Re: Proposal to deploy GitLab on gnome.org

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 16 May 2017 at 15:38, 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.
>
> > 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. 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.

Phabricator was thoroughly investigated; the wiki page has whole
sections on it, including why we think it's not what GNOME needs. :-)

I use Phabricator at work (for issue tracking) and I honestly gave my
personal position about it, balanced against GitLab; additionally, we
consulted with Daniel Stone, who handled the transition between
Bugzilla and Phab at Collabora and on the FreeDesktop.Org
infrastructure. We even had Phacility very kindly provide us with a
test instance to play with.

The main issues with Phabricator is that its code hosting is kind of
primitive, and its workflow is heavily patch-oriented. You have to
create patch files and "attach" them to issues, instead of creating
branches and asking the maintainer to merge them.

> From an issue tracking and project management perspective, Phabricator
is a winner in my eyes — but the requirements from GNOME are
definitely more oriented towards the code hosting and integration. As
much as I like working with Phab, I don't think it's a good fit for
GNOME.

This, of course, does not mean that we wouldn't be able to add a
Phabricator instance in the future; it would probably be easier to
migrate a pure GitLab set up to a GitLab + Phabricator, in any case.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]