Create and distribute a GitLab 'styles' project

Problem to solve

The technical writing team (more specifically the tw-testing committee) has been building a set of Vale rules and distributing them by hand to different projects. The problems with this approach:

• Updates require manual work to copy over into each repository that wants them
• There's no versioning
• Any other project that wants to start using the tests must copy them over by hand, just like we're currently doing for charts and gitlab-runner

Further details

The rules consist of:

• the .vale.ini file in the root directory of the gitlab repo: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/master/.vale.ini
• the rules, which are contents of doc/.vale/gitlab - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/tree/master/doc/.vale/gitlab
• and config (…somewhere) that ensure Vale runs during appropriate CI jobs.

Proposal

In the November check-in for the tw-testing committee, we agreed we needed a better way to roll out rules to other projects, but we didn't currently have the expertise inside the TW team to execute it. @leipert is on paternity leave ❤ right now, and we weren't sure who else we could reach out to. Step one, though, was to create an issue.

cc to @eread, @marcel.amirault, and @cnorris as promised.

Who can address the issue

@leipert. An unknown number of others.

Other links/references