The plan is to migrate all (these) Wikimedia CH repositories from Wikimedia Gerrit to Wikimedia GitLab:
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/wikimedia-ch/wmch-infrastructure
- https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/admin/repos/wikimedia-ch/wmch-cronos-form
For these reasons:
- Wikimedia Gerrit is an useful enterprise tool, but it's built on WMF as its central trust boundary. Wikimedia CH cannot open whatever small official repository on their own. Instead, WMCH needs to fill a bureaucratic form and wait for the intervention of a Gerrit administrator.
- Gerrit has not namespaces. GitLab has namespaces. In GitLab, WMCH can be independent in opening repositories in their namespace without any intervention of any non-WMCH operator.
- Gerrit's user interface is not-intuitive for the majority of (our?) users
- example: there were mobile improvements but try to search a repository in the search bar. The results are still a big table, not so accessible on mobile. Then, if you click on a result:
- example: the repository default homepage does not show any README or LICENSE file as default, and it's not so obvious that you have to click on "Browse". The user focus is just over all these distracting read-only options and can be confusing.
- example: the repository description cannot be selected and copied (why?)
- the "git review" process is not in our collective imagination. Instead the concept of "pull request" is more widely recognized
- The "Gerrit repository request form" is not so accessible for blind people, it's not so user-friendly, and it does not work with VisualEditor (1). Gerrit discourages new requests because they will waste the time of the author and the time of Gerrit's volunteers. After 2011 this can be considered an obsolete bureaucracy-wall.
- Gerrit is no longer the only libre suggested choice (now we have Wikimedia GitLab)
Thank you Gerrit administrators for your huge work. I am sorry that Gerrit is made this way. I'm also sorry that Wikimedia GitLab didn't come up sooner, so I would have wasted less of Gerrit administrators' time.
haha GitLab go brrrrr
