One of the main selling points of Gitlab, for me at least, is the
online editing experience. There's a web IDE, which has syntax
highlighting and validation. More importantly, it allows someone to
submit changes without having to be familiar with PR workflows - you
just click the "commit" button and it will create an MR for you. (A
screenshot of what this commit step looks like in Gitlab:
https://imgur.com/a/IBKufW8 .)
I think the Web IDE is a great selling point for GitLab, but not to *oversell*, while
Gitlab has good support for previewing asciidoc when browsing repositories, you don't
get either syntax highlighting or "live preview" for asciidoc in the IDE. These
both seem like very feasible additions - not big additions. (Live preview is
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/85134, syntax highlighting during editing
would require writing a grammar for
https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/monarch.html)
And of course, GitlLb is unaware of Antora, so various things won't render correctly.
Some of these (embedded images) could probably be fixed with small additions to the Gitlab
asciidoc support. Other (inter-component links) seem harder.
That all being said, the GitLab Web IDE seems to be the most feasible path to having a
workflow where a newcomer could come in and make significant contributions to the Fedora
docs, without needing install tools, learn the git command line, do local builds, etc.
And that's important!
Regards,
Owen