Gitlab experiment status

[Rémi Bernon]

On 5/24/22 11:12, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> The Gitlab experiment seems to be going well. For the last release, more
> than half the patches were submitted as Gitlab merge requests, so that
> seems to be working well for us.
> 
> There are still improvements we can make, and of course many more
> Gitlab features that we could start using, but before investing more
> effort we need to decide whether we want to use it going forward.
> 
> So now that you have had a chance to try it, what do you people think?
> Should we adopt Gitlab as our development platform?
> 

Hi,

I think it still has some rough edges but I really appreciate the 
cooperative aspect to it, where we can more freely and openly assign 
patches for review. Even if I'm going to list negative points below for 
reference I'm happy with it.


More precisely, the rough edges are a bit related to the current patch 
submission process, and I think they could be smoothed out if Gitlab was 
the preferred development platform:

* The sign-off requirement makes it a bit more painful to create MR than 
it could be. There's git rebase --sign-off, but it's a bit inconvenient 
to script. As other have mentioned already, reviewer information is also 
not included in commits anymore, which feels like a loss.

* Mixing patch reviews from the M-L with Gitlab is also a bit awkward, 
comments are not really well integrated, quoting on Gitlab in a M-L 
friendly way is inconvenient, and M-L comments are also not formatted in 
a very readable way.

* In the same way, approving patches with Sign-off on the M-L doesn't 
map well to Gitlab, it only creates dangling comments on the MR and are 
probably not considered as a valid approval. This also means that MR 
cannot be partially approved (though they can be updated after 
discussion to only include the good changes).

* We still miss proper testbot integration, though I understand it's in 
progress. I think it would be nice to have it use commit status API [1] 
to mark individual commit build / test statuses in MR.


[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/commits.html#commit-status

Cheers,
-- 
Rémi Bernon <rbernon at codeweavers.com>