On March 27, 2020, Fedora announced its decision to use GitLab as its git-forge (see announcement here). This announcement was met with mixed reactions because it meant a move away from Pagure, Fedora’s current home-grown git-forge tool.
Since the announcement, the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team, which is part of the Fedora community, has been working with members of the GitLab team to evaluate next steps (see migration tracker issue).
During this Ask Me Anything (AMA), we welcome questions about the upcoming migration!
Where and When?
The AMA will be done via realtime chat on IRC.
If you do not already have an IRC chat provider, you can participate in the AMA via web browser by clicking on the link below.
One thing I am curious about is how this will impact workflows for existing teams on our Pagure git forge.
My perspective is as a maintainer/participant of several non-software Fedora teams with several important discussion in issues and docs published from our git repos. In 2015, we moved from a Trac-based system to Pagure. It cost a lot of time, energy, and effort from a mostly volunteer community in order to preserve our discussions. (Although we did have great help from folks at Red Hat who wrote self-service software to migrate Trac issues and repositories into Pagure.)
I would want to move to GitLab and use more advanced features for project management, but I need that historical record of issues where important decisions dating back to at least 2008 are recorded. And we do actually go looking for those super old tickets because they have valuable context!
So, my question about the impact on workflows for existing teams in Pagure is centered on how much support and mentorship will be available to help teams migrate their projects from Pagure to GitLab.
Last month, GitLab participated in a live, public Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with the Fedora Community via IRC. We collected questions from the community in advance about the upcoming Fedora migration to GitLab.
While there were many questions asked in advance of the AMA, the main topics discussed during the session were:
Permission and access in gitlab
Message bus
Namespace and issue tracking
Branches
Naming issues with +
For those interested in reading through the session transcript, we’ve pastes it here in two posts since it was quite long: Part 1 and Part 2.
At GitLab, we’re very much looking forward to helping with the Fedora migration and continuing to deliver a product that enables open source communities to scale. We encourage those with open source projects to check out and apply to our GitLab for Open Source program.
A huge thanks to everyone who participated in the AMA – we look forward to more collaboration with y’all soon!
