Gitlab experiment wrapup

[Alexandre Julliard]

Folks,

Here's a summary of the Gitlab experiment discussion, with some
additional comments. Thanks to everybody who sent their feedback!


* Things that people like:

- Fetching commits directly with git instead of applying patches from
  emails (Huw, Jacek, Paul, Zeb). Indeed that's a major help for me as
  well.

- Better tracker, easy to see the list of pending reviews (Huw).

- Possibility to host more Wine projects, as well as private Wine trees
  to share WIP patches (Jacek). Indeed it would be nice to have all Wine
  projects in one place instead of the current mix of
  github/sourceforge/etc.

- Potential for automation (Jacek). Gitlab offers many services that we
  will be able to take advantage of, the most obvious being CI for the
  testbot. Having all the data in a proper database instead of free-form
  emails should make it possible to do other interesting things as well.


* Some other things I like:

- Updating status doesn't need to go through me, people can assign
  reviewers, supersede patches, etc. directly. That reduces my workload
  and improves the bus factor. Once we have figured out how to make
  testbot results reliable, we could also have maintainers merge commits
  directly.

- The full discussion thread for a given MR is readily accessible, it
  doesn't require hunting down the multiple revisions of a patch and
  associated threads in the mailman archive.


* Things that could be improved:

- Signoffs are a bit cumbersome (Rémi). We should change the
  requirements to something better adapted to Gitlab.

- It's only possible to approve the whole MR, not individual commits
  (Huw, Zeb). I think that's an acceptable trade-off, but we could
  imagine other approaches.

- The mailing list gateway creates too much noise; mixing comments from
  Gitlab and mailing list isn't very clean (Jacek, Rémi, Alex).  We can
  make some tweaks, or use a separate list, or even rethink the approach
  of the mail gateway.

- Gitlab threading support is limited, nested comment threads are not
  supported (Zeb). That's true, but looking through the past few months
  of patch reviews, it seems that we almost never use nested threads, so
  I think we can live with that limitation.

- Reviewers can push fixups to commits, but that requires the author to
  grant explicit permission (Jacek). Hopefully we can tweak access
  rights to allow this by default.


* Conclusion

I think Gitlab is working well for us, and most people seem generally
happy with it. So my plan is to go forward and make Gitlab the main
development platform for Wine.

I'll start working on the transition, and on the improvements mentioned
above. Any help will be welcome! I'll be posting a roadmap shortly.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org