Hello,

in today's (lightly advertised) TWS call, Casey raised the question of
migrating our infrastructure to GitLab in a bid to attract more
contributions.

Unfortunately a straight-up migration seems unfeasible to me due to a
multitude for things that come into play:

1) Jenkins integration, or are we saying we would also switch CI? If so,
how does that work with our JJB infra/CSIT?

2) Patch review process. Let's not kid ourselves, GitLab and GitHub
patch review workflow is utterly different from Gerrit. I do not know
what the multi-branch support looks like these days, but last time I
checked GitHub's workflow was woefully inadequate to support multiple
concurrent streams (to test: do you have 'cherry-pick'-like option?)

3) The straight-up choice of GitLab -- I think this is something the
community should have a choice in. Then again, we probably have far less
technical participation than would be needed to make a well-informed
decision.


With that out of the way, I would like to make a counter-proposal:

How about LF(N) investing some dev/test resources into making it
possible for outside contributors to be mirrored back to Gerrit?

I mean we already have a read-only mirror on GitHub for each and every
ODL mirror, and we should be able to make the same thing work on GitLab
(or any other force). We are utterly lacking the ability to review pull
requests -- in any way, shape or form!

What I mean is that while the repository mirrors are read-only, at least
GitHub provides API access, which should allow our infra to monitor
those repositories for incoming PRs. When a PR is created, updated,
closed, these actions should automagically be turned into equivalent
patch (series) being created in Gerrit. I do believe this is feasible,
as Gerrit provides a superset of required operations. It would also mean
any such PR would be serviced by our CI.

This would allow people to contribute, potentially provide Git{Hub,Lab}
reviews of PRs, extending the reach, while still not requiring any sort
of infrastructure or workflow migration. It also is very much aligned
with LF's mission to promote use of free software -- Gerrit is
(Apache-licensed) FOSS after all!

Hence, Casey, is this something LF has any capability/interest of
picking up in a bid to actively make the world a better place?

Regards,
Robert