Invent/gitlab, issues and bugzilla

[Nate Graham]

I'm not a fan of "that's just your personal opinion" being used as a 
veiled insult in this thread. Voicing opinions is what we do in a 
discussion. Everybody's opinion is valid.


Here's what we generally seem to agree on:

- bugs.kde.org currently offers a subpar UX for users reporting issues, 
compared to GitHub/GitLab/potentially the future Bugzilla 6 upgrade.

- It's important that user-submitted bugs and developer tools for 
project planning and internal technical discussions be separated from 
one another so users don't interfere in developers' internal 
conversations. We currently have this with Phabricator and Bugzilla 
being separate, and we'd like to not lose some kind of separation.



And it seems like many or most would also agree with the following:

- We should try to unify our infrastructure as much as possible, or else 
the KDE community fragments and working across teams and projects 
becomes harder (e.g. can't move a Bugzilla bug to GitLab, or vice versa).

- Since GitLab is a centralized system that at least aspires to host 
everything "under one roof", if we plan to move to GitLab, it makes the 
most sense to embrace and not maintain separate infrastructure outside 
of it, to the extent that this is practicable.

- What GitLab offers us from a bug triager, developer, reviewer, and 
project manager perspective is inferior to what we currently have 
available in Phabricator and Bugzilla, due to key features being EE-only 
(e.g. Merge request reviews and approvals) or just not available at all 
(e.g. separated infrastructure for user-submitted bugs and developer 
tasks; powerful and granular bug search tools and reports).



Basically our workflow requires that developers interact with users of 
potentially wildly varying levels of technical skill. Those who are more 
skilled should be invited to and allowed to participate in internal 
discussions so that they can actually mature into developers themselves, 
while those who lack technical skills or are personally abusive must be 
kept away from those discussions.

One of the advantages I've seen people mention about GitLab is how they 
are very responsive and open to the possibility of changes. Is there any 
chance we can discuss the above with them to see if there's any way to 
gain more support for our workflows?

If so, then it seems like the ideal state of affairs would be to replace 
Bugzilla with GitLab issues as a new bug-reporting front-end for users, 
and then there would be a separate back-end like what Phabricator Tasks 
currently offers us that's visible only or mostly to developers, where 
the issues can be categorized, organized, and discussed, and 
higher-level projects can be coordinated with something. If we can get 
something like this, that seems like the ideal outcome to me.



Nate