Re: Trying out GitLab (was Re: In support of Jonas Bernoulli's Magit)

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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I think Phil's point is very important. While I find github/gitlab to be a
nice interface for small projects, I'm not at all convinced that it adds
much for larger or more complex projects. As an example, the bug/issue
tracker really doesn't scale well once you have hundreds of bugs/issues.

Once you have a project with more than ~10k lines of code, multiple
branches and large numbers of contributors and bug reporters,
administration becomes a big issue. I suspect that few except perhaps
casual users will really use the UI's provided by github/gitlab, preferring
instead to use just git. At that point, where the repo is hosted becomes
less relevant.

My experience with github and gitlab issue tracking has been that you need
to either use a different tool or develop custom workflows using the API in
order to manage large numbers of bugs effectively. Again, the web interface
is OK for casual users and smaller projects, but lacks the level of
sophistication necessary for larger teams and larger bug numbers. I'm not
saying that the current bug tracker is great, but I've found few bug
tracking systems to be great and the current one is adequate once you
invest time into it.

I'm certainly not against something like gitlab or the gitlab interface,
but I don't think it will be as beneficial or 'revolutionary' to Emacs'
maintenance or level of contributions as some seem to feel. In most ways,
it is just a little bit of UI sugar and a community is more than just a bit
of sugar.

On 9 July 2017 at 07:02, Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> wrote:

> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>
> > On 7/8/17 2:53 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >
> >> It's actually more than that: patches submitted to Emacs need to
> >> conform to our coding and various other standards: include
> >> properly-formatted commit log messages, documentation, and (where
> >> appropriate) tests, etc.  Patch review could require cleanup changes
> >> etc.
> >
> > That doesn't negate the advantages of integrated solutions like
> > GitLab, though. Emacs is not the only project with standards.
> >
> > We often enforce those via code review, and GitLab helps with that.
>
> And the process is much easier in most projects. Push to feature branch,
> get comments, using line-level in diff commenting. Then fix, squash,
> force push. Finally, single click merge, PR closes.
>
> Phil
>
>
>


-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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