[Mailman-Developers] Moving to git and gitlab

[Barry Warsaw]

With the release of Mailman 3.0, it's time to take a look at our project
management, with an eye toward making it easier for core developers, easier
for non-core contributors, and providing improved quality, all while staying
true to the GNU project's principles.

There's a lot to like about Bazaar, and it's served us well over the years,
but it's also pretty clear that this round of version control systems has been
won by git.  We have converted the Core's vcs to git, and will soon convert
Postorius and mailman.client.  HyperKitty is already managed under git.

There's a lot to like about Launchpad.  It's free software, and it has some
nice features, including one of my favorites: bug tasks, which allow us to
report a bug affecting more than one project or series, and track each task as
it's resolved.  Launchpad has even announced git support:

http://blog.launchpad.net/general/git-code-hosting-beta

There are also reasons why we might want to move off of Launchpad.  Most
compelling is that Launchpad is difficult or impossible to use for code
hosting by our Indian colleagues.

We have therefore decided to move to Gitlab.

The Core is now hosted here: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman

Postorius and mailman.client will follow after Florian has had some time to
work through the existing Launchpad merge proposals.  HyperKitty may move at
some point soon.

We currently have no plans to move any hosting of Mailman 2.1.  For now, its
code will continue to live in Bazaar on Launchpad, its bugs will continue to
be managed on Launchpad, as will merge proposals.

Q: What about the existing lp:mailman Bazaar branch?
A: Let's leave it there for now, effectively keeping it around read-only.

Q: What about existing LP bugs for Mailman 3?
A: Abhilash is working on transferring them to Gitlab.  It won't be a perfect
   conversions since we can't match users on the two systems, but if/when we
   do transfer them, we'll keep a link to the LP bug report in the Gitlab
   issue.  We will only be moving the bugs tagged 'mailman3' on LP.

   If you own a Mailman 3 bug on Launchpad, feel free to close it there and
   open a new one on Gitlab.

   In the meantime, or if the transfer doesn't work well enough, we'll just
   close bugs on LP as we fix them.  Please report all new bugs on Gitlab.

Q: What about existing LP merge proposals?
A: These are much tougher to transfer.  If you have an open merge proposal on
   LP, feel free to update it to the latest git head and submit a new merge
   request on Gitlab.  If you do, please close your mp on LP.

   In the meantime, I'll work my way through the existing LP merge proposals,
   applying diffs by hand if necessary.

Q: What about CI?
A: This is definitely one of the exciting features of Gitlab we're eager to
   start using.  Our plans are to requisition a VM from python.org and set up
   CI on it.  I'd like for us to never commit directly to the official project
   branches.

Q: Why Gitlab and not Github or Bitbucket?
A: Gitlab has an edition that is free software.  If for some reason we have to
   leave gitlab.com, we could potentially stand up our own Gitlab and have
   an easier time transferring our projects to it.  Plus we have to be a
   *little* different don't we? :)

Cheers,
-Barry
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