[Mailman-Developers] Moving to git and gitlab

[Abhilash Raj]

On Tue, 12 May 2015 22:03:04 +0900
"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Aamir Khan writes:
> 
>  > > 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.
>  > 
>  > Reason being bzr is too slow, right? Or, are there more reasons to
>  > it?
> 
> Lack of HTTPS support.  Apparently many[1] Indian organizations block
> outgoing connections to port 22, so ssh connections aren't feasible.

There were some other reasons for which I insisted on the transition
from launchpad to gitlab too.

* Webhooks: Gitlab has webhooks for each pushes and we use it to build
  documentation automatically on readthedocs, which inturn notifies
  us(for now just me) about the build failures if any.
  (Earlier, I used to run a cron that updated the git repo on gitlab
  using git-remote-bzr every few hours)

* CI: Gitlab CI, though needs a separate host to run builds on, has a
  very good integration with gitlab with current build status and
  notification when tests fails. Also, it is automatic and testing
  merge requests would probably help Barry a lot in filtering out
  MRs that *Needs Fixing*.

* HTTPS: First of all, I agree this is an issue[1] that should be taken
  up with the universities. But all the code sharing platforms have
  done *something* by now to bypass this. Github had a proxy listening
  at 443 for ssh traffic even before it introduced support for
  push/pull over HTTPS. I did put up this on launchpad bug tracker,
  like 1 or 2 years back, but haven't heard any response back yet.


  Footnotes:

  [1]: They basically block ALL ports except the ones which have
  special use cases. All the university servers are inside the firewall
  and hence are easily accessible through SSH or FTP for anything. And
  they are too stubborn to consider the special use cases for
  developers like IRC(6667), SSH(22), FTP(21) or others. OTOH,
  there might be some security concerns related to internal LAN since we
  don't have a direct internet access, but only through a proxy server,
  so I can't really tell the real reason.
> 
> 
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  FVO "many" == at least the University one of our frequent
> contributors attends. :-)

Well now it is "used to attend" ;-) (yayy!!)


-- 
thanks,
Abhilash Raj