The GNOME project developers have recently made an announcement regarding the redirection of some requests to the main Git repositories of the project to mirrors hosted on GitHub. This move involves redirecting all “git clone” operations from gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/ to github.com/GNOME/. The project initially transferred its development infrastructure to GitLab in 2018, replacing the previous use of cgit and Bugzilla.
The primary reason behind this redirection is to reduce costs associated with the high volume of traffic. It has been mentioned that if the current measures are insufficient, additional steps may be implemented to further reduce traffic consumption, consequently lowering costs and eliminating the need for redirection from GitLab to GitHub. However, this transition has led to issues for some users, such as difficulties in downloading outdated data and encountering non-functional automatic redirection.