> I believe this whole discussion is basically this: the ones who are used to a gitlab workflow see the obvious benefits, and the ones who only use the email workflow don't see what's so great about it because they always find a manual/configuration-heavy way to achieve the same.
>
> I think the manual/configuration-heavy way is not very smooth and makes _you_ work instead of the tools, when this effort could be better spent improving Emacs.
IMO, that point is moot when we are talking about making contributions
to Emacs. Instead of an RFE to migrate to gitlab, an RFE for a
package that, for example, enhances Emacs bug reporting so that it
becomes a CI tool would be better, no?
Well, an Emacs custom-made CI tool will never be as complete, time-tested, maintainted (etc) than a tool that is used by hundred of thousands of users. Also if any of these gitlab/github/etc users want to contribute to Emacs, the time to start being "productive" is very low because they are used to this workflow (and most of them are not used to the mailing list workflow).
I think the effort required to understand & use the mailing list workflow is quite significant at the start, then after a while you get used to it... but in my case I'd switch to the gitlab workflow as soon as it is available. It's very likely that others here would switch too if it was available.
Best regards,
Philippe