Title: The new /etc/gitlab - Update
Author: Horst Prote <prote@fmi.uni-stuttgart.de>
Posted: 2021-02-22
Revision: 2
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: >=www-apps/gitlab-13.9.0

There were legitimate complaints about the error-prone syncing of
/etc/gitlab to /opt/gitlab/gitlab/config and the question arose
"What's the point of it?"

I had three reasons for this setup:

- I wanted to use the standard Gentoo way for config placement and
  management.
- The /opt/gitlab/gitlab/config directory contains hundreds of files
  but normaly one will only change three or four of them. I wanted to
  have only the changed ones in /etc/config.
- Last but not least: I use sys-apps/etckeeper to always have a backup
  and the complete change history of the configs under /etc. With
  /etc/gitlab beeing a symlink to /opt/gitlab/gitlab/config my changes
  in /etc/gitlab weren't captured by etckeeper.

Also note that we cannot install the config to /etc/gitlab and symlink
/opt/gitlab/gitlab/config to it since 'require_relative' in
/opt/gitlab/gitlab/config/application.rb gets confused by symlinks.

I changed two things:
1. The /etc/gitlab to /opt/gitlab/gitlab/config sync is now done
   automatically on (re)start of GitLab. And if you change the config
   you always have to restart.
2. As "Gentoo is all about choices." I added the 'gitlab-config' USE
   flag. When set
   - /etc/gibtlab isn't used.
   - The aforementioned automatic sync isn't installed.
   - /etc/env.d/42gentoo is installed which CONFIG_PROTECTs
     /opt/gitlab/gitlab/config to protect changes made in there
     to be overwritten on package updates.