Project URL is not slugified for GitLab repos

[bigint]

Bug description

Here is how the URL looks like https://gitpod.io/projects/Timesheet%20Remainder

Steps to reproduce

• Create new GitLab Repo with the name Gitpod Test
• Connect it to Gitpod projects
• Open the project and check the URL

Expected behavior

https://gitpod.io/projects/timesheet-remainder

It should take the GitLab repo slug instead of the name

[bigint]

/cc @gtsiolis the GitLab expert 😄

[gtsiolis]

Thanks for bringing this up @bigint! This makes sense!

Looping in @jankeromnes and @AlexTugarev who also brought up this issue in a recent discussion (internal).

[jankeromnes]

Nice catch! Thanks for reporting this @bigint (and thanks @gtsiolis for pointing me to it when I also complained about this 😁).

I believe the current situation is:

• There is only project.name, which is used in URLs and displayed in the UI
• For GitHub projects, we import the slug as project.name
• For GitLab projects, we import the full-text name as project.name

Instead, it would be better to:

• Have a (new) specific project.slug property for URLs (similar to team.slug) in addition to the existing project.name (which can be all nice with capital letters, spaces, varied characters, etc)
• For GitHub projects, import both the slug and the full-text name
• Same as above for GitLab

[JanKoehnlein]

I think this is not needed for the launch. Let's bring this up later

[JanKoehnlein]

/schedule

[roboquat]

@JanKoehnlein: Issue scheduled in the meta team (WIP: 0)

In response to this:

/schedule

Instructions for interacting with me using PR comments are available here. If you have questions or suggestions related to my behavior, please file an issue against the kubernetes/test-infra repository.

[laushinka]

/assign

[laushinka]

Have to /unassign for now to prioritize another ticket

[laushinka]

/assign

[laushinka]

The associated PR makes use of the path attribute provided by the GitLab API, where it gets added to the new slug column during project creation. For GitHub projects, the slug column is populated according to the name column, since it is already slugified.

However, the solution does not tackle existing GitLab projects. There are three options I can think of:

1. Import it from GitLab and populate the slug column (I don't know whether this is possible or how)
2. Populate the slug column by running a migration to replace the special characters. I'm not sure this would be a good solution, but maybe not a bad one either since essentially we're replacing spaces with dashes. Probably something like REGEXP_REPLACE(" ", "-")?
3. Leave the existing projects be. In the PR, existing GitLab projects will have NULL in the slug column, and the name column will be used instead, which is the current situation.

The reason why the string replacement can't happen in the frontend is because the Project page looks up the project repo using the url path, to find the matching project.

Thoughts?

[jldec]

see #6376 (comment) regarding why we are not fixing the slugs for existing GitLab repos at this point.