Re: [Mailman-Developers] Gitlab integration, GSOC'16
On 2016-02-28 1:34 PM, aahan bhatt wrote:
Please explain about the gitlab integration in layman terms. I would like to contribute to the project.
Gitlab integration can mean a lot of things, and we've left this particular project pretty open to see what people will suggest.
The tweet linked talks about moving a discussion from a mailing list to a bug tracker. So imagine that you have a bunch of people discussing an issue on a mailing list and after a few posts someone says "hm, that configuration didn't work the way I expected, this sounds like a bug, maybe we should file it" -- we want a way to dump the whole discussion into a bug so when someone goes to fix it they have all the information. You'd need to think a bit about privacy (were the mailing list posts public? what about the bug tracker?) and relevance of information (what if I only want some of the posts? what if I want to link the discussion but only provide a summary?) to go from the idea of "make it easier to file bugs using information from a mailing list discussion" to an actual workable interface for doing that, but that's the core of it.
If you want to understand the whole gitlab integration idea better beyond that one use case, try brainstorming a little bit about how the pieces could work together. How could a mailing list integrate better with a bug tracker? How could it integrate better with merge requests? What information would people want to pass from one system to the other and why?
For an example you might want to take a look at idea #27 on this page: http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2012/03/14/mailman-brainstorm-2/
On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 05:41:27AM -0800, Terri Oda wrote:
The tweet linked talks about moving a discussion from a mailing list to a bug tracker.
An easy way to do that (while leaving the mailing list discussion intact and not requiring that people have accounts on the bug tracking site in order to participate) is to link to the archive of the discussion -- specifically, to the message which begins the discussion thread. This has the useful feature that as new followups arrive (and the discussion continues) the link doesn't need to be updated. (Well, provided that everyone participating in the discussion uses a mail client that correctly manipulates headers in replies.)
I've done quite a bit of this with internal debug/development lists and have found that users catch onto it quickly. (Oh, and one small augmentation: sometimes it can be useful to have a process in place wherein the person who commits the feature or bugfix is responsible for saying so in the discussion thread. This creates a very useful history with a lot of context that can be highly valuable to future archaeology efforts.)
---rsk
participants (2)
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Rich Kulawiec -
Terri Oda