[Bf-committers] Deprecation of Phabricator

[Sebastian Parborg]

On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 07:02:44PM -0400, Aaron Carlisle via Bf-committers wrote:
> HI,
> 
> James and I spoke briefly about the possibility of moving to Gitlab before
> the deprecation was announced.
> I would highly recommend that this is the channel we go down. Gitlab is a
> big project that is well established,
> open-source, and opens many tools that are not possible with Phabricator.
> For example, GitLab would allow online editing of the user manual and other
> repositories.
> I have identified the lack of online editing as a major deficit in the
> current development workflow for the user manual.
> 

A year ago I did some research into the matter as well.
For me the two main candidates are GitLab and Gitea.

Feature wise, GitLab and Gitea seems to be mostly on par.
One of the biggest differences feature wise is that Gitea doesn't come
with built in CI, but for us that shouldn't be an issue as we already
have a build/testing system in place.

The next big thing is that Gitea doesn't have a premium version.
So everything is open source and all features are available and not
locked behind a pay gate.

Here is a long list that breaks down what is available in the different
GitLab versions:
https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-comparison/

Note that only the "free" version is open source.

One fear I have is that with GitLab even if we wrote our own
implementation of one of the premium features, it would not be accepted
upstream as it will conflict with their business model.

So for me I think we should at the very least try out both during a
testing period so we can get some hand on experience before we make a
decision.

> I would like to be included in the discussion here to make sure we meet the
> needs of the documentation project,
> we should also include James in this discussion as he might have other
> recommendations or needs.
> 

Of course! Everyone that wants to participate should!
We were not planning to exclude neither you or James from this as you
are some of the people that we must have on board at the very least in my
opinion.

We still need to figure out a time schedule and allocate time for this
as nothing has been decided yet.

Regards,
Sebastian Parborg