[meta] Use LFS for images for gitlab-ce/gitlab-ee repos

This is a meta issue to see what needs to be done in order not to break anything if we switch to LFS in a sudden.

Some things that pop into mind:

1. LFS will include all images, not only the ones in docs, but also the assets. How will that affect the development?
2. Document in CONTRIBUTING.md that we switched to LFS and write down the process to install the LFS client (ideally point to docs)
3. Mention this in the team call and the core channel, so that everyone is aware of the change.
4. Does our CI test suite need configuration? If images are used in tests, then LFS will need to be configured.
5. docs.gitlab.com is built by pulling these two repos, will need to adjust.
6. Omnibus packages are built as well by pulling the sources of the mentioned repos.
7. How will that affect our mirrors: dev, github? What needs to change?
8. How will that affect the CE to EE merge?

In general, it is a question of if and how much the other teams will be affected by this, for example, packaging, infra, etc.

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Places that we have images:

1. app/assets/images/
2. doc/**/*
3. public/

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Related issues/bugs:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22527

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cc @SeanPackham @sytses

@axil this is super cool. Can you document anything that comes out of it for the general public? Would also make a good blog post (cc @amara)

I've come across an issue with the recent SSH auth for LFS, My IPs and build server IPs are getting black listed. I'm assuming because when cloning they're making hundreds of requests very quickly, we have ~100 assets tracked in LFS on the particular repo we're having issues with.

Disabling rack attack is temporary workaround for us.

Also, please consider the current doc.gitlab.com server for deployments, and the /help portion of GitLab (probably more an issue of properly mentioning in the source install guides, and making sure Omnibus understands LFS for building packages)

@JobV we can document the whole process yes :)

@raldred I added the issue to the description, thanks!

@dblessing your points are added to the description, thanks!

Yesterday I tested pushing a branch with LFS enabled for images and ran into an issue with git LFS pushes. @patricio is investigating this further. Below is a summary of the issue:

A push will will first try and upload all the files without authentication, if there are many files in the commit a Rack Attack is detected and the user is given a temporary ban. When pushing fewer LFS changes the unauthenticated upload will fail before a Rack Attack is detected and then an authenticated upload is attempted which succeeds.

Related #22527 (closed) https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/issues/

How will this effect everyone else? This makes contribution harder right? At what gain? A couple of screenshots is not going to much difference in pull/clone speed?

Also, LFS is slow when using is on mainly smaller files. Checkout time is increasing, a lot of smaller changes will be a terrible experience for both the one pushing, the one pulling.

What are we looking for with this move?

LFS will include all images, not only the ones in docs, but also the assets. How will that affect the development?

This will negatively impact development as now everybody has to have LFS installed and configured in order to do development as far as I can tell. Furthermore this means our deployment process also needs LFS access. Our deployment process is already way too complex, let's not also throw LFS into the mix. Apart from everything else this particular part is a 👎 for me.

@axil can we start with the minimum, just the images of university? This may most people don't have to use git lfs at all. And we don't grow the repo much by integrating university into the repo.

Having many files in LFS makes 'git clone' a lot slower, unless you run the special git lfs clone command. https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2016/04/git-lfs-12-clone-faster/

@sytses yes we can restrict it to doc or even just university (currently has very few images).

@SeanPackham please start with just university, start as simple as possible

My branch which merges University documentation content into CE Docs now uses LFS only for doc/university/ images !6520 (merged)

@SeanPackham @axil Can we close this issue and do the smallest needed change to get started. This is involving too many people. LFS for university only for now, please. Thanks all.

@Ashley @axil I agree, I have already done the smallest needed change to get us started !6520 (merged) just needs a review.

Status changed to closed

Thanks @SeanPackham. I've closed this issue and hopefully someone will be able to review your change soon.

Much agreed and I'm still unsure about using LFS in university as well, see my comment https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/6520#note_16113164.