Update on Status of Gitlab Migration

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 2:37 PM Nate Graham <nate at kde.org> wrote:
>
> On 4/13/20 6:59 PM, Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > Why do we need to mimic them?
> >
> > If you Google "KDE Gitlab" then the first hit is invent.kde.org
> > <http://invent.kde.org>.
>
> To flip it around: why do we need to do something different? I don't
> think it's about mimicking anyone else, but rather using the most
> intuitively obvious domain name rather than some arbitrarily different one.
>
> No matter what, we're all going to be talking about "KDE GitLab" or
> "KDE's GitLab instance". The title of the relevant documentation page is
> "GitLab" (much as the Phabricator documentation page was named
> "Phabricator"). And when the migration is complete, we're all going to
> announce that "KDE is now using GitLab!" So the cat's out of the bag on
> using the word "GitLab" and avoiding some number of people looking for
> our stuff at gitlab.com and not finding it there. invent.kde.org doesn't
> avoid that at all.
>
> Given that, which is more confusing: explaining to people that we have a
> GitLab instance at invent.kde.org, or explaining to people that we have
> a GitLab instance at gitlab.kde.org?

There is no difference to be honest, the amount of explaining is
exactly the same.

We're also not alone in giving ours a different name - Debian did as
well (theirs is at salsa.debian.org). They didn't see fit to setup a
compatibility "gitlab.debian.org" hostname either.

>
> I know that over the next few years I'm going to be directing hundreds
> of people towards our infrastructure, and I would rather be able to say
> "please submit a pull request at gitlab.kde.org" rather than "please
> submit a pull request at KDE's GitLab instance at invent.kde.org."

Sorry, but the "KDE's Gitlab instance" in your second sentence is superfluous.
You could just as easily say "please submit a pull request on
invent.kde.org", not sure why you need to explicitly mention it is
Gitlab.

If people have already found the source code, chances are they will
have already found invent.kde.org anyway - as they will have probably
found it via a web browser, and Gitlab will be the only web interface
to our repositories (CGit is being discontinued)

>
> I know this probably feels like annoyingly extreme bikeshedding, but, I
> dunno, names are important.
>
> Nate

Cheers,
Ben