Re: Migrate away from vger to GitHub or (on-premise) GitLab?

From: Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de>
Date: Feb 4, 2024, 15:47 UTC
Message-ID: <20240204154714.GZ9696@kitsune.suse.cz>
In-Reply-To: <Zb+pQk9R3AOouFxF@ugly>

On Sun, Feb 04, 2024 at 04:12:02PM +0100, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> On Fri, Feb 02, 2024 at 12:50:04PM +0100, Michal Suchánek wrote:
> > Given the open nature of lore it should be feasible to provide
> > additional interfaces on top of it that cater to people used to PRs
> > on popular forge web UIs without hijacking the whole project and the
> > existing tools and interfaces. For some reason people are set on
> > replacing it as a whole, and removing the interfaces they personally
> > don't use,
> 
> > calling them obosolete.
> > 
> because they positively *are*.
> 
> when i started, patch-based code reviews were the norm, and i'm still using
> them for my small project with almost no external contributions.
> 
> but after working with gerrit code review for over a decade, i find it
> mind-boggling that people are still voluntarily subjecting themselves to
> mail-based reviews for serious high-volume work.

I have yet to see gerrit in action. Very few projects use it so it's difficult to gauge what tradeoffs compared to e-mail based workflow it does provide.

> it doesn't matter just how super-proficient you got with your old tools.
> there is just no way you'll get anywhere near as efficient as you would with
> the new ones, if you just were interested enough to learn them.  migrating
> the workflows that are worth keeping isn't such a bit deal.

Have you migrated them to gerrit already, and tought all the git contributors how to use them from gerrit?

Somobody has to do it.

Also can you migrate away from gerrit once it becomes defunct or new, better alternative emerges?

Recently it seems that forges offer a 'download your project data' option, probably as a result of GDPR. What use is such data blob though?

An e-mail archive is that: an archive. It's a medium that you can read with a wealth of software today, and 100 years from now. An achivable data format.

Compare that with the 'download your data' blob from a forge. Can it be uploaded even to a diffferent instance of the same forge to restore your project elsewhere? Interpreted by any tool othar than the correct vintage of that same forge? Deos even more than one instance of the forge exist?

I have seen what hoops Gitea is jumping through to import data from other forges, and it's not pretty. Understandably, people who have seen rise and fall of bitkeeper are wary of any tool that keeps your data locked to itself.

And even if you do convert to gerrit it's unlikely to satisfy the "Why are you not using github or gitlab" crowd. It's not one of the big, popular forges they are familiar with, the UX is significantly different.

Thanks

Michal