Hi all, Earlier this spring Julian Rüth and I sat down and created a mirror of Sage's repository over at GitLab:
https://gitlab.com/sagemath/sage This is in addition to the existing mirror at GitHub, for which we have no immediate plans except to have it link to the GitLab mirror. The reasons for this are several--in particular, Julian has put considerable work into a new advisory continuous integration system for Sage built on top of GitLab's CI pipeline system. It's quite nice, as the result of each built is a Docker image which can be run and tested in mybinder.org. With the exception of testing on unusual platforms, this means that proposed changes in tickets--if they indeed build successfully--will be easy to manually try out and play with without having to build them one's self. I will let Julian say more about that when he's ready to. I am bringing up the GitLab mirror for a different, but related reason, which is that I would like to start allowing submissions to Sage to be made via "merge requests" on GitLab (a.k.a. pull requests in GitHub parlance). Why GitLab? In short, we felt it would likely be more acceptable to most members of the Sage community; this was a feeling we had even before the Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub was announced. First of all, GitLab is open-core, meaning that the majority of their software is open source, but for paying customers there are additional features that are not made open source. This, in addition to providing higher level of support to paying customers, is the basis of their business model. But IMO it is more inherently open source-friendly than, say, GitHub. Second of all, while we are currently using the free hosting providing by gitlab.com, which frees us from both the cost in money and time of having to maintain our own GitLab server, GitLab makes it quite easy (I have done it myself) to self-host a GitLab server. So should anything ever go awry with gitlab.com, we can always export the project to a self-hosted server as we do currently with Trac. A second clarification to make is that we are not currently proposing to do away with Trac for Sage's ticket database, and we do not intend to open up the full issue tracker on GitLab. Instead, we only want to be able to accept merge requests, as we believe that enabling the popular "GitHub-style workflow" will make it easier and friendlier for new contributors to submit changes to Sage. For an immediate use case of this that I have in mind, I would like to make it easier for users to submit documentation fixes: https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/25914 In order that this does not overly disrupt the existing workflow, I have created a bot that automatically syncs GitLab merge requests to a Trac ticket, including synchronization of the branch being proposed for merging. This would allow Volker to continue merging positively reviewed tickets as usual, and (in theory) never even have to touch GitLab. You can see an example of any auto-generated ticket attached. If there are suggestions as to how exactly the auto-generated tickets are formatted I'm open to them--I know it's not exactly perfect as-is. But those are details. The only major downside I see is fragmentation of the discussion of a merge request: Comments can be made either on GitLab itself, or in the auto-generated Trac ticket. I do not yet have a specific recommendation for that in mind, and we may need to experiment. I considered having the bot synchronize comments as well, but that could get even more confusing. One thing I will say though, is that GitLab merge requests will give us superior code-review tools, such as the ability to leave comments inline with the diff. I'd like to just try it and see how it goes, but I'm also open to suggestions. There is also precedent for this model in other projects with legacy issue trackers. Most notably, of late, CPython itself, which started accepting pull requests through GitHub. I haven't seen too much complaint about the discussion being fragemented. For the most part discussions about the details of issues and what to do about them stay on the issue tracker, while discussions about code details (i.e. code review) stay on GitHub, though this is not cut-and-dry. A recent informal poll of the CPython developers as to how this workflow is going was almost entirely positive: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2018-February/152200.html Some of you may remember this is not a first for Sage either: some time ago there was a similar experiment done with GitHub, but it fell unmaintained. If anyone has any lessons learned from that time, please add them. What does everyone think? Is there anyone opposed to going ahead and opening up merge requests? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. 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