Re: Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org> wrote:

On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 3:22 PM, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
> 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].

Excellent. I think most will agree it’s time we implement such changes.

 

I agree. My view is that it's more important to move on, rather than exactly which option we choose.

> 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.

This mail mentions Gitlab as the only alternative. I know some people
suggested to consider Phabricator, yet your proposal doesn’t mention
it and by the looks of the wiki pages your research has been focused
around Gitlab.

As far as I'm concerned, we seriously considered both. I actually thought that both alternatives were well represented on the wiki pages...

We had a number of people involved in the process (Daniel Stone, Emmanuele Bassi, Andre Klapper to a certain extent) who are really familiar with Phabricator and advocated for at it points.

 

Now I know very little about both Gitlab and
Phabricator so I won’t push or block anything, but I’m a bit worried
that this wasn’t given enough scrutiny. In particular, I saw that
Phabricator has a tool for mockups/design (Pholio [0]) that really
looked like something we’d make good use of.

I agree that Pholio looks fantastic, and would love to have access to something like that. That said, it is one additional feature, when I think the core common feature set (code hosting, issue tracking) is the most important thing. Also, my impression is that Phab is best suited to more rigorously structured and managed development processes than our own, so I'm not 100% sure exactly what role Pholio would take. We'd have to experiment to see if it has a place in our overall methodology.

 

It would allow our
designers to stop using Github, Dropbox, and such non free,
not-on-our-infrastructure tools.

 

I not sure that Pholio is necessary for us to give up Github and Dropbox. We'll still need a repo for mockups, and the blocker for free infrastructure in the past has been performance - both rendering and serving the images, and handling the massive repository size.

So did you just look at Gitlab and think it’s good enough, or did you
actually consider Phabricator (and maybe other alternatives) and pick
Gitlab as the best fit?

I think early in the process there was greater interest in Gitlab, but as it went on Phabricator was given serious consideration.

Allan