Re: [gentoo-dev] Value of Continuous integration vs Code Review / Pull Requests

[Michał Górny]

On Wed, 2020-05-27 at 01:14 -0700, Alec Warner wrote:
> On Tue, May 26, 2020, 23:08 Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2020-05-26 at 20:24 -0700, Alec Warner wrote:
> > > The TL;DR is that a crack team of infra-folks[0] have been putting
> > together
> > > demos of CI services and things like gitlab / gitea / gerrit and so on.
> > >
> > > Some of these come in combined (e.g. gitlab offers repo hosting, code
> > > review / pull reqs, CI services, and deploy services.) Some of these are
> > > piecemeal (e.g. gerrit has code review, zuul has CI) and gitea offers
> > > repo-hosting but CI is separate (e.g. drone.)
> > >
> > > On the infra-side, I think we are pretty happy with repo-hosting
> > (gitolite)
> > > and repo-serving (gitweb). We are missing a CI piece and a pull-request
> > > piece. Most of the users using PRs use either a gitlab or github mirror.
> > >
> > > I think the value of CI is pretty obvious to me (and I see tons of use
> > > cases in Infra.) We could easily build CI into our current repository
> > > solution (e.g. gitolite.) However gitolite doesn't really support PRs in
> > a
> > > uniform way and so CI is mostly for submitted code; similar to the
> > existing
> > > ::gentoo repo CI offered by mgorny.
> > >
> > > If we build a code review solution (like gitea / gerrit) would people use
> > > it? Would you use it if you couldn't merge (because the code review
> > > solution can't gpg sign your commits or merges) so a tool like the
> > existing
> > > pram tool would be needed to merge?
> > >
> >
> > Does GitLab count?  Gerrit is just PITA.  I think we had some concerns
> > about Gitea, so I'd like to test it before deciding.  GitLab OTOH works
> > just fine for a lot of projects, and seems the next best thing after
> > GitHub
>
> Gitlab does count (we deployed and tested an onprem version.) I think there
> are some major issues with it though.
>  - Licensing. Gitlab-CE is available, gitlab-EE is not OSS nor OSI approved
> and many of the features we need are EE only and are not available in CE.

What are these features, and why do you believe we need them?

>  - Complex: Gitlab is a giant piece of software with maybe 8-12 components
> (unicorn, postgres, redis, memcache, sidekiq, puma, workhouse, gitaly,
> grafana, sshd,nginx, prometheus ..the list goes on)

Is gitea any better?

>  - I think gitlab ships with more features than we will use (CD, docker
> registry, issues / bugs, wiki, analytics, snippets, milestones, repo
> hosting, repo browsing, ... Again the list goes on.) I don't play to
> migrate away from bugs.gentoo.org nor wiki.gentoo.org, nor gitolite. I
> think if we did; then gitlab would be a more compelling option because it
> is a one-stop-shop solution for those use cases.

I don't think there is any requirement to use all of them.  Furthermore,
I think some of them may actually be helpful -- say, some Gentoo-
specific projects could use GitLab issue tracker over creating more
Bugzilla components.

> My understanding of gitea is that it works great for not-::gentoo, but
> ::gentoo and gitea don't work well and it would require work upstream to
> fix; other large repos seemed to work OK in gitea (based on our test
> deployment and conversations with gitea upstream.)

Works great for whom?  How many deployments are we talking about?  To be
honest, I don't think I've stumbled upon a single instance.
On the other hand, GitLab deployments are pretty common -- GNOME, Xfce,
Debian come instantly to my mind.  Then, there's Heptapod -- the GitLab
fork for Mercurial.

> Gerrit is widely used for large projects and I'm not worried for ::gentoo
> and we have deployed gerrit and it seems to work fine. Gerrit doesn't have
> CI (we would need to deploy something) and it uses gitweb for repository
> browsing (which we use today.)
>

Not to mention it's ugly and I found it cumbersome to use.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny