Re: Gitlab Migration

[Po Lu]

Daniel Fleischer <danflscr@gmail.com> writes:

> 1 The need for new people to join the community and help. Newer
>  (younger) people will be more familiar with the newer VC platforms
>  (github/lab and similar). These are not only developers but regular
>  users who want to report an issue (bug) or suggest a feature.
>  Lowering the bar for participation is the key to growing Emacs and
>  the community.

People mention youth.  I think recently there was an excellent article
written by someone who would definitely qualify as "youth", and posted
to one of the social media platforms frequented by youth, which
basically summed up the process as "initially intimidating, but actually
easy".

> 2 Having the code + issues + discussions in the same place as opposed
>  to now, where the code and discussions (lists) are in 3 different
>  places (Savannah, Gnu mailing lists and Gnu bug tracker). With a
>  modern VC system, one can jump easily between issues, discussions,
>  code commits back and forth easily as opposed to now, where if it's a
>  bug you can use its number to search lists and commits messages but
>  if it's a discussion, it's not "connected" to anything.

And in GitLab, the code, issues and discussions are also in 3 separate
places: The repository, the issue tracker, and I'm not even sure what
the place for discussions is on these platforms.  Twitter perhaps?

> Possible issue:
> 1 Being able to use Emacs for all these needs. One way is being able to
>  interact with the VC system using emails, i.e. issues, features,
>  discussions should have a nice and efficient email interface in
>  addition to using a website. Another approach is using the wonderful
>  Magit and Forge packages. Forge currently is lacking the discussions
>  feature but has a very good git + pull-requests + org-mode
>  integration abilities.

Magit as a whole is nice, but Magit is not part of Emacs.  Forge may be
nice and all that, but has anyone found a way to use Gnus for
pull-requests?

Anyhow, I don't think any of these clients will solve the real problems
with these platforms.  Case in point: some time ago, I tried reporting
an issue on the Freedesktop.org GitLab instance, and tried to register
an account.  At first my browser froze and would not open the
registration form! After it did load, I had to resign myself to running
Google's reCaptcha, and even after that, the confirmation e-mail never
arrived and I gave up.  That seems to be a very high entry barrier for
new contributions.