[metrics-team] A new home for the Metrics Timeline?

[David Fifield]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2020 at 10:15:19AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> How about we create a new Git repository, say, metrics-timeline.git with
> just the timeline file in the Markdown format? Ideally, that file would
> be rendered nicely by GitLab when looking at the project page. I can
> then write a new parser that processes that Markdown format.

This is a good idea. To have the table rendered by default, it looks
like GitLab requires the file to be called README.md or index.md:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/d5098d9fe3a5f05d9b90996851ab753f8b40cf65/app/assets/javascripts/repository/utils/readme.js

This is the old Trac markup:

||=start date =||=end date =||=places =||=protocols =||=description =||=links =||
||2016-02-17 ||2016-02-21 ||ug || ||Social media blackout in Uganda during presidential election. ||[https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/uganda#a2-limits Freedom House report] ||
||2016-11-16 09:20:45 || || || ||Tor Browser 6.5a4 is released. It changes the `app.update.url`. ||[https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-65a4-released blog post] [https://bugs.torproject.org/19481 ticket] ||

The new GitHub markup will look like this:

|start date|end date|places|protocols|description|links|
|----------|--------|------|---------|-----------|-----|
|2016-02-17|2016-02-21|ug||Social media blackout in Uganda during presidential election.|[Freedom House report](https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/uganda#a2-limits)|
|2016-11-16 09:20:45||||Tor Browser 6.5a4 is released. It changes the `app.update.url`.|[blog post](https://blog.torproject.org/tor-browser-65a4-released) [ticket](https://bugs.torproject.org/19481)|

If I understand correctly, to get the in-browser rendering, the project
needs to be on gitlab.torproject.org, not git.torproject.org. So we need
a new project created here:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/metrics/metrics-timeline
Perhaps it's best to start the initialize the repository from my
metrics-timeline-tools repository (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MetricsTimeline#tools)
and deprecate the latter one. Then I can incrementally adapt the "tidy"
script to (1) read the old format and write the new format:
`./tidy MetricsTimeline.txt > README.md`, and (2) read the new format
and write the new format.