KDE evaluating migration to GitLab

[Neofytos Kolokotronis]

Hello everyone,

we would like to inform all of you that a team consisting of the KDE 
sysadmin, e.V. board and onboarding goal members has been in talks with 
Gitlab about a possible migration of KDE from Phabricator (and perhaps 
other tools that can be replaced by it) to a self-hosted GitLab CE 
instance. Some further information can be found here: 
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/53206.

We have been holding regular calls with Gitlab and the discussion has 
been going very well, with GitLab being very reactive to our questions 
and requests. The KDE e.V. members are kept up to date after every call.

Thanks to the great work put in by sysadmin, we now have an initial 
setup of GitLab available for testing: https://invent.kde.org/ .

Several KDE projects are currently helping us test the implementation 
and workflows. These have been chosen for being:
- Small in number of contributors involved and not having complex and 
very large code repositories
- Rather active (so they can test things), but not rely heavily on 
Phabricator or have regular deadlines to catch so their workflow doesn't 
break
- Willing to go through the initial hurdles and help with testing and 
gathering feedback.

The results of this evaluation are meant to eventually be released to 
the wider KDE community, along with a recommendation from the people 
involved. Where we go from there will depend on the outcome of the 
discussion this is meant to jump-start in an informed way.

We tried to keep this under the radar until we had some solid feedback 
from the testing phase. The news however broke out recently on Reddit:
1. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/adnmd7/kde_is_considering_a_migration_to_gitlab/
2. 
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ado2c8/kde_is_considering_a_migration_to_gitlab/
To avoid any confusion and misunderstandings, but most importantly to 
start the discussion within the wider KDE community, we thought it would 
be better to communicate this in a more official way to everyone.

If you are new to GitLab the list of available features can prove 
helpful: https://about.gitlab.com/features/

Here are some answers to the FAQs we received so far:
- Why not use the GitLab Enterprise version?
   KDE is commited to only using software under a FOSS license.
- Why a new switch? We switched to Phabricator a few years ago.
   We hope that GitLab will prove to offer a variety of features that 
will improve our workflow in the longt-erm and will lower the barrier 
for new contributors joining us.
- Why GitLab and not another option?
   We know there are other solutions available (gitea.io, sr.ht, 
pagure.io to name a few) but we chose GitLab as they have been working 
closely with other FOSS projects (including Debian, GNOME) and we hope 
they can offer us a feature-filled solution and a great partnership 
going forward.

Feel free to ask any further questions here.

Let's have a productive testing phase and discussion!

Cheers,
Neofytos
on behalf of the team involved in the discussions