Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#1

Post by input_sh » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab
mediawiki.org

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#2

Post by q3k » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:16 PM UTC

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#3

Post by A_No_Name_Mouse » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:18 PM UTC

A compony moves their code repository to a different provider. Honest question: why is this news worthy? Am I missing something?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#4

Post by epistasis » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

q3k wrote: post #2

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

What advantages do you see in Gerrit? Do they require a lot of experience in order to be realized?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#5

Post by PieUser » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:19 PM UTC

q3k wrote: post #2

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

This is sad. In my experience, GitHub is a much better code review system than GitLab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#6

Post by q3k » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:22 PM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #4

q3k wrote: post #2

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

What advantages do you see in Gerrit? Do they require a lot of experience in order to be realized?

Clear mapping of change request == commit, allowing for easy building of multiple in flight change requests, rearranging them by using git rebase, updating with push to refs/for/master. Easy diffing between states of the CR (patch sets), so you can see what changes since the last round of comments, even if it spanned multiple updates. This is the feature I miss the most from other code review systems - be able to easily work on another commit that bases on one that I just sent out for review (even starting review on the new while the parent still hasn't finished being reviewed!), and rebasing my current change as the parent change gets reviewed/updated.

Possibility to send out a PR for review using just a push (change message in commit, push to refs/for/master%r=foo).

Snappy and compact code review experience (no space wasted for whitespace, avatars, pretty buttons). Full coverage with keyboard shortcuts.

Powerful review rule system based in Prolog, allowing for things like code owners, experimental subdirectories without the need for review, etc.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#7

Post by gravypod » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

One thing stopping me from moving my company's code to gitlabs cloud offering is the storage sizes for repos being extremely small. I heard from a rep that this will change in November. I'm wondering if this purchase-more-storage change come relates to this?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#8

Post by melling » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

A_No_Name_Mouse wrote: post #3

A compony moves their code repository to a different provider. Honest question: why is this news worthy? Am I missing something?

It helps to follow trends. For a while I thought Gitlab was part of GitHub.

When I see enough news about something on HN, I look into it.

I even did a little Rust tutorial recently.

Buzz makes a difference

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#9

Post by dietrichepp » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:24 PM UTC

q3k wrote: post #2

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

Probably because you got used to Critique at Google ;)

I agree though. I think the most important thing in a code review system is inline comments in the diff itself, and that’s something you get from Gerrit, Phabricator (Differential), etc. It encourages people to discuss the particulars of of a diff. Merge approval can be made contingent on resolving minor issues within a diff. Diffs are also approved on a per-diff basis, and it’s less typical to merge a stack of diffs.

I think the pull request / merge request makes sense with the “trusted lieutenants” development model that the Linux kernel uses, but for other projects you would be more likely to want a work flow where someone submits a single commit/diff and then someone approves it (after comments).

When I review PRs on services like GitHub I very often think, “This should be several different reviews” and the discussion thread in a PR is often not a high-quality discussion. I don’t use GitLab as much but my experience is that it has the same problems. What I would love is to review a stack of commits and approve / make comments on the commits individually.

(For those reading: Mondrian -> Rietveld -> Gettit, and also Mondrian -> Critique. Mondrian and Critique are internal tools at Google. Phabricator originated at Facebook which has a lot of ex-Google engineers on staff.)

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#10

Post by huskyr » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

q3k wrote: post #2

This is sad. In my experience, Gerrit is a much better code review system than Gitlab merge requests. But it is different from what people are used to.

I guess you can get the hang of Gerrit, but i tried it out a couple of times (i occasionally do work on projects in the Wikimedia git repo) and is pretty evident that the interface is written by developers with little knowledge of user experience. Moving stuff to Gitlab will probably increase the number of volunteer contributions, at least i'm more interested in contributing more now.