Re: Migrating to the gitlab issue tracker

[John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>]

On 10/29/20 12:49 PM, Alistair Francis wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 9:41 AM Cornelia Huck <cohuck@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:01:27 -0400
>> John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>>> If you're in the CC list, it's because you are listed in MAINTAINERS.
>>
>> <cleared the cc: list except for qemu-devel :)>
>>
>>>
>>> Paolo's QEMU keynote this morning mentioned the possible use of the
>>> Gitlab issue tracker instead of using Launchpad.
>>>
>>> I'm quite fond of the gitlab issue tracker, I think it works quite well
>>> and it has pretty good and uncomplicated API access to it in order to
>>> customize your workflow if you'd really like to.
>>>
>>> In experimenting with my mirror on gitlab though, I was unable to find a
>>> way to configure it to send issue tracker notifications to the email
>>> list. A move to gitlab would likely mean, then:
>>>
>>> 1. The cessation of (automatic) issue tracker mails to the list
>>> 2. The loss of the ability to update the issue tracker by replying to
>>> said emails
>>> 3. Anyone listed in MAINTAINERS would be expected to have a gitlab
>>> account in order to interact with the issue tracker.
>>
>> The gitlab issue tracker is almost certainly is an improvement over
>> launchpad (and I do have a gitlab account); but not being able to
>> interact via email is at least annoying. I expect that not only
>> maintainers will want to interact with bug reports?
>>
>>>
>>> However, once you have a gitlab account, you DO gain the ability to
>>> receive emails for issues; possibly only those tagged with labels that
>>> you cared about -- giving a nice filtering mechanism to receive only
>>> bugs you care about.
>>>
>>> Gitlab also does support individual accounts updating issues using a
>>> generated personalized email address, so if the email workflow is
>>> crucial to you, it is still available.
>>
>> You mean that I can update via email, provided it's an address
>> associated with my account?
>>
>>>
>>> I'm for it, or at least for beginning a pilot program where we
>>> experiment with the idea for interested parties. I wanted to send up a
>>> trial balloon to see how we were feeling about this.
> 
> I'm not sure if you want Acks, but it sounds good to me.
> 
> Alistair
> 

Mostly I was looking for any hard objections over the idea of issues not 
necessarily being sent to the list anymore, if there were any.

I want to hear from Thomas Huth too, but maybe we can work out a pilot 
migration and give it a test-run and find more concrete objections that way.

--js