Tipping the apple cart?

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On maandag 1 juli 2019 09:10:59 CEST Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> 
> This tells me that Gitlab can be worse, which is not surprising.
> 
> And can it be better? Will some folks who have a good experience with this
> on Gitlab speak up?
> 
> This is something that all of us want and need to know.
> 

Krita has switched from Phabricator to Gitlab a while ago, so maybe I can add our experience. It's not that great, though. 

Bad:

* For new users who want to submit one or two patches, gitlab is way harder to use. They need much more help and handholding.
* Gitlab has an exceedingly confusing UI where many options are very hard to find. The first thing I want to see when I get a MR is the diff, and that means scrolling and hunting for a very small button.
* I haven't managed to make Gitlab remember to show me the diffs side-by-side, though that seems to work for others
* The code review tools are crap, with every little comment being a separate thing, as Kai noted.
* gitlab is slow
* it's much harder to follow my gsoc students who work in a fork instead of a branch, for some reason I could only enable email notifications for one out of four students.
* you cannot have more than one reviewer for a MR
* using the label system for approving a MR is cumbersome

Good:

* sometimes, the merge button works, and then that's nice.
* the on-line editor is very handy for the docs.krita.org project.
* gitlab is actively maintained

My takeaway:

Gitlab might be maintained, and phabricator not, but when it comes to making life easier for newcomers, it's not working (1). We can live with it, but it isn't a huge improvement.

When it comes to email, phabricator worked better for me, but yes, sometimes I got too much mail. Now I don't get enough. Right now, my biggest email problem is bugs.kde.org, but that's because we get too many bug reports.

-- 
https://www.krita.org

(1) Which reminds me -- we ought to have a discussion on whether matrix actually achieved its goals of making life easier for newcomers.

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20190701/d379d3f9/attachment.sig>