GitLab Community Relations, 13 Jul 2023

Previous Meeting

Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Building Manjaro with GitLab

Description

The Manjaro community offers Linux users an open source operating system that's fast, reliable, and user-friendly. Manjaro is the newest member of the GitLab Open Source Partners community, and Bryan Behrenshausen (Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitLab) recently caught up with project leaders Philip Müller and Bernhard Landauer to learn how GitLab helps the Manjaro community continue its great work.

In this interview, you will learn how using GitLab allows Manjaro to:

* Maintain data sovereignty by hosting its own infrastructure
* Automate Linux package management so a core group of 16 developers can maintain more than 3,000 packages
* Monitor its relationships to other projects in the open source ecosystem

*Learn more*

Manjaro:
https://manjaro.org/

Manjaro on GitLab:
https://gitlab.manjaro.org/explore/groups

GitLab Open Source Partners:
https://go.gitlab.com/030Ue3

A

Greetings open source fans and welcome to today's conversation, uh open source program manager, Brian here with some exciting news, the Manjaro project has agreed to become the latest member of the gitlab open source partner. Community I'm super excited about this news delighted to have them with me today to talk about their project, to welcome them officially and to help us learn a little bit more about Manjaro with me today are Philip and Bernhardt, and I am just gentlemen thanks. So much for being here. It's delighted delighted to talk to you today, hello pleasure.

A

um Let's start at the beginning for folks who might not be aware of the Manjaro project, talk a little bit about it. What is Manjaro? What's its you know, who's its ideal, tart or Target user.

B

It's depending who is uh finding manjaros a lot of people finding us and using us it's developers, users experienced ones and normal ones. So all the bunch out there most likely might use Manjaro.

A

And what is Manjaro just if you had to give up if you have to give a 30 second summary for somebody's, never heard of it.

B

Well, manchar is a Linux distribution. I started as a hobby project back in the days. We are about 13 years old now and uh was more or less a fun project, and lately we became a company. This is also now three years ago, so yeah, it's a lot of things happened with Manjaro and most likely it's based on Arch, but with a little bit fist.

A

Nice great, um so you said, you've been in existence for about 13 years.

B

A

B

Like that, yeah.

A

And how big is your community.

B

Depending which Community you look for the development Community is about 16 core members, eight moderators for the forums and social media and registered users on our gitlab instance. We have more than 8 700 and uh projects also around 3 300. So it's a large number and.

A

B

In our forums are users so yeah.

A

Got it got it so several you know close to 10 000 people using your gitlab instance. That's right, yeah incredible! um So let's talk a little bit about um your use of git lab. uh How how do you, how does the the Manjaro project use gitlab um as part of your your everyday operations, making Manjaro run.

C

When we started using gitlab in 2018 uh until then, we were using GitHub and uh What. uh Looked very appealing to us was the opportunity to actually self-host all our code. As Phil already said we had. We have already between three thousand and four thousand individual projects, which means basically packages or or our own applications, and the nice thing is that we were able to install gitlab on our own server. So it's really always our code.

C

Everything, of course it's it's open source, but uh so it feels really good to to self-host and to have our own control about what our source code is. Yeah.

A

That's and uh digital software, so basically this.

C

Mostly storage of our code and, uh of course, git development, uh which is of course, standard with open source and other software projects anyway, and most recently, we have also been using the CI functionality more and more because over the last few years, Manjaro has been growing really exponentially and uh developer group has not so much so we are already still really a small group of people serving an enormous amount of packages.

C

So it's becoming more and more important to optimize stuff and we've slowly been starting to to use the automated scripts which are triggered by commits or also we are using external, build platforms. We are serving a lot of arm Hardware also, so there is some exotic software that needs to be compiled on certain platforms and the way we do that is partly with gitlab Runners.

C

So we install the runner on whatever Hardware we need the stuff to be built on, and then we trigger the builds with the yaml files on gitlab and the runners get triggered automatically. So whenever we we commit the change packages get built automatically, and the very latest topic we are still working on is automatically committing the actually built packages to our repos, so that users can the packages the users install uh at the moment we're still doing it.

C

The the commit of the packages we do is still more or less manually, or at least scripted, because this is a very a very high security concern, of course, so we're very careful about how we optimize this, and uh this is still in development. But the goal, of course, is that we push any changes to our code and it gets it automatically triggers the build and automatically pushes it to the repo and updates the user's installs right.

A

Right so every time you push code, it triggers automatic, builds for various architectures. How many architectures? Are you like you building for every time? Well,.

C

Architectures is two: it's it's AR 64.. This is the the arm single board, computers and uh until recently we also had um 32 bit, which is which we stopped deploying, but of course, 64 64-bit.

A

Wheel right right and how many packages are you managing as part of the project these days.

C

I'm, not even sure I mean a few thousand yeah a.

A

Few thousand.

C

It's in different groups, so I have never counted them, but they are growing more and more. Of course. We also have the the plasma development packages, which is actual git packages. This means that we we scan Upstream development of plasma and uh when there are changes these packages get built they're on us in a separate repo. So this is uh uh targeting developers, specifically it's not intended for for user installs, so those packages alone are I, think I think uh around 1 000 packages which get built more or less daily wow.

A

Every day, okay, so several thousand.

C

And then uh the regular packages, so if we know that we have 3300 projects the corresponding to repos, so that's the the regular packages on top of that unbelievable.

A

Yeah- and you are in your- you said: your development team is maybe what eight 12 people. What are you how many developers real active developers.

C

Yeah Philip, you said 16 I'm,.

A

C

B

That's 39 projects.

A

Okay, so that allows a group of 16 people to manage more than 3 000 more than 3 000 projects. It's really impressive guys um what what other challenges? Obviously that's one challenge that using git lab helps you overcome right of being able to manage that many things with that relatively few people, and mostly volunteers I, would assume right um absolutely yeah, which is just incredible any. What other challenges have you overcome uh since you switched to gitlab.

B

Well, in the past, the issue was always: if you look at GitHub, you have a lot of repositories in GitHub and you don't know what's going on so uh the fine thing, with the manjaois from the project management point of view that you can go to activities and see over the groups of your maintaining uh what's going on there, so you can see okay, this graphical package got built or this application has an issue. So many issues are opened. These are the epics we should look at so from the management point of view.

B

It's a lot of advantages over GitHub when you use git map.

A

Because you get some insight into what's going on Upstream a little bit more insight into what's going on Upstream. Is that what you're saying like with Upstream packages or.

B

No, it's like the management point of view. If you have this activity views, you can see it. This is like.

A

B

Feet and so on and a lot of Open Source uh projects like gnome and KDE are switching also over to gitlab. So it's like the same flow gotcha.

A

Now I understand what.

B

Upstream is doing so if I'm into Frameworks in KDE, then I can look in the group of Frameworks and see what's going on there right and since Arch Linux also switch to gitlab. I can look, for example, in the packages list, so I find the stuff very fast. That.

A

Makes sense so it's easier to get insights into what others in in the ecosystem are doing, especially if they're, using gitlab with activity feeds and things that makes sense, yeah yeah fascinating great.

A

um What what are you working on right now? What's: what's what's the big project in Manjaro land? What's next.

C

But if you want to say something about that.

B

Well uh depends we have many projects, so the latest project? What we actually do is uh the new yearly release of Manjaro itself. So we will have a plasma, gnome and xfc again as our main editions, and we are working on some commercial projects which we cannot tell yet I see, but it will be great to see um how that will go and gitlab helps us a lot to achieve that, because also our commercial Partners see where's the project, what we do actually and they can track the issues as well.

A

So you release new versions of Manjaro once a year and that's coming up.

B

A

Okay, oh okay, so the next release is slated for what time.

B

Well, we actually wanted to have it released already, but we have so much other things to do that. We have to find time to actually test it and finding the right, stable snapshot of arch is kind of hard, because a lot of Kernel regressions are ongoing. Graphical regressions are there. We found recently the vulnerability in our package manager Panic. So we have still tackled that and on top of that, some people are on vacation. So we have to time it a little bit and maybe in one two months we might see the release great.

A

Great, what's what's the most exciting thing that you've seen somebody do with Manjaro, you know put it on a rocket ship or use it to power a laser or what what? What? What is? What's your? What's the your favorite uh example of Manjaro in the wild I.

C

Mean what's what's currently really hot is all the new hardware platforms that are appearing on the market, some of them. We are experimenting with uh recently. We as so we mostly commercially. We we collaborate with Hardware producers, um for example with Star Labs, which is a British company. We have produced some very nice laptops and also with slim book. We we produced a really hardcore gaming machine.

C

It was pretty fancy and the mini PCS are very popular at the moment, so they are very small form factor they're, just this size and very, very powerful, like a desktop computer and then the the very small formats. Of course, the I think in a very near future, they're very exciting projects coming up, which we cannot talk about, but so tiny tiny form factors with a lot of power and a lot of capability.

C

So we have very often directly working together with the hardware producers, so we're also the the platform which manager is based on Arch Linux is very much on the on the Forefront of of Hardware support. So that's really an advantage for us if we want to support very new and very uh yeah very fresh Hardware, that's really one a very good opportunity for us, so yeah I guess the great mini PCS, maybe recently were very, very exciting and uh also with pine64.

C

We had a lot of very interesting projects with the the pine book and the pine phones and so new hardware and new challenges. Also those are the biggest challenges. Also those.

B

Are very exciting.

C

But then, of course, developing a Linux phone is really not something you can do even in a few years. It's really wow. But uh of course you learn a lot and you find out about the possibilities and about the challenges and about the roadblocks right right.

A

Always always a learning experience in open source for sure exactly yeah. Well, if folks want to get involved with the Manjaro project, what's the best way for them to get involved with the project.

B

There are many ways, so we have the Forum where people can participate in. We have a Wiki where people can document stuff, then we have several translation projects where people can simply translate in their native language and, of course, testing uh spreading the words making YouTube channels and so on. All that is possible.

A

Great, where, where can people go to find how to do that.

B

Directly to our homepage manjaro.org and there they find all the the nice information where they can download the stuff where they can see which Hardware we support. What news are coming up and so stuff is all listed there so best. Our homepage.

A

Great, what and what do you need most right now? Do you need translators? Do you need front-end developer? What do you need most right now? What kind of help.

B

Mostly testers, so if there's a new release or daily release, simply test, it out, give us feedback uh what we are missing or what the current issues are. If a new stable uh date release is coming, then a lot of people are already giving us feedback in the Forum. So it's like Manjaro. If you have a problem and go to the forums most likely after five minutes, someone is answering something to your problem and sometimes you even get the solution really fast.

A

Great all right! Well, uh thank you for that, and welcome once again to the partner, Community I'm, just delighted to speak with you and happy to welcome you thanks for today's conversation, I really appreciate it.

A

Thank you, Brian all right, looking forward to working with you more.