(From a private channel discussion with @basil )
The GitLab plugin is widely used (58,727 installations) but has not had an active maintainer for a long time. Many of us at CloudBees have volunteered to keep it afloat over the years, including Owen, me, Bruno, Jean-Marc, and Mark. But I feel that it could use a sprint of active development. Maybe GSoC could be a good way to staff this with an intern?
Off the top of my head there are a number of things that need to be done to keep this plugin afloat in the long term:
- Migrate from the very old version of RESTEasy it is using to the GitLab API plugin (just like GitLab Authentication, GitLab Branch Source, and GitLab Logo)
- Revive the Docker-based functional test suite. It has been broken for some time and is currently disabled.
- Fix any of the dozens of outstanding bugs.
I feel this would be a good intern project for the following reasons:
- While boasting less of a brag factor than the exponential backoff and jitter GSoC project idea, impact to a large number of users might be brag factor enough.
- Would be ideal for someone who wants to get GitLab experience and get paid along the way.
- Feasible within three months: Nothing prohibitively hard here, just a matter of doing the work (cutting code and testing).
- Stretchable and shrinkable scope: If the intern is struggling, we can drop one of the two main changes. If the intern is doing better than expected, we can fix more bugs.
- Not fatal if the project fails: People still seem to keep using this plugin no matter how poorly maintained it is.
How do people feel about this project idea? If people like it, I think the current GitLab plugin maintainers would be the ideal mentors. I could help with mentoring the RESTEasy portion of the project, as I have specific context there.