GitLab is a software development, hosting and deployment company that’s proven popular with open source software developers and which currently hosts many popular projects. But according to a report from The Register, some of those projects could disappear soon.

Update: GitLab has announced that rather than deleting older, inactive projects from users on the company’s free tier, it will instead move those projects to “object storage,” where “they will still be accessible, but take a bit longer to access after a long period of inactivity.” The original article continues below.

Readlebee is an example of an older project hosted on GitLab which has not been updated in more than a year.

That’s because GitLab is said to be planning to start deleting inactive projects from users on GitLab’s free service tier if they haven’t been updated in the past 12 months. In order to stave off deletion, developers just need to issue a commit, open an issue, or otherwise show that the project is active. But there’s a decent chance that this policy could still lead to deletion of many older software projects that haven’t been updated in a long time, but which may still be in use or which may be relied upon by other software projects.

GitLab hasn’t confirmed the report, but since the new policy is expected to take effect in September, we’ll likely hear something from the company soon… whether it’s a confirmation, denial, or change of plans.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

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7 replies on “Lilbits: GitLab could delete inactive projects (Update: or not), Google’s messed up messaging strategy, and Purism’s priciest Librem 5 Linux smartphone now ships more quickly”

  1. the app formerly known ass Duo and… the app formerly known as Meet

    I’m pretty sure that you meant “formerly known as Duo and” 🙂

      1. Yep, this is the biggest down side to my decision to start embedding tweets in these posts. (The up side is that it takes me less time to write these articles than it used to, since I just grab whatever random things I tweeted throughout the day when I thought something was interesting, but didn’t warrant a 300+ word article. Also, Liliputing’s Twitter follower count has been rising slowly, but steadily since I started doing this, helping expand our reach a bit).

        That said, deleting and reposting Tweets to fix typos is a pain, especially if folks have already liked or retweeted the original.

        1. The nice thing is most people are familiar with twitter’s limitations, there’s been so much complaining about twitter’s lack of an edit button, I’d bet there are many millions of people who aren’t even on twitter who know about it. And anyone who is a user knows the feeling of spotting a typo just a moment too late.

  3. If you want a front end for Apt with a bit more history, there’s always been Aptitude.

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