Wine Experimenting With GitLab For Improving Development

[shmerl]

Did Wine use Bugzilla?! That's terrible...

Bugzilla makes the bug description a "comment" and makes the bug details take one entire page, which is uncomfortable.

Yeah, plus they use rather old version of it I think.

[Aryma]

are they move from Bugzilla too ?

[STiAT]

Nice move. For personal use and my small projects I prefer codeberg/gitea (gitlab would be a bit of an overkill for that), but for a project the size of Wine this move to gitlab makes sense. I think both bring their pros and cons to the table, and they'll have reasoning behind using Gitlab and not Gitea. Gitlab is around for a long time and a stable base, community and development behind it, stability and continued development is a decision factor for sure.

I think the issue tracking really being integrated with the code and PR/code review is something I wished was better in Wine in the past. I welcome the move and think it will help them managing the project more efficiently (not that they had tremendous issues in the past, but it didn't seem very efficient to me).

[sinepgib]

Nice move. For personal use and my small projects I prefer codeberg/gitea (gitlab would be a bit of an overkill for that), but for a project the size of Wine this move to gitlab makes sense. I think both bring their pros and cons to the table, and they'll have reasoning behind using Gitlab and not Gitea. Gitlab is around for a long time and a stable base, community and development behind it, stability and continued development is a decision factor for sure.

I think the issue tracking really being integrated with the code and PR/code review is something I wished was better in Wine in the past. I welcome the move and think it will help them managing the project more efficiently (not that they had tremendous issues in the past, but it didn't seem very efficient to me).

Oh yes, I wasn't necessarily suggesting they need to use that. I was just wondering if Gitea was sufficient in terms of accessibility because it's what I use with my small community for our hobby projects. We want to be welcoming of everyone, so it would be a bonus. The choice of Gitea in our case was because we have a single multipurpose server with "only" 32GB of RAM. We previously had a GitLab instance running somewhere else but it was too slow in that computer, and we need to save RAM for other services in the big server, thus Gitea.
For bigger projects Gitea could certainly be insufficient. I don't remember exactly which features it lacked, but I think some really cool ones like wikis and pages were missing that may be more important for a project like WINE. In any case, I'm always for the ones doing the work being the ones who pick the tool.

[STiAT]

Yeah, plus they use rather old version of it I think.

And searching in bugzilla is a real pain. I actually use google to search their bugzilla since it leads to better results than searching in bugzilla. I do the same in Fedora. That is something I really do not like, it makes finding if something was reported already a real time consuming task.

[guglovich]

Entering the 21st century.

[dragon321]

I hope they will switch to GitLab for code and issues in near future. I'm not a big fan of that old mailing list + bugzilla style development. That can also bring more contributors.

[arQon]

Did Wine use Bugzilla?! That's terrible...

Bugzilla makes the bug description a "comment" and makes the bug details take one entire page, which is uncomfortable.

I've used a LOT of bug trackers worse than bugzilla, and very few that are genuinely better. As long as you have *something* in that role, all that matters is how well the team uses it. The ability to have a doomscrolling page with emojis on it that you can shit links onto twitter from isn't just absolutely f**king worthless, it's actively negative.

All the gimmicks in the world don't magically stop some projects ignoring bugs for years until they're auto-closed, even when there are patches provided.
You also lose context for all the things like comments that say "blah blah, see tracker_url/bug#comment for details" every time, and that can matter a lot for a long-lived project like WINE. Having to text-search the DB in the hope that the old reference survived somewhere is Not Fun enough to make it worth avoiding unless you're getting something in return, and you rarely are.

Replacing a mailing list (or parts of it, at least) with a better tool, that has value.
Replacing Bugzilla with Jira etc so you can have a wiki and admire your commit e-peen from a chart on your phone? That's just jerking off even *before* the third party hosting your entire damn project goes offline for two weeks. It's the kind of crap that gets sold to gullible technically-inept managers who don't know what "velocity" means, but it sounds cool and they're too embarrassed to admit they aren't on top of this month's buzzwords.

Yes, I've been through more bugtracker transitions than I care to remember... :P
None of them EVER made ANY difference at all in reality though, other than a migration from a POS in-house system that AFAICT was written in Excel and performed like it was still running on a 286. That one was genuinely needed.

[Vistaus]

I hate the current way, but I also hate GitLab's interface. So not sure this is an improvement.

[sinepgib]

I've used a LOT of bug trackers worse than bugzilla, and very few that are genuinely better. As long as you have *something* in that role, all that matters is how well the team uses it. The ability to have a doomscrolling page with emojis on it that you can shit links onto twitter from isn't just absolutely f**king worthless, it's actively negative.

I disagree on the only relevant part being how the team uses it. Like it or not, the bug tracker is an interface with end users who are often not as skilled as the team. It needs to be approachable.

All the gimmicks in the world don't magically stop some projects ignoring bugs for years until they're auto-closed, even when there are patches provided.
You also lose context for all the things like comments that say "blah blah, see tracker_url/bug#comment for details" every time, and that can matter a lot for a long-lived project like WINE. Having to text-search the DB in the hope that the old reference survived somewhere is Not Fun enough to make it worth avoiding unless you're getting something in return, and you rarely are.

Can you explain further here? I don't really understand why you would need to do that. For the record, I think it's me being ignorant of the issue, not something wrong with your claim.

Replacing a mailing list (or parts of it, at least) with a better tool, that has value.

Agree. This is far more of an issue.

Replacing Bugzilla with Jira etc so you can have a wiki and admire your commit e-peen from a chart on your phone? That's just jerking off even *before* the third party hosting your entire damn project goes offline for two weeks. It's the kind of crap that gets sold to gullible technically-inept managers who don't know what "velocity" means, but it sounds cool and they're too embarrassed to admit they aren't on top of this month's buzzwords.

Well, Atlassian tools are known for being a POS. Some years ago they wouldn't even run well enough on Firefox. Let alone having a few tabs thrash a computer with 8GiB of RAM. But it's not the only alternative to Bugzilla. I do agree that Bugzilla, in all of their flaws, is excellent in terms of performance (at least its frontend, no idea about the backend).