[Alioth-staff-replacement] gitlab

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

So I know quite a bit about using gitlab, only a little about deploying
and admining it.  I'm very happy to see this process happening, so I'd
like to contribute as much as I can, which means mostly sharing
knowledge.  I'm a DD as well, working on Android Tools and Python
modules mostly.

I think overall, gitlab is quite a nice tool, with lots of advanced
features but easy enough for non-technical people.  I think it helps a
lot that it follows similar patterns to GitHub.

I agree that their open core model sucks, but I don't think its bad
enough that it should veto Debian using gitlab.  The real amazing
feature that gitlab would bring to Debian is gitlab-ci.  It is
decentralized, so any dev can set up a gitlab-ci runner, register it
with gitlab, then allocate it to various projects.  This would be
immensely helpful for the development process, especially for newcomers
who do not already have pbuilder on their own machine.

As for the other leading choice which I forget the name of, I love that
its Python over Ruby.  And I love that is built entirely as free
software, and by a GNU/Linux distro.  But I have to say that gitlab-ci
and the overall familiarity of gitlab to devs in general is worth so
much that gitlab is probably going to be the most effective tool for Debian.

.hc