Re: Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[mcatanzaro gnome org]

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 11:12 AM, Germán Poo-Caamaño <gpoo gnome org> 
wrote:
> From the migration plan in the wiki:
>
>     "Our contention is that copying/moving every existing GNOME issue 
> to
>     a new issue tracker is impractical and, in many situations,
>     undesirable."
>
> May you expand in which many situations is undesirable?
>
> I can foresee unmaintained projects, but I clearly am missing more
> cases.
>
> For (semi-)maintained projects bugzilla is a database of "wisdom",
> which is practical to find duplicated reports, for example, repetitive
> bugs, and more importantly, the rationale behind WONTFIX issues 
> because
> of design decisions.
>
> Does the plan consider a tool like bugzilla2gitlab, but removing the
> part that copy the accounts?

We need a much better migration plan than that. If we don't have a 
script to migrate Bugzilla issues, comments, and attachments to our new 
GitLab instance, then we should not be considering using GitLab's issue 
tracker at all. I would rather continue to use Bugzilla forever than 
switch to GitLab without a proper migration of existing issues. We 
could still switch from cgit to GitLab and use it for merge requests, 
but turn off the issue tracker for now and reevaluate in the future 
when we have a better migration story in place. (Of course, we do not 
need to migrate anything except for actively-maintained projects 
currently hosted on git.gnome.org.)

We might even decide to never migrate the issue tracker. I would be 
surprised (and, of course, pleased) if the GitLab issue tracker ever 
becomes anywhere near as good as Bugzilla (or Phabricator's issue 
tracker, Maniphest). That said, some of the comments in this thread 
have made me more comfortable with switching, especially Emmanuele's 
comment that it's now possible to move issues from one project to 
another.

Michael