Hey Carlos,
thanks for bringing this topic to the table. I certainly have feedback to share!
Wall of text, tl;dr: GitLab is great, but could be greater; increased number of contributions, but not
contributors; better tools to manage issues, but lacks project and product management features;
needs better cli tools.
Overall, my experience since the introduction of GitLab has been great so far. It is, without a doubt,
a huge improvement over Bugzilla + cgit.
The first impact it had on the projects I maintain is the massively increased number of contributions.
Calendar and To Do are smaller apps, but saw an increase of around 2x the number of external
contributions. Settings is a bigger app, and since I took over maintainership and instituted a shared
maintainership model, the number of merge requests skyrocketed - to the point of becoming hard to
keep track of it. I still haven't decided if this is a positive or negative aspect. I'm afraid this might
have a negative impact on some high-bandwidth-but-on-maintainer-shortage modules, like GNOME
Shell. I mean, even on Settings, when I see that there are goddamn 30 open merge requests, I
silently freak out. The influx of contributions, not contributors, increased, and there is a price we pay
for that: more time spent on review means less time spent on coding.
On top of that, I have to say, even though GitLab's issue management is fantastic for individual tickets,
there is still a long road for mass managing tickets. It's still a PITA to mass label or change milestones
of tickets.
Feature-wise, GitLab is good enough, but as I expressed on IRC multiple times, I'm somewhat pissed
off with their decision of not CE-ing some features (related tickets, multiple reviewers, etc). Specifically
about reviewers, as it is right now, the feature is useless. On single-maintainer projects, nobody assigns
that field because there's only one someone that will check that. On multiple-maintainer projects, the
field is misleading since the merge request will probably be reviewed by more than a single someone.
As Christian said in the past, GitLab lacks project and product management tools. Milestones are okay,
but they could be so much more useful than they are right now. But my expectations are low due to the
multiple disappointments regarding EE-ing important and useful features and leaving CE helpless.
