RedMine REST API Integration : Log comments to Redmine on git Push/Commit, Merge, Merge Request Open, MR Comment
Description
Customers who use RedMine instead of the built in issue tracker may not actually want to import issues and then stop using Redmine. Redmine actually has a full CRM/Project suite of plugins, plus many agile/kanban development tools, and is its own rich Ruby/Rails plugin world. However, Gitlab does not currently provide, nor does Redmine provide, an easy way to get activity on Gitlab noted as issue-comments with links on each particular issue on Redmine. Redmine artifacts (trackers in their nomenclature) often are the "single source of truth" for engineering companies constrained by regulatory compliance, and moving all of that inside of a gitlab issue tracker which is very simple and not very customizable compared to redmine, might not always be the best option for some users. Thankfully, Gitlab has very flexible hooks, and this might even be possible without writing a plugin, just using some simple webhooks.
Proposal
A redmine-plugin for Gitlab that would provide a way to map any set of Gitlab projects to any set of Redmine projects. In a common case, multiple gitlab projects would be mapped to a SINGLE redmine project. Comments would be posted by Redmine REST APIs with visible text as shown, and each having a link to the URL of the merge request or comment:
- {User} commented on merge request {title} : {comment}
- {User} opened merge request {title}
- {User} closed merge request {title}
- {User} accepted merge request {title}
Initial most useful thing would be to have merge request activity above posted as comments with links to redmine. Some people using redmine together with gitlab right now are manually copying and pasting their comments and actions in two places.
In redmine wiki syntax the above items would be posted in format "text here":https://mygitlab/group/project3/merge_requests/223
These would be attached to an issue, when the title of the merge request contains a link to a redmine issue, using hash-syntax ie #1234
Redmine's apis are already wrapped up as a ruby gem, writing this plugin should be easy, and if there is interest in it, I'll take a stab at writing it.