Invent/gitlab, issues and bugzilla

[Elv1313 .]

Ok, lots of email in the last few hours, lets recap a bit.

1. "Top" projects don't like GitLab issues because they are too
simple. Can we try to make a comprehensive list of issues on a pad
somewhere? Sa far, I see:
1.1 It doesn't allow custom combo boxes like BZ/RedMine which then
forces manual abuse of labels. This probably runs a bit deep and
affect the search.
1.2 It doesn't allow fine grained issues tree where dependencies and
relationship can be tracked "well enough".
1.3 It doesn't allow a "walled garden" to separate technical
discussions from support.
1.4 Someone should chat with GitLab about this to see what they think
about adding some EE features into CE.
1.5 There is BZ 6, 7 and 8 in various level of development or planning
which seem good

2. For point 1.3, maybe this is where the solution is. @Boud, you
mention that Krita "ask" failed. Can you provide more insight here on
why? Is there anything to learn so we can try better? How about
redirecting users directly to a ticket system for top-10 projects?
Ticket systems are overkill (and problematic) for 95% of the KDE
projects, but seem a step forward for larger projects. Or maybe send
people to "a forum" first? For my largest non-KDE project (AwesomeWM),
when we switched to GitHub (from FlySpray), we updated the contact
page of the website to point to StackOverflow.com, SuperUser.com and
Reddit above the GitHub Issue link. This worked fine for a relatively
medium-large user base (of geeks).

3. The login (identity.kde.org) issue. Maybe I am not on enough
mailing lists, but what is the situation regarding generic OAuth2
login for a subset of non-developer services? Is it only an
integration issue or a political one? Being able to login with
Google/Facebook/GitHub/Yahoo/Microsoft/GitLab/Gnome(?!) accounts with
a path to upgrade to "proper" account seems to currently be the
popular and future proof way to handle this. This is better from a
security standpoint because all of them support 2 factor
authentication in a way *normal people* can understand (aka, a
notification on Android phones). Of course it doesn't help with GPG
and SSH public key wallets and other dev related concerns. That's not
relevant for most users.

4. For point 1.5, this isn't really solving anything. Sure, a better
BZ with all the powerful features would be nice. It would not solve
the PR<->Issues integration problems at all, which still leaves half
of the people here unsatisfied. It would not be welcoming to projects
looking to move into the incubator because they are used to a more
integrated pipeline. It would also leave the whole problem of slowly
making the services more bot friendly, which is the future.
4.1 This would leave the sequestration of BKO and IKO into 2
ecosystems. This makes bots more complex and makes porting good open
source bots such as mergify.io even harder since it would be more
painful than just a GitHub<->GitLab API compat (or if they ever
support GitLab). Bots are a solution to many of the problem outlined
here, such as when is a pull request acceptable to merge or some magic
rebase/squash/fixup bots.

On Thu, 4 Jul 2019 at 15:39, Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> wrote:
>
> On donderdag 4 juli 2019 21:32:59 CEST Ben Cooksley wrote:
>
> > With regards to Identity, I'm well aware it has its issues - it was
> > originally designed as a system for developers and other contributors (so
> > not users) and is now many years old.
> >
> > It's trying to do a job it was never designed to do, in a world that is
> > quite different from the one it was originally created for. We do have
> > plans to replace it, but getting time to seriously look into those is quite
> > difficult.
>
> It's mostly outside KDE's own infrastructure that we get those complaints -- people on IRC, Twiter, Reddit and so on complaining they just cannot figure out how the heck they can make it possible for themselves to login on the forum.
>
> --
> https://www.valdyas.org | https://www.krita.org
>
>