[gdal-dev] brainstorming: moving away from github?

[Laurențiu Nicola]

Hi,

For free CI, I think GitHub is unbeatable. There's also GitLab, but I think they're asking for card numbers when registering an account and the UI is pretty slow. Codeberg I don't really trust at this point. Until recently, you had to ask them to approve you for CI (because of environmental and probably capacity concerns), they only had three servers, and one of them was running a damaged motherboard (https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.html). I think the OSGeo infra is more reliable at this point.

If you mostly want to get better CI performance, the GitHub agent can be self-hosted and a bare metal server on Hetzner will take you a long way (for 50-250 EUR/month). It also supports Kubernetes, which probably gives you a lot of flexibility (mostly towards spawning 10 nodes and paying a lot for them). But the orchestration is still done on GitHub's side, so self-hosted runners might still be affected by outages.

I've also heard good things about CircleCI (among other providers); they seem to have Aarch64 Linux, but not macOS.

Laurentiu

On Thu, Apr 23, 2026, at 20:25, Even Rouault via gdal-dev wrote:
> Hi,
>
> not something we should rush into, but we should maybe start considering 
> a better alternative. The github experience has been really worsening 
> over the last months. Hardly an incident every day lately (actions being 
> degraded at the very moment of writing this email). Not speaking about 
> their obsession to stuff AI everywhere they can.
>
> Codeberg could be such an alternative. Anyone with practical experience 
> with it, in particular with a project of the size of GDAL ?  My main 
> worry is about CI capabilities & capacity. We are quite heavy burners of 
> it. I believe they don't have arm64 runners either, which would be a 
> blocker for us. If there are paying plans with reasonable economics, 
> IMHO it could make sense to spend sponsorship money for that. And being 
> fully aware there would be a non trivial amount of work to complete a 
> migration... So not an easy road if we decided to follow it, but given 
> the current situation, that's worth keeping that in mind.
>
> Even
>
> -- 
> http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
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>
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