Drupal.org issues to GitLab issues cheatsheet

For contributors familiar with Drupal.org who are navigating the new GitLab workflow.

• GitLab docs
• Using GitLab to contribute to Drupal
• GitLab custom commands

Terminology & concepts

Workflow changes

URL changes

Gotchas

• "My issues" view is no longer reliable — https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/user used to show all subscribed issues across all projects on Drupal.org. Now this view is missing any project that has already migrated to GitLab. Additionally, GitLab has no functional equivalent for this view out of the box.
  • @jurgenhaas is working on a browser plugin "drulab" to help bridge the gap in the meantime.
• The drupal.org/i/XXXX URL shortener is no longer reliable. At migration time, Drupal.org issue IDs are brought over 1:1 so old links do not break. However, thereafter they start auto-incrementing within each project, so there will be multiple work item '123456'. Drupal.org, meanwhile, continues to auto-increment its "global" Node ID so drupal.org/i/XXXX will typically take you to some random contrib project now if the number is in the 350Ks+.
• Short links no longer auto-expand. On Drupal.org, [ #3409678 ] will auto-expand to #3409678: Opt-in GitLab issues (with a background colour based on status), but on GitLab they stay as #xxx or <project>#xxx links. To get metadata you need to "hover" over them.
• Drupal collaboration logic hinges on 'Issue' Work Item type. While GitLab offers several Work Item Types out of the box ("Incident," "Issue," and "Task") only "Issue" is wired up with various Drupal contributor niceties such as do:xxx commands.
• GitLab's Personal access tokens (PATs) grant access to everything — Unlike GitHub, there is no way to limit a PAT to only opening write access for one repository (for example), write_repository grants access to all repositories a user has access to.
  • Fine-grained personal access tokens are a beta feature. See feature request on Drupal.org to join the beta.

New capabilities

Here are some cool new things that GitLab offers that can help make collaboration easier.

• GitLab Flavored Markdown (GLFM) — GitLab uses Markdown instead of hand-writing HTML for content authoring.
• GitLab Query Language (GLQL) — Anywhere you can use GLFM, you can use GLQL to create a table of issues, and break out the labels and other attributes into columns. Here's an example: https://git.drupalcode.org/-/snippets/274
• Issue Boards — Can be used for triaging issues between different workflow states.
• Milestones — Milestones can be used to track release blockers and progress toward releases, including burndown and burnup charts.
• Description Templates — Description templates standardize and automate how issues and merge requests are created in GitLab, including the ability to have different "types" of issue templates (e.g. bug report vs. feature request vs. plan), both globally and per-project.
• Multiple assignees for issues — Useful for projects with shared ownership.
• Trending projects — Useful surfacing projects with active contribution.

Upstream issues

Upstream GitLab issues that would reduce "Drupalisms" in workflows — list to be filled in.

• gitlab#15384 — Allow some labels to be settable by anyone
• gitlab#293749 — Drupal Migration to GitLab (historic issue)