Don't want to weigh in on Gerrit as I don't know it well enough, but as
for Phabricator, Ben may have forgotten but we did evaluate it a while
back. It was neat but had a very serious problem: you needed an account
to even view anything (no public access), and once you got into it
everything was completely open. There was no real way not to give
everyone the keys to the kingdom. This was getting tracked in
https://secure.phabricator.com/T603 which is now marked as resolved. So
it may be a viable candidate again. But it's definitely a very
opinionated way of doing things.
To be honest, I actually think that this discussion needs to start with
a more fundamental question than the technical specifics of the various
tools, because at this point we probably have several potential tools
that can meet our needs. So the question I think is fundamental is: what
is our goal in a tool?
- If the goal is to make it comfortable to those that are used to and
like using GitHub, we should be looking at Gogs (I'm comfortable with Go
so could even code in some missing features, potentially).
- If the goal is to put code review front-and-center, mandatory even, we
should look at Gerrit.
- If the goal is to have a Phabricator-style hub (not sure what else to
call it), we should look at Phabricator.
I don't know the best way to choose from that list -- and this is part
of the reason that trials stalled after Phabricator and GitLab. As far
as I'm concerned, we can put it to a poll or vote, although I think
capturing the general sentiment of the KDE community rather than a
smaller subset of interested people is likely to be difficult. I ran the
trials of Phabricator and GitLab in the past and I'm happy to do trials
of Gogs and Phabricator now (Gerrit obviously doesn't need this as it's
currently being trialled).
Regardless, any move to a different tool will require compromises, and
will make some users happy and others unhappy. But it's not reasonable
to expect the sysadmins to support multiple parallel systems, and I
really do think that until we figure out what we actually want, and by
we I mean the general developer community, it's somewhat wasted time --
especially because until we know what our ideal end goal is, we won't
know if the compromises we need to make in pursuit of that end goal are
worth making, which makes it easy to keep discarding solutions that
don't quite measure up.
Thanks,
Jeff
