Re: Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[Arun Raghavan <arun accosted net>]

On 17 May 2017 at 03:57, Carlos Soriano via desktop-devel-list
<desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
> Hello Mattias,
>
> Thanks for sharing your thoughs!
>
> Your concern is about using fast forward merge. Yes, we raised this concern
> as the top most important for us, and as we mention in the wiki we have good
> news, GitLab team is willing to strongly consider making fast forward merge
> to CE if GNOME decides to switch to GitLab.
>
> Don't worry much about this one :)

Thank you for taking this up. While I share some concerns voiced on
this thread, overall, I think it is a good thing for us to be trying
to move to tools that make our lives easier as well as lower the bar
for new contributors who are used to the Github-esque workflow.

My first note to folks who are concerned about GitLab being an evil
semi-closed project would be to look at the repository at
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce -- having shared these
concerns in the past, I feel a lot more positive looking at degree to
which external contributions are encouraged.

The things I worry about are the features that are in the EE and not
in CE that I think will be important for us either now, or down the
line:

 * Git hooks -- either admins with file system access need to manage
these for projects because the web interface to do this is EE-only

 * Automatic rebase for fast forward commits -- Carlos mentioned that
this might be something that'll just be part of the CE

 * Single-sign-on with the remaining GNOME account infra -- maybe this
will just be something we'll have to maintain ourselves

 * Issue templates -- again, this seems like a basic feature for this
kind of platform so we can get more meaningful bug reports to start
with

 * Multiple issue boards per project -- I haven't used the issue
boards yet, but this seemed like a rather artificial limitation rather
than an actual feature differentiated in EE

Other than the hooks which might be an immediate concern, I guess the
rest of these aren't a step down from where we are, so if we have an
idea of how to deal with these in the future, that's good enough.

Thanks again to everyone helping with this,
Arun

p.s.: I do think Bugzilla allows for more complexity in
tracking/management but that might just be because of my familiarity
with it.