[tor-project] Gitlab Migration Status 17/1 2020

[Alexander Færøy]

Hello list!

Gaba and I recently talked about how it would be good to have some
status about where we are with the Gitlab migration project.

In December a lot of you reported a lot more issues than I had spotted,
which was both extremely good, but also not so good in that every issue
was another thing for me to fix :-) Thanks to everybody for reporting
these!

Fortunately, with anarcat's suggestion of using some parts of tracboat I
got over some of the "Trac markup" to Markdown issues quickly, but some
of them remained.

Recently, cohosh reported an issue with the Gitlab instance we were
running where PR's generated 503 messages. Hiro spend a lot of time
trying to debug this, and with this new issue in mind, we have decided
to move to Gitlab's own "omnibus" package method for maintaining the
Gitlab instance instead of Debian's "salsa" Ansible playbooks. We feel
that a larger number of us are more confident with operating the omnibus
Gitlab instance and those of us who have been running Gitlab instances
this way before (hiro, gaba, and myself) haven't run into issues like
the ones we have had with Salsa so far.

Here's a summary for my Gitlab hackday today:

- Synced my local cache of Trac tickets (used for speeding up runs).
- Worked on "missing information" issues reported in December: points ->
  estimation, actual points -> spending (both based on a conversion
  function Gaba and I talked about in December), owner, milestone,
  reviewer, and "reported by". I still use my own username for these
  to avoid spamming folks with emails.
- CC in issues for *known users* so far. That is the people who have
  users on GL when we move.
- Figure out how to handle parents.
- Extended the "Tracboat" conversion code with handling some of our {{{
  }}} (code blocks) and headlines better. Checking the cosmetic changes
  for errors takes longer time than all the metadata issues since I need
  to go over tickets and see if things "looks right" and not just look
  out for missing or wrong information.

Right now it's running against my local GL install in a Qubes VM for
speed, and once I've gone over the results I'll make it post to a new
repo on dip.torproject.org (this makes the difference of a sync from 8h
for a complete sync to 20min). I will be using "strike through" on the
text on our December pad to indicate that I think something is fixed,
then we can walk over it together at a later point.

Have a nice weekend all!

All the best,
Alex.

-- 
Alexander Færøy