[Mesa-dev] Switching to Gitlab Issues instead of Bugzilla?

[Kenneth Graunke]

Hi all,

As a lot of you have probably noticed, Bugzilla seems to be getting a
lot of spam these days - several of us have been disabling a bunch of
accounts per day, sweeping new reports under the rug, hiding comments,
etc.  This bug spam causes emails to be sent (more spam!) and then us
to have to look at ancient bugs that suddenly have updates.

I think it's probably time to consider switching away from Bugzilla.
We are one of the few projects remaining - Mesa, DRM, and a few DDX
drivers are still there, but almost all other projects are gone:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/enter_bug.cgi

Originally, I was in favor of retaining Bugzilla just to not change too
many processes all at once.  But we've been using Gitlab a while now,
and several of us have been using Gitlab issues in our personal repos;
it's actually pretty nice.

Some niceities:

- Bug reporters don't necessarily need to sign up for an account
  anymore.  They can sign in with their Gitlab.com, Github, Google,
  or Twitter accounts.  Or make one as before.  This may be nicer for
  reporters that don't want to open yet another account just to report
  an issue to us.

- Anti-spam support is actually maintained.  Bugzilla makes it near
  impossible to actually delete garbage, Gitlab makes it easier.  It
  has a better account creation hurdle than Bugzilla's ancient captcha,
  and Akismet plug-ins for handling spam.

- The search interface is more modern and easier to use IMO.

- Permissions & accounts are easier - it's the same unified system.

- Easy linking between issues and MRs - mention one in the other, and
  both get updated with cross-links so you don't miss any discussion.

- Milestone tracking

  - This could be handy for release trackers - both features people
    want to land, and bugs blocking the release.

  - We could also use it for big efforts like direct state access,
    getting feature parity with fglrx, or whatnot.

- Khronos switched a while ago as well, so a number of us are already
  familiar with using it there.

Some cons:

- Moving bug reports between the kernel and Mesa would be harder.
  We would have to open a bug in the other system.  (Then again,
  moving bugs between Mesa and X or Wayland would be easier...)

What do people think?  If folks are in favor, Daniel can migrate
everything for us, like he did with the other projects.  If not,
I'd like to hear what people's concerns are.

--Ken
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