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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I was curious about the automated CLA process. It is interesting to me to read the answer about not supporting GitLab:

https://github.com/cla-assistant/cla-assistant/issues/534

Very terse answer that says:

  As you noticed, this would mean a completely different line of code

I believe the author is not a native speaker, and means to say that this would require different code for each platform. Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar.

I felt like this was a very strange response to a legitimate question and it makes me feel like there must be something more there.

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A "Code Line" is SAP speak for "branch" or "port" in other software projects. (CLA Assistent is an SAP project.)

See e.g. usage here https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-sap/one-cod...

Sure, that must be true, but the GitLab and GitHub APIs are not that dissimilar.

Which they address in the later part of their answer which you leave out:

Surely most parts of the project could be reused, but this development would still mean a huge investment, which we can't afford. Nevertheless all kinds of contribution are still welcome and we would try to provide our support as good as we can.

As you point out, I am assuming malicious intent and you have every right to assume the same of me! I should have put that other part in.

It just didn't jibe with me and still feels like it is an easy and obvious upgrade.

But, you are right, they did justify it, it seems like an overstatement to say it would be a huge investment. I should review the code myself to verify, but a statement like that the lazy programmer in me shy away from even doing that.

I'd guess "huge investment" in this case is relative. The maintainer is not spending a ton of time building features for the CLA tool since it's mostly "done" and so investing more time to build support for Gitlab would require many more hours of development than they're probably dedicating right now.

And i can imagine that maybe they didn't abstract communication with Github enough and would need to refactor the system to handle that as well.

Generally, i think it's not totally reasonable to expect them to do more free work to support use cases that the maintainer does not need. Since it's open source, we're all welcome to contribute back.

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