Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

[Written on behalf of Alberto Ruiz, Carlos Soriano, Andrea Veri, Emmanuele Bassi and myself.]

Dear community,

Over the years, many of us have become increasingly frustrated about the state of our development infrastructure, Bugzilla in particular. Pretty much everyone we’ve spoken to doesn’t like it, and it’s not hard to see why: it is littered with usability issues, code review is a pain, and it is light-years behind more modern development platforms.

In the past, there haven’t been many other options, but we’re now in the fortunate position of having viable alternatives and the sysadmin resources to set one of them up and maintain it.

In recent months we have got together to examine the possibilities for GNOME’s development infrastructure. We’ve spent a lot of time on this, because we want the community to have faith in our conclusions. If you are interested in this, you can read our research on the wiki [1].

The outcome of this evaluation process is that we are recommending that GNOME sets up its own GitLab instance, as a replacement for Bugzilla and cgit.

We are confident that GitLab is a good choice for GNOME, and we can’t wait for GNOME to modernise our developer experience with it. It will provide us with vastly more effective tools, an easier landing for newcomers, and lots of opportunities to improve the way that we work. We're ready to start working on the migration.

Please bear in mind that this is just a recommendation! We are not claiming to have complete knowledge and we would like to hear questions and comments. At the same time, we do ask that members of the community approach this proposal with an open mind: please read the wiki pages and try to resist making assumptions about GitLab without familiarising yourself with it.

Yours,

Allan Day


[1] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/DevelopmentInfrastructure/