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This Week in GNOME, GNOME Foundation Update, and More GNOME
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This Week in GNOME ☛ This Week in GNOME: #245 Infinite Ranges
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 10 to April 17.
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GNOME ☛ Allan Day: GNOME Foundation Update, 2026-04-17
Welcome to another update about everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been four weeks since my last post, due to a vacation and public holidays, so there’s lots to cover. This period included a major announcement, but there’s also been a lot of other notable work behind the scenes.
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Andrea Veri: GNOME GitLab Git traffic caching
One of the most visible signs that GNOME’s infrastructure has grown over the years is the amount of CI traffic that flows through gitlab.gnome.org on any given day. Hundreds of pipelines run in parallel, most of them starting with a
git cloneorgit fetchof the same repository, often at the same commit. All that traffic was landing directly on GitLab’s webservice pods, generating redundant load for work that was essentially identical.GNOME’s infrastructure runs on AWS, which generously provides credits to the project. Even so, data transfer is one of the largest cost drivers we face, and we have to operate within a defined budget regardless of those credits. The bandwidth costs associated with this Git traffic grew significant enough that for a period of time we redirected unauthenticated HTTPS Git pulls to our Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub mirrors as a short-term cost mitigation. That measure bought us some breathing room, but it was never meant to be permanent: sending users to a third-party platform for what is essentially a core infrastructure operation is not a position we wanted to stay in. The goal was always to find a proper solution on our own infrastructure.