Gitlab experiment status

[Jacek Caban]

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?


What I like about Gitlab:


* push/fetch model eliminates ML hacks by design (where we give up 
proper git history when sending an email, only to have hackish 
reconstruction of it in patch tracker, TestBot and reviewers' tools).


* It provides a platform where having Wine Gecko repo fits Wine 
infrastructure.


* It gives us a nice place to share WIP branches within Wine infrastructure.


* It seems to have a good potential for automation.


On top of above it makes Alexandre's life easier, so I think it's good 
enough to continue adopting it. There are some things that could be 
improved:


* The ability of reviewer to push simple fixups to MRs. Gitlab provides 
some support for it, but it currently doesn't fit our workflow. For the 
existing option to work, reviewer would need commit access to the target 
branch. I worked around that with Huw by giving him access to my tree 
instead, but that does not scale.


* Related to above, when reviewer pushes to MR, MR creator is used by ML 
bridge as a sender. It seems like it should use the reviewer instead and 
Gitlab has that information. Eg. [1] should use Huw as a sender.


* I think that a mailing list dominated by a bot does not give an 
impression welcoming for general discussion. If we're moving forward 
with this, I think we should move Gitlab bridge to a separated mailing 
list. We had wine-patches in the past (although in this case it would 
contain review comments as well).


Jacek


[1] https://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2022-May/217574.html