On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 10:43 AM Erik Bray <erik.m.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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?
Now that the OpenDreamKit reporting period is over (at least to the extent that I'm responsible for anything), I would like to re-raise this issue one more time. To take a straw poll based on the responses so far, there are: 4x +1 (not including myself, which is an additional +1) 1x +0 (how I am interpreting Dima's response, which did not include an explicit +1 but seems positive; he can correct me) 2x -0 (how I am interpreting Jeroen and Simon's responses, pending some explicit correction from them) To answer again some of the concerns that have been raised, if I am to be honest I am in favor, long term, of moving away from Trac entirely. However, that is *not* what is being proposed here, and I have no concrete plan for a full move off of Trac. If this does lead to a "slippery slope" of more people wanting to move to GitLab from Trac I see that as a positive thing: For all the advantages of Trac, if enough people see a net positive to using a new tool, then so be it. However, it will be hard for the community to even get a feel for other tools if we don't (optionally) incorporate them into our exiting workflow at some level. I'll leave this open for more comments until the end of this week before making any moves. P.S. If anyone has additional comments, positive or negative, on https://trac.sagemath.org/ticket/25914 they would be most appreciated P.P.S. See PEP-581 (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0581/) for an argument in favor of moving from CPython's legacy Roundup-based issue tracker entirely to GitHub. With the exception of a few Roundup-specific issues, I feel that the argument applies largely the same for Sage/Trac. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
