Re: [RFC] Using gitlab for upstream qemu repo?

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 06:47:55PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> now that Gitlab is the primary CI infrastructure for QEMU, and that all
> QEMU git repositories (including mirrors) are available on Gitlab, I
> would like to propose that committers use Gitlab when merging commits to
> QEMU repositories.
> 
> There are four reasons for this:
> 
> - this would be a step towards ensuring that all commits go through the
> CI process, and it would also provide a way to run the deployment of the
> web site via .gitlab-ci.yml.
> 
> - right now Gitlab pulls from upstream repos and qemu.org pulls from
> gitlab, but this is not true for the qemu, qemu-web and openbios
> repositories where Gitlab pulls from qemu.org and qemu.org is the main
> repository.  With this switch, all the main repositories would be on
> Gitlab and then mirrored to both qemu.org and GitHub.  Having a
> homogeneous configuration makes it easier to document what's going on.

I think it makes sense to make GitLab be the canonical location for
all the GIT repos that QEMU project hosts, and everything else be a
read-only mirror.

With the current mixed setup both qemu.org and gitlab.com are failure
points which impact us. This is bad because while gitlab.com has
scalable redundant hardware with dedicated sysadmins, qemu.org is a
single VM, with part time sysadmins, and no failover facility if the
VM fails.

By making gitlab.com primary, any problems with qemu.org no longer
have a blocking impact on us.

> - it would limit the number of people with access to qemu.org, since
> committers would no longer need an account on the machine.
> 
> - by treating gitlab as authoritative, we could include it in the
> .gitmodules file and remove load on the qemu.org server

Yes makes sense,

> Nothing would change for developers, who would still have access to all
> three sets of repositories (git.qemu.org, gitlab.com and github.com).
> Committers however would need to have an account on the
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project organization with access to the
> repositories they care about.  They would also lose write access to
> /srv/git on qemu.org.
> 
> Of course this is just starting a discussion, so I'm not even proposing
> a date for the switch.

Regards,
Daniel
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