Solution validation: investigate code nav using LSIF
Problem to solve
For self-hosted GitLab, the only way to enable Code Nav is using Sourcegraph which requires installing their EE version (we can't package this with our FOSS version), and managing a completely separate application. This isn't easy, and is expensive to run.
Code navigation (and search) should work by default on every GitLab instance, so that administrators don't have to install, configure, and manage an additional tool for this critical capability.
Further details
In the next few releases we want to start adding support for native code nav, but we should do some technical investigation to work out what challenges exist for an first minimal implementation.
Proposal
The questions we need to answer before going further:
- how do we convert and store the LSIF file into a queryable format that can scale to GitLab.com size
- what should the API to make this information queryable efficiently? Could we make the API compatible with Sourcegraph so that there is a consistent experience for customers already using Sourcegraph?
The outcome of this issue should be a list of issues to be created and an understanding of their dependencies so that we can begin estimating and scheduling this work beginning in %12.8