Le 2025-01-24 13:00, Andrea Pappacoda a écrit :
Same for me. In addition, on the topic of making things easier for new
contributors, when I first started using Salsa I felt lost in the
myriad
of features and options enabled by default. Not only 99% of projects
hosted on Salsa don't need features like "Model experiments", but
keeping them enabled makes the platform harder to use. The BTS, on
other
hand, might not have a modern user interface, but its simplicity has
value.
Another big usability improvement in my opinion would be to
automatically enable CI when the `debian/salsa-ci.yml` file is present.
This way, users don't have to be familiar with GitLab's web settings UI
to enable and customize the CI jobs. Not sure if this has been
mentioned
before.
Reading things like this I have the feeling that maybe a custom web UI
and service could be a worthy development to complement the stock GitLab
UI. AIUI Salsa admins are not willing to extensively patch the GitLab
codebase for understandable reasons, so an add-on platform may help to
overcome some GitLab limitations and provide additional features
specifically suited to the Debian project. Similar applications are
common in corporate setups.
Among the first features that could be implemented:
- create (or clone) a repository with a choice of suitable configuration
presets (from "nothing but git" to "all bells and whistles")
- check a repo configuration, suggest configuration changes based on
current recommendations (they could be adjusted to team or maintainer
preferences), apply selected changes.
The application could then be extended later for additional features,
such as initializing a repository from team templates and the initial
import of upstream sources, maintenance tasks (Janitor et al) such as
mostly automated routine updates, fix or work around some rights issues
with GitLab, offer an alternate, no-javascript-required, accessible UI
to browse and participate to merge requests and issues (I'm not sure the
stock GitLab UI fares great in terms of accessibility), check a
repository for common issues or deviations (sort of git linter) and
suggest how to fix them, expose additional bulk APIs, expose a
self-service registration UI with improved detection of unwanted peers
and registrant status updates, interact and cross-link issues with the
BTS etc.
Would that make sense?
Cheers,
--
Julien Plissonneau Duquène
