Re: poll: switching our development platform

[David Kastrup]

Jonas Hahnfeld <address@hidden> writes:

> Am Mittwoch, den 15.04.2020, 21:15 +0200 schrieb Jonas Hahnfeld:
>> With 2.21.0 done, I'd like to restart discussion about switching our
>> development platform. To recall, we had proposals about using Gerrit
>> [1] (don't miss follow-ups in March [2]) and GitLab / gitlab.com [3].
>> 
>> [...]
>> 
>> To conclude, I believe we should choose one of Gerrit and GitLab and
>> have a trial to see if the processes can be carried over. (If not, we
>> can still give the other platform a try.)
>> I'd propose we kind of vote, so please reply with your thoughts.
>
> I think GitLab is the better match in the current situation for the
> following reasons:
> 1) It provides a complete forge platform. This allows to replace all
> three tools that we currently use to host & browse the source code,
> keep track of bug reports, and review code.
> 2) gitlab.com is hosted and you only need a single account. If you want
> to it's possible to log in with Google or GitHub (and others), but you
> can also just have a plain account with username and password.
>
> I acknowledge that Gerrit might provide a better review experience for
> large graphs of commits. However I think that the integration into a
> single tool outweighs that advantage.

Personally, I would prefer the long-term dedication that being a free
project supported by a free software organisation would mean: getting
kicked out of the free tiers of a proprietary company already happened
for us with Google Code, and Google is supposed to be comparatively
friendly to free software as a company.

However, the FSF's Forge evaluation is at such an early stage (and their
current convergence to Pagure looks also like their choice of platform
has still a lot of leeway for growing and maturing) that I am skeptical
we are either doing us nor them a favor by dropping a project of our
size on their infrastructure at this point of time.

It is a bit of a downer that they are going to downgrade Gitlab's
evaluation because Gitlab is not overly interested in addressing a
number of issues for people bothered above average about software
freedom aspects.

It still seems that at the current point of time our attempt at
balancing priorities would lean towards using Gitlab as a hosted
instance.

-- 
David Kastrup