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.