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

[Alec Warner]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 2:31 PM Matt Turner <mattst88@g.o> wrote:

> On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 1:14 AM Alec Warner <antarus@g.o> 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.
>
> It's very surprising to me that CE wouldn't work for our purposes.
> Debian, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and FreeDesktop have all switched to GitLab
> and are using CE. It's hard to believe that Gentoo's usage or
> requirements would be so different as to make GitLab a non-viable
> option.
>
> What features of EE do you think we need?
>

I know debian spent considerable effort customizing their gitlab. I've not
heavily investigated the other deployments. We set up a demo on
gitlab.gentoo.org already as a test and there are some issues. Many of them
are related to operations and not to the app itself.

[mirroring]
 - We can't do pull-based git mirroring (
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/repository_mirroring.html#pulling-from-a-remote-repository-starter
)
[Auth] Note that we have keycloak now, so we can perhaps workaround these
LDAP issues.
 - GItlab doesn't support multiple redundant LDAP servers
 - Gitlab doesn't support LDAP group syncing
 - Gitlab doesn't support syncing admin users from LDAP
[mgmnt]
 - The gitlab terraform provider is pretty bad; and I struggled to get it
to control our admin users; did not leave me excited about managing other
resources (projects, users, hooks, etc.)

The pull-based mirroring is a bit sad, as it would be nice to auto-update
some forks, but it's not a killer feature. I think our new SSO solution
could potentially be a fix for the auth subsystems, but more work there
will be needed.

Another major issue is operating the software. I haven't found anyone to
*run* gitlab; I'm not eager to do it. Today Gentoo is mostly distributed,
bugs are in bugzilla, wiki is on mediawiki, code is on gitolite with N
mirrors, email and lists are separate, etc. In a world where bugs, wiki,
code, ci, containers, PRs, are all on gitlab and it breaks and we can't fix
it; it will be bad news for all of those things. If the bugzilla machine
breaks we lose bugzilla; if gitlab breaks we lose the ability to edit the
wiki, file bugs, commit, run CI, etc.

-A