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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Gitlab Evaluation & Migration
From:       Ben Cooksley <bcooksley () kde ! org>
Date:       2019-02-24 20:03:05
Message-ID: CA+XidOHVSO45uSE5sNjpTOve3s3t+L=r-QJu=5=+s6TofEKSkg () mail ! gmail ! com
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On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 8:31 AM Martin Fl=C3=B6ser <mgraesslin@kde.org> wro=
te:
>
> Am 2019-02-23 10:44, schrieb Ben Cooksley:
> > Hi all,
>
> > Based on all of the above we'd like to propose migrating towards
> > Gitlab. Comments?
>
> I'm totally honest here: I'm not happy about yet another migration. This
> will be the fifth reviewing toolkit I use for KDE (reviewboard for svn,
> reviewboard for git, gerrit, phabricator and now gitlab). Each of the
> transitions was painful for everyone involved and the commit rate to the
> project I was involved suffered from the transitions. As an example for
> the problems: KWin's hacking document still mentions reviewboard:
> https://community.kde.org/KWin/Hacking#Submitting_Changes

Please don't over exaggerate the numbers here.

Gerrit was never an official system for reviews, it was something that
was evaluated by a small group and which was never proceeded with as
an official whole-of-KDE solution.
Reviewboard for SVN/Git are basically the same thing (just a different
instance url), so this is only really the third system, not the fifth

Please also bear in mind that we've been on Git now for coming up on 9
years (I have mails for git.kde.org starting around June 2010) so
switching systems twice in that time frame as software continues to
mature seems quite reasonable to me.

>
> I'm not pleased that we want to transit to another solution after just a
> few years. I understand that there is the feeling that our phabricator
> solution limits contributions from newcomers. I don't believe that and
> are afraid of the long term developers walking away due to the changes
> (which is something I saw with every transition). I don't know whether I
> will continue to contribute if I have to relearn the tooling - my time
> for KDE is currently very limited. If I have an hour to hack and have to
> spend half the time on how to contribute now, that sucks and lowers
> motivation.

If you've worked with Github before then Gitlab is very similar, so
the learning curve shouldn't be too steep.

>
> Changing the tooling will not solve any of the contribution problems.
> Instead we introduce new ones like all documentation going out of life.
>
> Please consider whether the advantages are really worth it.

Please also see my comments re. Phabricator upstream as to part of the
reason why we're considering this, along with the feedback we received
at Akademy last year.

>
> Best regards
> Martin

Regards,
Ben
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