Since you give the example of GitHub... Sandstorm itself doesn't use their own Gitlab app to host and collaborate. How can they convince others? Doesn't make me confident of their platform. Centralized platforms like GitHub exist for a purpose.
When the Sandstorm project started, we obviously couldn't host it on Sandstorm. But, we are gradually moving towards more dogfooding. For example:
- We use Etherpad on Sandstorm for all documents we write, e.g. design docs or project plans.
- We use Wekan on Sandstorm for project / task planning.
- We use Rocket.Chat on Sandstorm for internal team chat.
- We commonly share and publish files using Davros.
- We host docs.sandstorm.io -- and the analytics for docs.sandstorm.io -- directly from Sandstorm.
- We host the Sandstorm app index (back-end for apps.sandstorm.io and for the automatic app update pipeline) as a Sandstorm app.
- We host the purchase flow for Sandstorm for Work as a Sandstorm app.
- We sometimes use private Gitlab or Gitweb grains on Sandstorm for non-public code, or for working on security fixes before they are ready to be disclosed.
That said, we still need to:
- Switch the main Sandstorm source repo to Gitlab or similar. This will obviously be a disruptive change, so we haven't tackled it yet.
- Host our e-mail on Sandstorm. Sandstorm's e-mail support admittedly needs a lot of work -- it's a much more complicated problem than most of the other things one does on Sandstorm, and we haven't put much effort into it yet. We'll get there eventually.
- Host our CI server on Sandstorm. This requires packaging Jenkins as a Sandstorm app, and also has a bunch of other complications relating to the fact that some of our tests need to run in VMs or use privileged syscalls, so it might take a while.
- Host our main web site on Sandstorm. Currently it's hosted as a plain-old static file server that we maintain. We could switch but there wouldn't be a ton of benefit in doing so, other than to say that we did.
If we can help to your use GitLab CI to test your app we would be happy to. Since GitLab already runs on Sandstorm I think we can do it relatively easily compared to Jenkins. Of course the privileged syscalls still are an issue. But maybe we can host the GitLab Runner on a non-Sandstorm box to work around that.
