Gitlab Presentation Task

[valentinaschueller]

Since EC-Earth 4 is moving to Gitlab from Redmine, we want to prepare a new presentation task that can, at some point, replace the Redmine task.

This includes:

• figure out the Gitlab Python API
• figure out how Gitlab Markdown flavour differs from CommonMark/Redmine Markdown
  • in particular: table of contents/HTML anchors
  • image size specification (cf. Show plots next to each other in Redmine presentation task #44)
• figure out a nicer way to handle API keys (Secret handling of Redmine API key #42)
• decide where the monitoring output should live
• add tests for Gitlab task
• update documentation

This issue is here to already discuss these aspects and document progress on the individual tasks.

[zklaus]

For step 1, python-gitlab (which we are exploring also in other projects) may be helpful.

[uwefladrich]

Hej @zklaus ,
Thanks for the input! Yes, python-gitlab appears reasonable, @valentinaschueller and I have discussed it a couple of days ago and we think that the technical implementation will be kind of obvious, at least as long as we just want to provide the same feature set as for Redmine. What is not so clear at the moment is how exactly to use the EC-Earth Gitlab instance for monitoring, i.e. where to put monitoring output, if we want make use of Gitlab issues in the same way as for Redmine, etc. These are questions that need to be discussed in sync with ECE developers.
In summary, we think that we can implement this as soon as we know what the target exactly is. So we put actual work on hold a bit and try to push the discussion in the ECE working groups.

[zklaus]

Sounds fine. Since the target likely will be set in a single line of configuration somewhere, you might as well get on with it and just use a dedicated test project under your own account. Switching (to the main EC-Earth repo with a dedicated label or perhaps to a dedicated monitoring project with no associated repo) should be trivial, right?

[valentinaschueller]

A first version of the Gitlab task works (with a private test repository I created) and I have created a draft PR #95 where we can discuss implementation-related questions.

[valentinaschueller]

Note: I have stuck with the same concept as in Redmine, i.e., I assume that we just create issues for each experiment and this is what gets updated.

[valentinaschueller]

Switching (to the main EC-Earth repo with a dedicated label or perhaps to a dedicated monitoring project with no associated repo) should be trivial, right?

Yes, will be easy! We just have to update the server_url and project_id