If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME’s infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs.
Over the past week have been bug reports with users now finding Git clones and similar being redirected to GitHub rather than the official GNOME.org GitLab repositories.
It turns out this was an intentional change in an effort to help reduce server/bandwidth costs. Andrea Veri
noted:
“This change was required due to the significant data transfer costs we are incurring, we applied a set of potential mitigations and will monitor costs during February. If these won’t be enough we’ll apply a set of additional changes which hopefully will bring the aforementioned costs down and allow us to remove the https pull redirect between gitlab.gnome.org and github.”
Sophie Herold added:
“As a cost-saving measure, git traffic like git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/[repo] is now redirected to our mirror under https://github.com/GNOME/[repo].”
So while an increasing number of open-source projects are migrating away from GitHub to avoid GitHub Copilot and other AI training on GitHub repositories, GNOME at least for now is shifting more Git traffic to their GitHub mirrors as a cost savings measure.
