 200 applications, with more than 2,700 artists, designers, developers, and contributors working on improving the experience overall for everyone that’s part of the community.
Before the migration to GitLab can be considered complete, KDE still has two more phases to finalize. They include CI and task management for developers, and once again, this would take place gradually to make sure everything goes as planned.
A more technical overview of the migration is available in GitLab’s own post here.