About a year ago I posted a question to Ask[1] about migrating our development infrastructure to GitLab. I'd like to raise the question again here on -dev, and if that's the direction we decide to go, start migrating late this year and/or early next year. GitLab's feature set includes repository hosting, continuous integration, issue tracking, and wiki hosting. It could replace most or all of the following in our environment:
Gerrit, aka code.wireshark.org
Bugzilla, aka bugs.wireshark.org
Buildbot, aka buildbot.wireshark.org
Moin, aka wiki.wireshark.org
For new contributors, getting up and running with GitLab should be easier. GitLab doesn't require pushing to a special remote reference and doesn't require a special Change ID in the commit message. It should also be more familiar. For better or worse, the world seems to be standardizing on Git{Hub,Lab} and their respective workflows and tooling.
For existing contributors and core developers, the review process would change a fair amount. The current [-2 .. +2] approval system would either change or go away depending on the flavor of GitLab we use[2][3]. It also looks like you can't edit a commit message in the web UI before merging[4].
For the operations team, there *should* be less management overhead and lower operational expenses. We'd also have the opportunity to replace a bunch of aging and loosely coupled products with a more tightly integrated system.
Note that if we do decide to migrate to GitLab it won't happen all at once. For example, Moin isn't really tied to any of our other infrastructure and could be migrated without affecting the other components. We can also set up a test/sandbox environment in order to shake out as many bugs as possible before the actual migration.
If we decide *not* to migrate to GitLab, we (the operations team) will still have to upgrade each component at some point. In the case of Bugzilla and Buildbot, I'm not sure the updated version would suit our particular needs better than the one we currently use.
[1]https://ask.wireshark.org/question/5784/should-we-migrate-development-to-gitlab/
[2]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/761
[3]https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/merge_request_approvals.html
[4]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/18142
