18 ms·

Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

924 points by levlaz 11y ago

nik736 11y ago
Off topic: https://jumpshare.com/v/MOEwe43eAHatINgDTi0z https://jumpshare.com/v/MOEwe43eAHatINgDTi0z What does this stand for? ;-)
- nearlythere 11y ago
  wm in wm_web refers to "wordmark" - looks like it's not displaying correctly in your browser! which one?
  - nik736 11y ago
    Safari 9
    - nearlythere 11y ago
      Thanks! That's helpful. I posted a bug report https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513
    - nearlythere 11y ago
      BTW, this was fixed! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513
onuras 11y ago
Their issue tracker seems really busy atm: https://i.imgur.com/Iv46xnx.png https://i.imgur.com/Iv46xnx.png
- nearlythere 11y ago
  Gr... yeah, spammers gonna spam. We're fighting it. Here you can find out more https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/5573 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/5573
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nearlythere 11y ago
    FYI - Users of GitLab can report spam. Click the (!) button on the offending user's profile. This triggers moderation. Screenshot - https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/688103614556995584 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/688103614556995584
- vive-la-liberte 11y ago
  Here are snapshots of the spam sites for anyone curious: udaiso03: https://archive.is/jZFbR https://archive.is/jZFbR NSFW! bamwar10: https://archive.is/HeWvt https://archive.is/HeWvt opmania35: https://archive.is/jNEr2 https://archive.is/jNEr2 NSFW!
filleokus 11y ago
It seems as the linked issue, for the "long list of suggestion", is being spammed or something? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 I have never used GitLab myself, but some of the features mentioned in the article (like a true voting system) is something I've really longed for. Might have to reconsider trying out GitLab more.
- sytse 11y ago
  GitLab.com is dealing with a lot of spam over the last week, but at this point https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 seems spam free to me.
glandium 11y ago
Just for this, I'm tempted: One issue that was raised several times was the ability to not create merge commits. In GitLab you can, as an alternative to the merge commits, use fast-forward merges or have merge requests be automatically rebased. The main thing keeping me from actually doing it is the network effect... and this: Disadvantages Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015.
- levlaz 11y ago
  Very true, I think they are working very hard on improving the experience this quarter. Front page of HN probably does not help either. :)
  - sytse 11y ago
    Thanks! We're very glad to be on the front page and hopefully get more people contributing and discussing features. GitLab.com is now at a size were the HN crowd doesn't make a dent. But the HN crowd is very important because they are frequently active contributors. We are trying to solve the speed of GitLab.com even if we grow 10x over a few months.
- enimodas 11y ago
  Only in the enterprise edition though.
  - levlaz 11y ago
    No the efforts are for .com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
  - nearlythere 11y ago
    GitLab.com runs GitLab EE. So - if you compare features of github hosted and gitlab hosted, it's best to compare EE. (For example, GitLab.com hosts private repos, for free, and it's EE.)
- nearlythere 11y ago
chris_wot 11y ago
GitHub probably want to, you know, actually pay attention to their developers now. Gitlab might just eat their lunch.
- mahouse 11y ago
  Actually, that will not happen.
  - J_Darnley 11y ago
    What? Listening to the developers?
    - mahouse 11y ago
      A migration to Gitlab. GitHub would have to start fucking the developers asses in a serious and violent way for them to move to another place, the same way that the SourceForge -> GitHub move was done.
      - pekk 11y ago
        Maybe you didn't notice, but this already happened for some projects.
        digitalsushi 11y ago
        I'm curious enough to ask for an example please.
jbk 11y ago
With VideoLAN, we're not on github, but I believe we fit the 'large open source project' description. We host VLC, FFmpeg, x264 and quite a few related libraries. For VLC and all related VideoLAN projects, we're moving to our own instance of GitLab hosted on our infrastructure. And to be honest, it's quite good, but a few stuffs are ridiculously limited, to the point that some people in the community are resisting the change. The first part is the groups and subgroups: it seems incredibly difficult to give sub-groups access to repos (like a team for iOS, one for Android, one for libVLC... but all are under the "videolan/" group). It seems there is a way with the EE, but not in the CE; and the current idea for the CE is to have sub-projects, which is not good, because it will make our URLs way more complex than needed. The second part is the bugtracker/issues tracker. We use trac for VLC, and we want to leave it for something better; but gitlab issues is way too limited, even when using the templates. Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). If I remember correctly, this second part was also a complaint in the open letter to github. Finally, it's not really related, since it's more a feature request, but we'd love to allow external people to fork our repos, but not create completely new ones (or have them validated) because we don't want to host any projects under the sun (there is github and gitlab for that). So far, you either allow both features or none of them. PS: can we have custom landing pages and custom logo in the CE version? :D :D
- RVuRnvbM2e 11y ago
  > Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). Isn't this use-case covered by Gitlab's issue labels?
  - jbk 11y ago
    I don't think so. Labels are too limited. We want for every bug, that a few custom fields are always defined, to do a partition of the bugs, and to be able to query on those. Moreover, to change the priority or the platform, it's quite complex to do and will break often. Many bugs won't have it filled, for example. Labels do not guarantee that consistency. As you can see, it's already what people want in the github open letter.
akerro 11y ago
My company with ~300 developers are moving to Gitlab in the next few months. Today our CTO/PM shared opinion about Gitlab and he was very happy we're doing it, even better I recommended it to him :) I'm a Gitlab users for a few years now, personally I like it much more than Github, one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS, I also dislike their CoS. Good luck Gitlab!
- sytse 11y ago
  Thank akerro, good to hear that.
- reledi 11y ago
  > one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS I don't understand this fear. All repositories on GitHub can be hosted elsewhere. Moving metadata (e.g. issues, milestones, PRs, etc.) is more difficult but mostly possible. Disclaimer: I like that GitHub is the "central" place for OSS, it makes my life much easier. I know how to use the product very well and it's convenient having almost every project that interests me available there.
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    > Moving metadata (e.g. issues, milestones, PRs, etc.) is more difficult but mostly possible. I'm curious as to how people tend to go about doing this. Any recommendations?
    - sytse 11y ago
      GitLab has an importer for GitHub repo's, issues, pull requests and in 8.4 (out on Jan 22) wiki's.
  - akerro 11y ago
    >I don't understand this fear Monopoly. Github enforces their CoC which has nothing do to with good coding practices or technological progress, they ban repositories and people based on their views expressed in comments.
nathan_f77 11y ago
I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this letter, which changed my perspective quite a lot. I didn't know that had features like voting on issues, and issue templates. So now it even feels like they're doing Git hosting the right way, making the core software open source, and charging for enterprise features. On the other hand, I would have probably never paid for GitHub if they followed this model. So I don't think GitHub would have been as successful.
- Vespasian 11y ago
  We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that. I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)
  - dev360 11y ago
    A good friend of mine likes to run https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ .. I havent used it heavily but Ive been impressed so far.
    - bovermyer 11y ago
      I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link. It seems just about everything is being re-written in Go these days...
      - xena 11y ago
        Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails.
alexbardas 11y ago
Both products are really good, but Github needs to realise that they have to be more open and listen more to their users. There is an opportunity for Gitlab here and I'm happy that they decided to make this announcement. The community is the actual winner of this healthy competition.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks alexbardas!
arihant 11y ago
> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I want hosted Git hosting from Gitlab, I cannot reliably get it without paying at least $390 upfront for their EE plan. Too much smokescreen, too less actually on offer.
- levlaz 11y ago
  Have you tried using BitBucket?
  - sleepychu 11y ago
    I have, were you just saying you think it's bad?
  - pmontra 11y ago
    I did. Some customers of mine use it (free tier if possible) for their private projects. My assesment: * issue management is better than GitHub's one but for very simple needs (90% of the repositories?) GitHub is enough and BitBucket is needlessly complicated (don't even talk about Jira). * repository navigation is worse (finding the repositories themselves can be difficult if you land on the wrong page) * wiki/pages are probably the same * access control and general management is better * pull request... I don't know. Our teams are small and normal communication plus git merge are enough.
  - yaworsk 11y ago
    I use it for personal, small scale repos where i just want to have the repo online and available across machines. Having the free, hosted tier is invaluable to me as a single developer. That said, I've also used it in a paid, hosted environment supporting a team of 10. Again, our needs weren't overly complex and the integration with team software like Jira and Confluence were great (as can be I suppose, given the complexity of both tools). I'm actually surprised there isn't more of a discussion around bitbucket and the cost of hosting smaller, private repos. Do most just dislike bitbucket or are you hosting bigger projects with multiple contributors which requires Github / gitlab services?
bigbugbag 11y ago
The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the reasonable expectations or pay for enterprise edition coming with a big bag of features I have no use for just to get the missing features that I can have on github for free (And I'm not a big fan of github)? As such gitlab community is not very useful to me and does not seem to have a future because its chosen business model goes against its usefulness to people.
- levlaz 11y ago
  I think called the community edition crippled is a stretch. I have a small team (4-5 devs) that has been using the CE for a few years now and we have been more than happy with it for all of our needs. The EE edition features make a lot of sense for much larger organizations I suppose.
  - sytse 11y ago
    Glad to hear that in your case we made the CE/EE feature tradeoff correctly!
- DouweM 11y ago
  GitLab CE is not crippled in any way, it is used every single day by hundreds of thousands of companies and millions upon millions of developers. It is and has always been our (GitLab, the company) main focus, we only decide to make new features EE-only when we think that they are mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees. Besides the company's efforts, contributions from the 1000+ community contributors always go into CE, unless the contributor submits it to the EE repository specifically. As evidence, just look at our Direction page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, or compare the CE and EE changelogs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO... vs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELOG-EE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELO.... Note that our free, hosted GitLab.com runs EE, which means that EE features like GitLab Pages ("Hosting static pages straight from GitLab") are available to everyone.
rcarmo 11y ago
I chose Gitlab for my former company over GitHub Enterprise because we wanted an on-prem solution, and it worked well enough for ~200 folk. We did have to tweak (and occasionally break) a few things, since quite a few people suffered from NIH syndrome and wanted things done "the right way". In general, I liked it, but it always irked me that its Ruby underpinnings made it hard to upgrade/migrate stuff (we basically just swapped LXC containers at one point, not sure how it was handled during the last upgrade). If anyone ever manages to do a credible alternative that does _not_ use Ruby in any way but keeps the overall GitHub-like workflow, a lot of operations folks will switch _instantly_. (Like https://try.gogs.io/explore https://try.gogs.io/explore, for instance) Also, like some commenters already pointed out, the CE edition was ridiculously limited in some regards - we mostly skipped the bits we didn't like and did product-level ticketing outside it (using Trac), with Gitlab issues used only for "techie" stuff, tracking fixes, etc. But today I'd probably just sign us all up for GitHub and be done with it, or fire up a VM image from some marketplace - there's hardly any point in maintaining our own infrastructure or doing a lot of customization.
- markdog12 11y ago
  > But today I'd probably just sign us all up for GitHub and be done with it Did you mean Gitlab?
  - rcarmo 11y ago
    Nope. GitHub. In that past context, it made more sense.
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry to hear you're not satisfied with GitLab and I would love to know more. 1. What things did you have to tweak? 2. Did you try our Omnibus packages for upgrades? It should be just apt-get upgrade https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 3. What features of EE belong in CE in your opinion?
  - rcarmo 11y ago
k__ 11y ago
I read that Babel uses Phabricator. How does GitLab compare to Phabricator?
sqldba 11y ago
Because the thread has turned into a "why I like/dislike GitLab over GitHub", I'll say one thing that keeps sending me back to GitHub is the neat-o desktop client. I use a command line for everything else in life; but with Git I'm hopeless.
- bovermyer 11y ago
  Have you tried Hub (http://hub.github.com http://hub.github.com)? It makes life with command line Git easier (so long as you work with GitHub primarily).
- jazoom 11y ago
  The GutHub GUI (GutHub Desktop) is pretty bad. Try GitKraken or Sourcetree. You can even use GitHub Desktop with Gitlab if you really want.
  - mdk754 11y ago
    I currently do this for the basics, and drop down to git at the shell for anything more complex than the one or two things GitHub's client does well. It's a decent trade off in my opinion.
  - whorleater 11y ago
    Is GitKraken out now? Last time I checked it was still in beta, so I've been using Tower in the meantime.
sandGorgon 11y ago
Please improve your mobile UI - phones have lesser horizontal space than vertical. You have put a cool looking sidebar on the left side which takes up a lot of space causing text layout to be funny on my 5.2 inch LG G2. Github OTOH has an extremely usable mobile UI.
- sytse 11y ago
  You should be able to collapse the left sidebar. But we are the mobile UI has deteriorated in the last few releases and we plan to look into it in the coming months. If you want to get paid to contribute, we're hiring front-end engineers https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
  - sandGorgon 11y ago
    Thanks for that offer. Already have my hands full. Look for me on Bookface ;)
    - sytse 11y ago
      Sorry, I missed that you're YC too :)
jorisw 11y ago
Before you think of switching to GitLab, look at their status Twitter account over the past few months. They've had a lot of down times. They run on Microsoft Azure.
- shocks 11y ago
  > They run on Microsoft Azure. What does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting that service run on Microsoft Azure are not stable?
  - dingo_bat 11y ago
    Most people associate a lack of reliability with anything Microsoft-related. Although I do not think that is the cause of Gitlab's problems.
    - castell 11y ago
      Reading their Twitter status messages. Microsoft sponsored Azure for Gitlab. Between Oct and Dec they were on Azure, and they had major issues with the Azure platform, pretty unreliable for their use case. Gitlab switched to IBM Softlayer because of that experience. Read yourself: https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/17 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/17
      - dingo_bat 11y ago
        It seems they have switched back to Azure now. In my own (very limited and small-scale) experience, Azure is pretty solid. Although some of the APIs seemed a bit unnecessarily convoluted compared to AWS (can't recall any specific instance).
      - sytse 11y ago
        Although we planned to switch to Softlayer we're still on Azure. It has given us a hard time, but in the last few weeks things have gotten more stable. Our availability is better (fingers crossed) but our speed is still unacceptably slow https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
beshrkayali 11y ago
Nice ride, Gitlab!
gravypod 11y ago
If GitLab plays their cards right, they can take the market from github. That, in my book, will be good because unlike github, we can all contribute to making GitLab better. The only question left is if your servers are powerful enough to run gitlab. Maybe I'll sacrifice a goat for some new server hardware and 256GB of ram.
- sytse 11y ago
  Don't be cruel to animals. I'll ship you the 256GB of ram personally, email me at sytse at company domain.
  - thewhitetulip 11y ago
    By the way, I don't want to troll you, but at my company we use Gitlab 6 self hosted version and I wasn't able to do a simple git push origin master the repo I held in my machine was barely 5MB and still remote server closed connection HTTP 500 I solved it by increasing the POST buffer. I never had this issue with github, maybe you can check why it was an issue with gitlab? it might help to advance your product!
    - pfg 11y ago
      GitLab introduced a new web server (gitlab-workhorse) in 8.0 that's better at handling large HTTP requests. I would suggest upgrading (not just for that reason, there have been tons of improvements and security updates).
    - randx 11y ago
      Thank you for feedback. We improved git push a lot since version 6. So when you update to recent version it should not be a problem anymore.
      - thewhitetulip 11y ago
        cool
- 11y ago
MoSal 11y ago
Somebody just spammed their Issues page[1]. The one they link to in the letter. I think the spammer is trying to make a point! For starters, there seems to be no rate limit applied. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
- sytse 11y ago
  GitLab has rate limiting on the API http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/security/rack_attack.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/security/rack_attack.html but by default we set it pretty high.
  - sytse 11y ago
    We added recaptcha a week ago and will merge akismet and RBL support this week to reduce spam.
imonabout 11y ago
I don't think the fact that GitLab is free for basic users is very discoverable from the site. You've got the "features" tab, which leads to what seems to be the option of downloading a community edition, which makes it look like GitLab is only offering the code itself but not hosting from their, and the enterprise edition for some licensing fee (I suppose). Then you've got "sign in", but no "sign up", which leads me to ask "but then how do I sign up", which most naturally (for me) leads me to the "pricing" tab. Now this page only shows "trial" and the different priced tiers. But if I press "sign in", I am able to sign up, with no notice about it being just a limited (45 day) trial. So so far I'm assuming that this is a perpetually free account, though I'm not completely sure yet...
- haynes 11y ago
  Your account on gitlab.com is completly free and permanent unless you decide to delete it yourself. The 45 day trial is for the case when you want to host gitlab-ee yourself on your own server.
- dingo_bat 11y ago
  Visiting www.gitlab.com redirects me to https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/. There are three big options: 1. Community edition 2. Enterprise edition 3. On our server The 3rd option has this text: Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators. Clicking on Sign up takes me to https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in which has clear options to sign in or sign up. It also has the text: GitLab.com offers free unlimited (private) repositories and unlimited collaborators, please sign up or in on the right. In lesser words, it seems pretty clear-cut to me. They offer unlimited free hosting for your repos. I did not see any trial period anywhere. Maybe you went to the Enterprise option?
  - imonabout 11y ago
    I'm sorry.
- DouweM 11y ago
  Hmm, the front page (https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/) lists "GitLab.com — On Our Server — Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators. — Sign Up", but I get that it's a bit confusing that the features and pricing pages don't mention anything about it. To clear things up: GitLab.com is completely free, with unlimited projects and collaborators. GitLab CE is open source and completely free. GitLab EE costs money and has a 45-day trial.
danielsamuels 11y ago
Perhaps if they had the same uptime, page load speed and UX as Github, I would consider it. Unfortunately we tried it for a week at work and none of us could figure out our way around it (when it was working).
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry that GitLab.com was unavailable an slow. As mentioned on https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ we're working on that. Have you considered self-hosting it?
pmilot 11y ago
This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me. By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In fact, I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months. I just wish they would be a little more up-front about their marketing efforts.
- tomp 11y ago
  > This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. I can hardly imagine a better outcome. Now both GitHub and the developers have a choice to make; GitHub can either ignore the complaints or take them into account, and people can either continue using GitHub or start using GitLab (or something else). Nothing better than informing people in a kind, respectful manner.
- Jedd 11y ago
  > This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction > wave seems a little low-brow. There's a github dissatisfaction wave? Anyway, opening sentence of gitlab's open letter: "The letter of GitHub’s open source community is clearly not addressed to us, but we’re thinking a lot about the issues that were mentioned in it." Does that cover your concerns? I think if github was the free software entity, and gitlab had no free software edition available, then the tone would be, as you suggest, totally inappropriate. However given the arrangement is the other way around, it seems quite reasonable they would hop onto this issue at this time, especially given the very clear caveat quoted above.
  - pmilot 11y ago
    "Wave" might be too strong a word, but I've seen three or four posts on HN in the last few days that were pretty critical of Github's closed source nature and insufficient transparency. I'm not sure why offering a free software edition somehow gives you a pass. Both Github and Gitlab are commercial entities as far as I know. Anyway, my concern wasn't a big deal, I was just a bit taken aback at the opportunism. In retrospect, I think my reaction was a bit overblown.
_yy 11y ago
Meanwhile, Phabricator has implemented all of these (and even more). Custom templates: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/forms/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/form... Votes: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Tokens https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Tokens It's better in almost every aspect than GitLab and GitHub. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator for an (incomplete) list of open source projects using it.
- aaviran 11y ago
  As a quite disappointed user of Gitlab (due to issues raised here, e,g, CE vs EE and the Ruby infrastructure), has anyone had experience with both? I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? I consider this an anti-feature, but this might be highly opinionated.
  - VeilEm 11y ago
    > I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? I think GitHub is prettier, but having tasks separate from repos and having tasks be as sophisticated as they are in Phabricator and having such a better pull requests system, it doesn't matter? GitHub has to dumb down the user interface on their product to appeal to the least common denominator and maintain their growth. Phabricator is for projects where people care enough about their projects to learn the UI so they can get things done. > Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? As a user I doubt you're going to find your self caring about how it's written.
    - pekk 11y ago
      As a user of a self-hosted web service, how it's written affects details about the pain of deployment and administration. How it's written also affects whether it has satisfactory performance and how many nasty security problems are waiting to be discovered. Not everyone can afford to be completely blase about their source control system going down or getting defaced.
osoti 11y ago
10 Most Powerful Militaries in The World http://goo.gl/PmwkSr http://goo.gl/PmwkSr
infocollector 11y ago
Any chance you can support Mercurial? There was a highly voted issue that I saw sometime back.
- e12e 11y ago
  Gitlab might have the resources to properly support multiple vcs' - but even though I personally prefer mercurial (ui, reasonable large-file support) - I'm not sure it would be a good idea. Trac (trac.edgewall.org) did a lot of feature-experimentation -- and I think one take-away is that being an effective workflow support tool and supporting (even subtly) different back-ends with accompanying different best-practices/patterns (eg: git sub modules) is hard. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
- marcinkuzminski 11y ago
  If you're looking for Mercurial try out RhodeCode, it support all the Mercurial specific workflows like phases etc. RhodeCode actually supports Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.
  - infocollector 11y ago
    Is Rhodecode completely open source like Kallithea?
    - sytse 11y ago
      Consider reading http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html for more background.
    - marcinkuzminski 11y ago
      No, Kallithea is an fork of older code base of RhodeCode. RhodeCode source code is not open, but it's free up to 25 users There's a big difference between Kallithea and RhodeCode. Kallithea development is stale, and there's not a lot of things going on in this project. RhodeCode is adding new features constantly, and the project is really active.
georgefrick 11y ago
I've been using GitLab myself and suggesting it to any clients with the proper infrastructure. When I found GitLab I tried it out, and finally ended up moving my SVN to Git (private projects). It's a great piece of software and I love the web hooks.
- jobvandervoort 11y ago
  That's great to hear. Any way we can improve web hooks for you?
  - georgefrick 11y ago
    Arguments from the project/push add to url would be great! A page outlining why you are better than gitblit would help with clients :-) (who are all possible future EE users)
    - jobvandervoort 11y ago
      Thanks! I created an issue here [0], I'd love it if you could clarify it a bit there. I think we can do better in our comparisons with competitors. I created an issue [1]. I haven't heard someone asking before about a comparison with Gitblit. Please feel free to email me at job at companyname dotcom if you'd like me to discuss it with your clients. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10860 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10860 [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/514 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/514
bitshepherd 11y ago
I remember GitLab. They interviewed myself and a bunch of my colleagues to test the salary waters here in the Bay Area and hired nobody because we were all "overpriced", with several being underpaid for the area. If you want the talent you need, especially in the Bay Area, you have to pay more than what the average developer makes in Amsterdam. I want to like GitLab, but I just can't get that bad taste out of my mouth.
- btmiller 11y ago
  Interesting. Yours is not the first account of a poor interview process with GitLab that I've heard. Even out of Texas, had a few colleagues that were very qualified and came out of it with a poor experience, to the point of changing their mind about wanting to work at GitLab.
  - sytse 11y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that, what was went wrong during our interview process?
- sytse 11y ago
  We never interview people to test the salary waters, we know interviewing is serious for you and it is serious to us too. We're very aware of the salaries in SF (writing this from SOMA). But since we're a remote first company we can hire for anywhere in the world and because we're open source we get a lot of great applicants. So the bar is high and for the Bay Area it is even higher. Feel free to email me at sytse at company domain if you want to discuss your application.
  - lwhalen 11y ago
    So sorry I missed this thread when it was hot. If you know you're not going to pay SF (or even US) sized salaries, why waste everybody's time with multiple interviews then? State up front "We're only willing to pay $80k, even if you've got the history (previous salary, measured prior project impact, demonstrated skill in the areas we need, etc) to justify 2x or 3x that". You won't be able to pick your interviewees brains on possible solutions, but you also won't be wasting their (and your) time.
jhasse 11y ago
Has anyone any experience with Gogs? How does it compare to GitLab? https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/
neumino 11y ago
I've been using GitLab instead of GitHub recently for all my new projects and honestly there's nothing worse than GitHub and a few things are better - like having protected branches and master by default in it -, private respositories etc. That being said, what both GitHub and GitLab are missing is actually becoming a "social network" or maybe more an active network. There are tons of interesting projects that pops up every day, that I would be interested in knowing about, contributing, but there's basically no way to learn about them. Kudos to the GitLab team for all its work :)
- benwaffle 11y ago
  https://github.com/explore/subscribe https://github.com/explore/subscribe
simi_ 11y ago
Sourcegraph has pivoted into a git hosting appliance, it's pretty cool, even if nowhere near as full-featured. https://sourcegraph.com/ https://sourcegraph.com/
nevi-me 11y ago
At least with Gitlab I can open an issue somewhere and follow it, like with open source projects. It doesn't disappear into the abyss with no feedback on what's happening. I've implemented two self-hosted Gitlab instances at work, for one of the instances on our private network, I'm still fighting with IT to allow us to use LDAP. Gitlab EE is still off our 'pockets' as management aren't too keen to pay for it, at least yet, but I hope that we'll get there. Our self-hosted instance is also a bit slow, not as slow as Gitlab.com, and if it was written in a language that I'm familiar with, perhaps I and some of my team could contribute to 'making it faster'. Pity I don't have enough time left in the day to learn Ruby. I've read up a bit on the work going on around Unicorn and workers, but maybe some of these things could be better written in other more 'performant' languages? For personal projects I still use Bitbucket + JIRA. I got to the point where I decided to stop looking for freebies and pay. JIRA has been awesome, totally worth the price.
mdw 11y ago
I've recently made an iOS App that integrates with GitLab. The people at GitLab have been incredible, they respond to my issues, improve the API with every release, I didn't expect this level of awesomeness when I started the project. What's great about GitLab, there's a release on the 22nd of each month, so you can depend on pretty much continual improvement. Even if you don't think GitLab is suitable for your Open Source project, talk to the team on their issue tracker, things get solved pretty quickly!
- DouweM 11y ago
  Because Matt is too nice to plug his own app, I will do it for him. Check out Trident: http://www.somerobots.com/trident.html http://www.somerobots.com/trident.html It's a really nice app and we are happy to make improvements on our side to make it even more capable with every release :)
- dordoka 11y ago
  Thanks for building Trident! Happy customer here. Gitlab servers work really well and is super fast. Patiently waiting for the Github servers functionallity to be on par with the Gitlab one :)
  - mdw 11y ago
    Appreciate this compliment :) Please open any issues you see with the App in the issue tracker, helps me prioritise new features and candid feedback helps!
    - dordoka 11y ago
      Already opened some enhancement request on the issue tracker, thanks! Any help you need :)
- jtreanor 11y ago
  Just bought the app from these recommendations. It is beautifully made. Nice work :)
- 11y ago
spudfkc 11y ago
I get why GitLab wrote this, but it seems like just a stab at GitHub. There seems to be a lot of hating on GitHub here, but I personally love GitHub (and we use GitLab at my current employer). I think GitLab is doing a great thing, and I appreciate that their community edition is free and open source, but GitHub has been able to provide an invaluable service. They have a great community that facilitates open source projects and a vastly better UI than GitLab (though that isn't saying much with how awful GitLab's UI is). I'm eager to see how GitHub evolves in the future with GitLab as a competitor, as GitLab has a lot of nice features (built-in CI, etc).
- s986s 11y ago
  It is a stab and tbh Im glad they took the opportunity. There are few times when a product can be marketed to such effect for as little cost. What they did was show everyone how awesome they are and how stagnent Github is. Github can easily change but most of their decision making is done behind the scenes. Github grew popular because it was popular. Maybe thats worth something but long term they must adapt just like Gitlab
- bebraw 11y ago
  Yeah, it's bit of a stab. I'm really curious to see how GitHub responds (if they respond). A lot of good could come out of this even if it takes some competition to force some of that.
grimborg 11y ago
Using gitlab for go development, "go get" doesn't work. Googled around, couldn't find a solution. With github, on the other hand, it just works. I love gitlab (even made a git tool to easily create repositories from the commandline, gitgitlab) but these small things make a real difference. I'll end up paying for a github organization account just to get this annoyance out of the way.
- sytse 11y ago
  This should work, see https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5958 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5958 Please open an issue with what you tried exactly.
allan_s 11y ago
For me the big things missing (not only for big open source projects) 1. more than one level of subdivision for groups/projects (see below) 2. groups of users (call it department/team): because of 1 we have a lot of groups, (because all the small libs are in separate projects, so the project itself is a group, but of course we have several projects), so everytime somebody join the company, we have to add him in every single project (for them to be able to read the code), and we have also subcontractors, we would like to have a nice way to separate from the others I think this things are most "day to day annoying", other than that gitlab is pretty good, the CI system, the hook system, it's pretty easy to put that links to issue section, ticket reference redirect to redmine , taiga , jira or whatever.
- sytse 11y ago
  Regarding: 1. Nested groups should solve that in the future https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 2. We're thinking about that but for now the invite other group feature in EE will have to do.
thejameskyle 11y ago
I'm one of the co-authors of the Dear GitHub letter. This is the type of response I want so badly from GitHub (but wasn't expecting). GitLab still has a ways to go in terms of performance/reliability and polishing their product, but GitHub aught to be very nervous about them.
- johnmaguire2013 11y ago
  Could you explain what still needs to be done? I use Gogs for personal use, but evaluated Gitlab briefly and it seemed about as polished, if not moreso, as Github to me.
lowpro 11y ago
Great PR move by gitlab, and I don't mean that negatively. This kind of direct response is exactly what a company looking to improve should do, hats off to gitlab! Once their performance increases, maybe we'll see the momentum shift from Github.
p1mrx 11y ago
GitLab could differentiate their service by offering IPv6 support, which GitHub has so far declined to do.
- sytse 11y ago
  Cool, I created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/43 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/43
  - p1mrx 11y ago
    Thanks, subscribed. When Google Code shut down, I migrated the IPvFoo[1] source code to GitHub, but it felt dirty using an IPv4-only service for that purpose; I'll probably move again to GitLab if they follow through. [1] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
    - sytse 11y ago
      We will, Ian is already working on it.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
Thank you GitLab for being yet another option, and for at least maintaining one Open Source version of your software at the very least.
- sytse 11y ago
  You're very welcome!
nhumrich 11y ago
I love gitlab and its features, and will commit to actually using it once dockerhub has gitlab integration. I agree though that is more of a limitation on dockerhub.
cyphar 11y ago
While I've always admired GitLab being a free software alternative to GitHub, the whole EE licensing stuff really rubs me the wrong way. EE is completely proprietary software, even for people who have paid for it (it only allows the freedom to modify the code, but you cannot run it as you wish or distribute code freely). I understand charging money for your software, but you can also charge for feature requests and support. There's no need to lock away features from people using your free software just because you've deemed that feature "not useful for you" or "pay-to-use". What I really don't get is the argument that "we won't liberate feature XYZ from EE because it's only useful for companies with 100+ developers". I think it's quite impressive that you can know what every user of your free software needs, and that you'll protect them from code only suited for enterprise. I'll still use GitLab (the fact there's a free software version is great), and I'll be the first to fork (or back someone else's fork) CE as soon as you get acquired and your free software is no longer maintained by you (see: Oracle with Solaris, and every other acquahire ever).
- sytse 11y ago
  What do you mean with 'cannot run it as you wish'? Regarding choosing features for EE, I recently updated the text on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship to read "is this feature much more relevant for organizations that have more than 100 developers?". Obviously every features is relevant to smaller organizations too. We make a guess and if we find out we guessed wrong we'll open source the feature, as happened today in this article https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 We think it is great that people have the freedom to fork CE. We open sourced our release tools https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools and the Omnibus Packaging https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/ to ensure that people can easily generate and alternative distribution.
merb 11y ago
What I would like to have in the free version is: - Project importing from Stash to GitLab - Mirror Projects - Display merge request status for builds on Jenkins CI - Rebase merge requests before merge - Git hooks (commit message must mention an issue, no tag deletion, etc.) These are pretty essential.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for voicing your wish. 1. Project importing from Stash makes sense, we already have it for BitBucket.com, any reason why you want Stash instead of using any repo by URL? 2. Mirroring sounds like a good one to open source. Feel free to make an issue. 3. There is a open source Jenkins plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/GitLab+Plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/GitLab+Plugin that uses our new build status API, so I think this is doable already in CE. 4. If you want to use rebase before merge and git hooks can I ask how large your organization is?
  - merb 11y ago
    1. Currently It's hard to migrate a whole Stash Server / Bitbucket Server. 2. Thanks 3. Oh, ok we already use a thing like that for Stash 4. Currently we are 5 people, but we use Git Hooks extensively and used a rebase workflow before we used a Stash Server. Also we only use a special style of commits that go into our global git server, people should take time to write their commit message. > yearly per user purchased in packs of 10 $390 per pack Remove the Pack and we are happy. Paying monthly would help also we try to grow, but sometimes we need to shrink (if people don't fit) we move really slowly when it comes to people, we had some issue's at the beginning, so we learned from that the hard way.
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Ellahn 11y ago
Congratulations on GitLab, I personally use it and love it, and it's awesome to see amazing people like the VLC team considering GitLab. A suggestion I have is to consider open-sourcing and re-branding EE on a GPL-Like license that also requires projects hosted with it to be open sourced, while specifying that contributions to this version can be re-licensed by GitLab to be used by paying customers (Or re-licensed to MIT and released on CE). This way open source people get it all, and if you want to use it on closed source you pay GitLab. This also has the benefit of allowing open source developers to work with GPL, and the changing to MIT could even be decided before merging (Sending to either CE on MIT or EE on GPL+GitLabProprietary, according to developer decision). There's a lot to fix on the OpenSource world, but there are also so many possible ways. Best of luck to the GitLab team, I hope we see more amazing stuff from you (Btw, GitLab CI got a lot better recently, I hope you keep improving it. :D)
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for the kind words Ellahn. You suggestion is interesting. I'm afraid that releasing EE under a GPL-like license that prevents private projects is confusing. It would be GPL-like instead of GPL. I think that such a license muddles the waters and would not be in the best interest of open source. I presume that people want to be free to do as they please with the software, not be restricted to how they use it.
caiowilsonb 11y ago
I love that this thread main comments have become a sale negotiation. lol

924 points by levlaz 11y ago

Off topic: https://jumpshare.com/v/MOEwe43eAHatINgDTi0z https://jumpshare.com/v/MOEwe43eAHatINgDTi0z What does this stand for? ;-)

nearlythere 11y ago
wm in wm_web refers to "wordmark" - looks like it's not displaying correctly in your browser! which one?
- nik736 11y ago
  Safari 9
  - nearlythere 11y ago
    Thanks! That's helpful. I posted a bug report https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513
  - nearlythere 11y ago
    BTW, this was fixed! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513

onuras 11y ago

Their issue tracker seems really busy atm: https://i.imgur.com/Iv46xnx.png https://i.imgur.com/Iv46xnx.png

nearlythere 11y ago
Gr... yeah, spammers gonna spam. We're fighting it. Here you can find out more https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/5573 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/5573
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- nearlythere 11y ago
  FYI - Users of GitLab can report spam. Click the (!) button on the offending user's profile. This triggers moderation. Screenshot - https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/688103614556995584 https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/688103614556995584
vive-la-liberte 11y ago
Here are snapshots of the spam sites for anyone curious: udaiso03: https://archive.is/jZFbR https://archive.is/jZFbR NSFW! bamwar10: https://archive.is/HeWvt https://archive.is/HeWvt opmania35: https://archive.is/jNEr2 https://archive.is/jNEr2 NSFW!

filleokus 11y ago

It seems as the linked issue, for the "long list of suggestion", is being spammed or something? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 I have never used GitLab myself, but some of the features mentioned in the article (like a true voting system) is something I've really longed for. Might have to reconsider trying out GitLab more.

sytse 11y ago
GitLab.com is dealing with a lot of spam over the last week, but at this point https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938 seems spam free to me.

glandium 11y ago

Just for this, I'm tempted: One issue that was raised several times was the ability to not create merge commits. In GitLab you can, as an alternative to the merge commits, use fast-forward merges or have merge requests be automatically rebased. The main thing keeping me from actually doing it is the network effect... and this: Disadvantages Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015.

levlaz 11y ago
Very true, I think they are working very hard on improving the experience this quarter. Front page of HN probably does not help either. :)
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks! We're very glad to be on the front page and hopefully get more people contributing and discussing features. GitLab.com is now at a size were the HN crowd doesn't make a dent. But the HN crowd is very important because they are frequently active contributors. We are trying to solve the speed of GitLab.com even if we grow 10x over a few months.
enimodas 11y ago
Only in the enterprise edition though.
- levlaz 11y ago
  No the efforts are for .com https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42
- nearlythere 11y ago
  GitLab.com runs GitLab EE. So - if you compare features of github hosted and gitlab hosted, it's best to compare EE. (For example, GitLab.com hosts private repos, for free, and it's EE.)
nearlythere 11y ago

chris_wot 11y ago

GitHub probably want to, you know, actually pay attention to their developers now. Gitlab might just eat their lunch.

mahouse 11y ago
Actually, that will not happen.
- J_Darnley 11y ago
  What? Listening to the developers?
  - mahouse 11y ago
    A migration to Gitlab. GitHub would have to start fucking the developers asses in a serious and violent way for them to move to another place, the same way that the SourceForge -> GitHub move was done.
    - pekk 11y ago
      Maybe you didn't notice, but this already happened for some projects.
      - digitalsushi 11y ago
        I'm curious enough to ask for an example please.

jbk 11y ago

With VideoLAN, we're not on github, but I believe we fit the 'large open source project' description. We host VLC, FFmpeg, x264 and quite a few related libraries. For VLC and all related VideoLAN projects, we're moving to our own instance of GitLab hosted on our infrastructure. And to be honest, it's quite good, but a few stuffs are ridiculously limited, to the point that some people in the community are resisting the change. The first part is the groups and subgroups: it seems incredibly difficult to give sub-groups access to repos (like a team for iOS, one for Android, one for libVLC... but all are under the "videolan/" group). It seems there is a way with the EE, but not in the CE; and the current idea for the CE is to have sub-projects, which is not good, because it will make our URLs way more complex than needed. The second part is the bugtracker/issues tracker. We use trac for VLC, and we want to leave it for something better; but gitlab issues is way too limited, even when using the templates. Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). If I remember correctly, this second part was also a complaint in the open letter to github. Finally, it's not really related, since it's more a feature request, but we'd love to allow external people to fork our repos, but not create completely new ones (or have them validated) because we don't want to host any projects under the sun (there is github and gitlab for that). So far, you either allow both features or none of them. PS: can we have custom landing pages and custom logo in the CE version? :D :D

RVuRnvbM2e 11y ago
> Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). Isn't this use-case covered by Gitlab's issue labels?
- jbk 11y ago
  I don't think so. Labels are too limited. We want for every bug, that a few custom fields are always defined, to do a partition of the bugs, and to be able to query on those. Moreover, to change the priority or the platform, it's quite complex to do and will break often. Many bugs won't have it filled, for example. Labels do not guarantee that consistency. As you can see, it's already what people want in the github open letter.

akerro 11y ago

My company with ~300 developers are moving to Gitlab in the next few months. Today our CTO/PM shared opinion about Gitlab and he was very happy we're doing it, even better I recommended it to him :) I'm a Gitlab users for a few years now, personally I like it much more than Github, one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS, I also dislike their CoS. Good luck Gitlab!

sytse 11y ago
Thank akerro, good to hear that.
reledi 11y ago
> one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS I don't understand this fear. All repositories on GitHub can be hosted elsewhere. Moving metadata (e.g. issues, milestones, PRs, etc.) is more difficult but mostly possible. Disclaimer: I like that GitHub is the "central" place for OSS, it makes my life much easier. I know how to use the product very well and it's convenient having almost every project that interests me available there.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  > Moving metadata (e.g. issues, milestones, PRs, etc.) is more difficult but mostly possible. I'm curious as to how people tend to go about doing this. Any recommendations?
  - sytse 11y ago
    GitLab has an importer for GitHub repo's, issues, pull requests and in 8.4 (out on Jan 22) wiki's.
- akerro 11y ago
  >I don't understand this fear Monopoly. Github enforces their CoC which has nothing do to with good coding practices or technological progress, they ban repositories and people based on their views expressed in comments.

nathan_f77 11y ago

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this letter, which changed my perspective quite a lot. I didn't know that had features like voting on issues, and issue templates. So now it even feels like they're doing Git hosting the right way, making the core software open source, and charging for enterprise features. On the other hand, I would have probably never paid for GitHub if they followed this model. So I don't think GitHub would have been as successful.

Vespasian 11y ago
We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that. I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)
- dev360 11y ago
  A good friend of mine likes to run https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ .. I havent used it heavily but Ive been impressed so far.
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link. It seems just about everything is being re-written in Go these days...
    - xena 11y ago
      Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails.

alexbardas 11y ago

Both products are really good, but Github needs to realise that they have to be more open and listen more to their users. There is an opportunity for Gitlab here and I'm happy that they decided to make this announcement. The community is the actual winner of this healthy competition.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks alexbardas!

arihant 11y ago

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I want hosted Git hosting from Gitlab, I cannot reliably get it without paying at least $390 upfront for their EE plan. Too much smokescreen, too less actually on offer.

levlaz 11y ago
Have you tried using BitBucket?
- sleepychu 11y ago
  I have, were you just saying you think it's bad?
- pmontra 11y ago
  I did. Some customers of mine use it (free tier if possible) for their private projects. My assesment: * issue management is better than GitHub's one but for very simple needs (90% of the repositories?) GitHub is enough and BitBucket is needlessly complicated (don't even talk about Jira). * repository navigation is worse (finding the repositories themselves can be difficult if you land on the wrong page) * wiki/pages are probably the same * access control and general management is better * pull request... I don't know. Our teams are small and normal communication plus git merge are enough.
- yaworsk 11y ago
  I use it for personal, small scale repos where i just want to have the repo online and available across machines. Having the free, hosted tier is invaluable to me as a single developer. That said, I've also used it in a paid, hosted environment supporting a team of 10. Again, our needs weren't overly complex and the integration with team software like Jira and Confluence were great (as can be I suppose, given the complexity of both tools). I'm actually surprised there isn't more of a discussion around bitbucket and the cost of hosting smaller, private repos. Do most just dislike bitbucket or are you hosting bigger projects with multiple contributors which requires Github / gitlab services?

bigbugbag 11y ago

The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the reasonable expectations or pay for enterprise edition coming with a big bag of features I have no use for just to get the missing features that I can have on github for free (And I'm not a big fan of github)? As such gitlab community is not very useful to me and does not seem to have a future because its chosen business model goes against its usefulness to people.

levlaz 11y ago
I think called the community edition crippled is a stretch. I have a small team (4-5 devs) that has been using the CE for a few years now and we have been more than happy with it for all of our needs. The EE edition features make a lot of sense for much larger organizations I suppose.
- sytse 11y ago
  Glad to hear that in your case we made the CE/EE feature tradeoff correctly!
DouweM 11y ago
GitLab CE is not crippled in any way, it is used every single day by hundreds of thousands of companies and millions upon millions of developers. It is and has always been our (GitLab, the company) main focus, we only decide to make new features EE-only when we think that they are mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees. Besides the company's efforts, contributions from the 1000+ community contributors always go into CE, unless the contributor submits it to the EE repository specifically. As evidence, just look at our Direction page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, or compare the CE and EE changelogs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO... vs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELOG-EE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELO.... Note that our free, hosted GitLab.com runs EE, which means that EE features like GitLab Pages ("Hosting static pages straight from GitLab") are available to everyone.

rcarmo 11y ago

I chose Gitlab for my former company over GitHub Enterprise because we wanted an on-prem solution, and it worked well enough for ~200 folk. We did have to tweak (and occasionally break) a few things, since quite a few people suffered from NIH syndrome and wanted things done "the right way". In general, I liked it, but it always irked me that its Ruby underpinnings made it hard to upgrade/migrate stuff (we basically just swapped LXC containers at one point, not sure how it was handled during the last upgrade). If anyone ever manages to do a credible alternative that does _not_ use Ruby in any way but keeps the overall GitHub-like workflow, a lot of operations folks will switch _instantly_. (Like https://try.gogs.io/explore https://try.gogs.io/explore, for instance) Also, like some commenters already pointed out, the CE edition was ridiculously limited in some regards - we mostly skipped the bits we didn't like and did product-level ticketing outside it (using Trac), with Gitlab issues used only for "techie" stuff, tracking fixes, etc. But today I'd probably just sign us all up for GitHub and be done with it, or fire up a VM image from some marketplace - there's hardly any point in maintaining our own infrastructure or doing a lot of customization.

markdog12 11y ago
> But today I'd probably just sign us all up for GitHub and be done with it Did you mean Gitlab?
- rcarmo 11y ago
  Nope. GitHub. In that past context, it made more sense.
sytse 11y ago
I'm sorry to hear you're not satisfied with GitLab and I would love to know more. 1. What things did you have to tweak? 2. Did you try our Omnibus packages for upgrades? It should be just apt-get upgrade https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 3. What features of EE belong in CE in your opinion?
- rcarmo 11y ago

k__ 11y ago

I read that Babel uses Phabricator. How does GitLab compare to Phabricator?

sqldba 11y ago

Because the thread has turned into a "why I like/dislike GitLab over GitHub", I'll say one thing that keeps sending me back to GitHub is the neat-o desktop client. I use a command line for everything else in life; but with Git I'm hopeless.

bovermyer 11y ago
Have you tried Hub (http://hub.github.com http://hub.github.com)? It makes life with command line Git easier (so long as you work with GitHub primarily).
jazoom 11y ago
The GutHub GUI (GutHub Desktop) is pretty bad. Try GitKraken or Sourcetree. You can even use GitHub Desktop with Gitlab if you really want.
- mdk754 11y ago
  I currently do this for the basics, and drop down to git at the shell for anything more complex than the one or two things GitHub's client does well. It's a decent trade off in my opinion.
- whorleater 11y ago
  Is GitKraken out now? Last time I checked it was still in beta, so I've been using Tower in the meantime.

sandGorgon 11y ago

Please improve your mobile UI - phones have lesser horizontal space than vertical. You have put a cool looking sidebar on the left side which takes up a lot of space causing text layout to be funny on my 5.2 inch LG G2. Github OTOH has an extremely usable mobile UI.

sytse 11y ago
You should be able to collapse the left sidebar. But we are the mobile UI has deteriorated in the last few releases and we plan to look into it in the coming months. If you want to get paid to contribute, we're hiring front-end engineers https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
- sandGorgon 11y ago
  Thanks for that offer. Already have my hands full. Look for me on Bookface ;)
  - sytse 11y ago
    Sorry, I missed that you're YC too :)

jorisw 11y ago

Before you think of switching to GitLab, look at their status Twitter account over the past few months. They've had a lot of down times. They run on Microsoft Azure.

shocks 11y ago
> They run on Microsoft Azure. What does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting that service run on Microsoft Azure are not stable?
- dingo_bat 11y ago
  Most people associate a lack of reliability with anything Microsoft-related. Although I do not think that is the cause of Gitlab's problems.
  - castell 11y ago
    Reading their Twitter status messages. Microsoft sponsored Azure for Gitlab. Between Oct and Dec they were on Azure, and they had major issues with the Azure platform, pretty unreliable for their use case. Gitlab switched to IBM Softlayer because of that experience. Read yourself: https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/17 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/17
    - dingo_bat 11y ago
      It seems they have switched back to Azure now. In my own (very limited and small-scale) experience, Azure is pretty solid. Although some of the APIs seemed a bit unnecessarily convoluted compared to AWS (can't recall any specific instance).
    - sytse 11y ago
      Although we planned to switch to Softlayer we're still on Azure. It has given us a hard time, but in the last few weeks things have gotten more stable. Our availability is better (fingers crossed) but our speed is still unacceptably slow https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

beshrkayali 11y ago

Nice ride, Gitlab!

gravypod 11y ago

If GitLab plays their cards right, they can take the market from github. That, in my book, will be good because unlike github, we can all contribute to making GitLab better. The only question left is if your servers are powerful enough to run gitlab. Maybe I'll sacrifice a goat for some new server hardware and 256GB of ram.

sytse 11y ago
Don't be cruel to animals. I'll ship you the 256GB of ram personally, email me at sytse at company domain.
- thewhitetulip 11y ago
  By the way, I don't want to troll you, but at my company we use Gitlab 6 self hosted version and I wasn't able to do a simple git push origin master the repo I held in my machine was barely 5MB and still remote server closed connection HTTP 500 I solved it by increasing the POST buffer. I never had this issue with github, maybe you can check why it was an issue with gitlab? it might help to advance your product!
  - pfg 11y ago
    GitLab introduced a new web server (gitlab-workhorse) in 8.0 that's better at handling large HTTP requests. I would suggest upgrading (not just for that reason, there have been tons of improvements and security updates).
  - randx 11y ago
    Thank you for feedback. We improved git push a lot since version 6. So when you update to recent version it should not be a problem anymore.
    - thewhitetulip 11y ago
      cool
11y ago

MoSal 11y ago

Somebody just spammed their Issues page[1]. The one they link to in the letter. I think the spammer is trying to make a point! For starters, there seems to be no rate limit applied. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

sytse 11y ago
GitLab has rate limiting on the API http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/security/rack_attack.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/security/rack_attack.html but by default we set it pretty high.
- sytse 11y ago
  We added recaptcha a week ago and will merge akismet and RBL support this week to reduce spam.

imonabout 11y ago

I don't think the fact that GitLab is free for basic users is very discoverable from the site. You've got the "features" tab, which leads to what seems to be the option of downloading a community edition, which makes it look like GitLab is only offering the code itself but not hosting from their, and the enterprise edition for some licensing fee (I suppose). Then you've got "sign in", but no "sign up", which leads me to ask "but then how do I sign up", which most naturally (for me) leads me to the "pricing" tab. Now this page only shows "trial" and the different priced tiers. But if I press "sign in", I am able to sign up, with no notice about it being just a limited (45 day) trial. So so far I'm assuming that this is a perpetually free account, though I'm not completely sure yet...

haynes 11y ago
Your account on gitlab.com is completly free and permanent unless you decide to delete it yourself. The 45 day trial is for the case when you want to host gitlab-ee yourself on your own server.
dingo_bat 11y ago
Visiting www.gitlab.com redirects me to https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/. There are three big options: 1. Community edition 2. Enterprise edition 3. On our server The 3rd option has this text: Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators. Clicking on Sign up takes me to https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in which has clear options to sign in or sign up. It also has the text: GitLab.com offers free unlimited (private) repositories and unlimited collaborators, please sign up or in on the right. In lesser words, it seems pretty clear-cut to me. They offer unlimited free hosting for your repos. I did not see any trial period anywhere. Maybe you went to the Enterprise option?
- imonabout 11y ago
  I'm sorry.
DouweM 11y ago
Hmm, the front page (https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/) lists "GitLab.com — On Our Server — Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators. — Sign Up", but I get that it's a bit confusing that the features and pricing pages don't mention anything about it. To clear things up: GitLab.com is completely free, with unlimited projects and collaborators. GitLab CE is open source and completely free. GitLab EE costs money and has a 45-day trial.

danielsamuels 11y ago

Perhaps if they had the same uptime, page load speed and UX as Github, I would consider it. Unfortunately we tried it for a week at work and none of us could figure out our way around it (when it was working).

sytse 11y ago
I'm sorry that GitLab.com was unavailable an slow. As mentioned on https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ we're working on that. Have you considered self-hosting it?

pmilot 11y ago

This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me. By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In fact, I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months. I just wish they would be a little more up-front about their marketing efforts.

tomp 11y ago
> This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. I can hardly imagine a better outcome. Now both GitHub and the developers have a choice to make; GitHub can either ignore the complaints or take them into account, and people can either continue using GitHub or start using GitLab (or something else). Nothing better than informing people in a kind, respectful manner.
Jedd 11y ago
> This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction > wave seems a little low-brow. There's a github dissatisfaction wave? Anyway, opening sentence of gitlab's open letter: "The letter of GitHub’s open source community is clearly not addressed to us, but we’re thinking a lot about the issues that were mentioned in it." Does that cover your concerns? I think if github was the free software entity, and gitlab had no free software edition available, then the tone would be, as you suggest, totally inappropriate. However given the arrangement is the other way around, it seems quite reasonable they would hop onto this issue at this time, especially given the very clear caveat quoted above.
- pmilot 11y ago
  "Wave" might be too strong a word, but I've seen three or four posts on HN in the last few days that were pretty critical of Github's closed source nature and insufficient transparency. I'm not sure why offering a free software edition somehow gives you a pass. Both Github and Gitlab are commercial entities as far as I know. Anyway, my concern wasn't a big deal, I was just a bit taken aback at the opportunism. In retrospect, I think my reaction was a bit overblown.

_yy 11y ago

Meanwhile, Phabricator has implemented all of these (and even more). Custom templates: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/forms/ https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/form... Votes: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Tokens https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Tokens It's better in almost every aspect than GitLab and GitHub. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator for an (incomplete) list of open source projects using it.

aaviran 11y ago
As a quite disappointed user of Gitlab (due to issues raised here, e,g, CE vs EE and the Ruby infrastructure), has anyone had experience with both? I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? I consider this an anti-feature, but this might be highly opinionated.
- VeilEm 11y ago
  > I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? I think GitHub is prettier, but having tasks separate from repos and having tasks be as sophisticated as they are in Phabricator and having such a better pull requests system, it doesn't matter? GitHub has to dumb down the user interface on their product to appeal to the least common denominator and maintain their growth. Phabricator is for projects where people care enough about their projects to learn the UI so they can get things done. > Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? As a user I doubt you're going to find your self caring about how it's written.
  - pekk 11y ago
    As a user of a self-hosted web service, how it's written affects details about the pain of deployment and administration. How it's written also affects whether it has satisfactory performance and how many nasty security problems are waiting to be discovered. Not everyone can afford to be completely blase about their source control system going down or getting defaced.

osoti 11y ago

10 Most Powerful Militaries in The World http://goo.gl/PmwkSr http://goo.gl/PmwkSr

infocollector 11y ago

Any chance you can support Mercurial? There was a highly voted issue that I saw sometime back.

e12e 11y ago
Gitlab might have the resources to properly support multiple vcs' - but even though I personally prefer mercurial (ui, reasonable large-file support) - I'm not sure it would be a good idea. Trac (trac.edgewall.org) did a lot of feature-experimentation -- and I think one take-away is that being an effective workflow support tool and supporting (even subtly) different back-ends with accompanying different best-practices/patterns (eg: git sub modules) is hard. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
marcinkuzminski 11y ago
If you're looking for Mercurial try out RhodeCode, it support all the Mercurial specific workflows like phases etc. RhodeCode actually supports Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.
- infocollector 11y ago
  Is Rhodecode completely open source like Kallithea?
  - sytse 11y ago
    Consider reading http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html for more background.
  - marcinkuzminski 11y ago
    No, Kallithea is an fork of older code base of RhodeCode. RhodeCode source code is not open, but it's free up to 25 users There's a big difference between Kallithea and RhodeCode. Kallithea development is stale, and there's not a lot of things going on in this project. RhodeCode is adding new features constantly, and the project is really active.

georgefrick 11y ago

I've been using GitLab myself and suggesting it to any clients with the proper infrastructure. When I found GitLab I tried it out, and finally ended up moving my SVN to Git (private projects). It's a great piece of software and I love the web hooks.

jobvandervoort 11y ago
That's great to hear. Any way we can improve web hooks for you?
- georgefrick 11y ago
  Arguments from the project/push add to url would be great! A page outlining why you are better than gitblit would help with clients :-) (who are all possible future EE users)
  - jobvandervoort 11y ago
    Thanks! I created an issue here [0], I'd love it if you could clarify it a bit there. I think we can do better in our comparisons with competitors. I created an issue [1]. I haven't heard someone asking before about a comparison with Gitblit. Please feel free to email me at job at companyname dotcom if you'd like me to discuss it with your clients. [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10860 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10860 [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/514 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/514

bitshepherd 11y ago

I remember GitLab. They interviewed myself and a bunch of my colleagues to test the salary waters here in the Bay Area and hired nobody because we were all "overpriced", with several being underpaid for the area. If you want the talent you need, especially in the Bay Area, you have to pay more than what the average developer makes in Amsterdam. I want to like GitLab, but I just can't get that bad taste out of my mouth.

btmiller 11y ago
Interesting. Yours is not the first account of a poor interview process with GitLab that I've heard. Even out of Texas, had a few colleagues that were very qualified and came out of it with a poor experience, to the point of changing their mind about wanting to work at GitLab.
- sytse 11y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that, what was went wrong during our interview process?
sytse 11y ago
We never interview people to test the salary waters, we know interviewing is serious for you and it is serious to us too. We're very aware of the salaries in SF (writing this from SOMA). But since we're a remote first company we can hire for anywhere in the world and because we're open source we get a lot of great applicants. So the bar is high and for the Bay Area it is even higher. Feel free to email me at sytse at company domain if you want to discuss your application.
- lwhalen 11y ago
  So sorry I missed this thread when it was hot. If you know you're not going to pay SF (or even US) sized salaries, why waste everybody's time with multiple interviews then? State up front "We're only willing to pay $80k, even if you've got the history (previous salary, measured prior project impact, demonstrated skill in the areas we need, etc) to justify 2x or 3x that". You won't be able to pick your interviewees brains on possible solutions, but you also won't be wasting their (and your) time.

jhasse 11y ago

Has anyone any experience with Gogs? How does it compare to GitLab? https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/

neumino 11y ago

I've been using GitLab instead of GitHub recently for all my new projects and honestly there's nothing worse than GitHub and a few things are better - like having protected branches and master by default in it -, private respositories etc. That being said, what both GitHub and GitLab are missing is actually becoming a "social network" or maybe more an active network. There are tons of interesting projects that pops up every day, that I would be interested in knowing about, contributing, but there's basically no way to learn about them. Kudos to the GitLab team for all its work :)

benwaffle 11y ago
https://github.com/explore/subscribe https://github.com/explore/subscribe

simi_ 11y ago

Sourcegraph has pivoted into a git hosting appliance, it's pretty cool, even if nowhere near as full-featured. https://sourcegraph.com/ https://sourcegraph.com/

nevi-me 11y ago

At least with Gitlab I can open an issue somewhere and follow it, like with open source projects. It doesn't disappear into the abyss with no feedback on what's happening. I've implemented two self-hosted Gitlab instances at work, for one of the instances on our private network, I'm still fighting with IT to allow us to use LDAP. Gitlab EE is still off our 'pockets' as management aren't too keen to pay for it, at least yet, but I hope that we'll get there. Our self-hosted instance is also a bit slow, not as slow as Gitlab.com, and if it was written in a language that I'm familiar with, perhaps I and some of my team could contribute to 'making it faster'. Pity I don't have enough time left in the day to learn Ruby. I've read up a bit on the work going on around Unicorn and workers, but maybe some of these things could be better written in other more 'performant' languages? For personal projects I still use Bitbucket + JIRA. I got to the point where I decided to stop looking for freebies and pay. JIRA has been awesome, totally worth the price.

mdw 11y ago

I've recently made an iOS App that integrates with GitLab. The people at GitLab have been incredible, they respond to my issues, improve the API with every release, I didn't expect this level of awesomeness when I started the project. What's great about GitLab, there's a release on the 22nd of each month, so you can depend on pretty much continual improvement. Even if you don't think GitLab is suitable for your Open Source project, talk to the team on their issue tracker, things get solved pretty quickly!

DouweM 11y ago
Because Matt is too nice to plug his own app, I will do it for him. Check out Trident: http://www.somerobots.com/trident.html http://www.somerobots.com/trident.html It's a really nice app and we are happy to make improvements on our side to make it even more capable with every release :)
dordoka 11y ago
Thanks for building Trident! Happy customer here. Gitlab servers work really well and is super fast. Patiently waiting for the Github servers functionallity to be on par with the Gitlab one :)
- mdw 11y ago
  Appreciate this compliment :) Please open any issues you see with the App in the issue tracker, helps me prioritise new features and candid feedback helps!
  - dordoka 11y ago
    Already opened some enhancement request on the issue tracker, thanks! Any help you need :)
jtreanor 11y ago
Just bought the app from these recommendations. It is beautifully made. Nice work :)
11y ago

spudfkc 11y ago

I get why GitLab wrote this, but it seems like just a stab at GitHub. There seems to be a lot of hating on GitHub here, but I personally love GitHub (and we use GitLab at my current employer). I think GitLab is doing a great thing, and I appreciate that their community edition is free and open source, but GitHub has been able to provide an invaluable service. They have a great community that facilitates open source projects and a vastly better UI than GitLab (though that isn't saying much with how awful GitLab's UI is). I'm eager to see how GitHub evolves in the future with GitLab as a competitor, as GitLab has a lot of nice features (built-in CI, etc).

s986s 11y ago
It is a stab and tbh Im glad they took the opportunity. There are few times when a product can be marketed to such effect for as little cost. What they did was show everyone how awesome they are and how stagnent Github is. Github can easily change but most of their decision making is done behind the scenes. Github grew popular because it was popular. Maybe thats worth something but long term they must adapt just like Gitlab
bebraw 11y ago
Yeah, it's bit of a stab. I'm really curious to see how GitHub responds (if they respond). A lot of good could come out of this even if it takes some competition to force some of that.

grimborg 11y ago

Using gitlab for go development, "go get" doesn't work. Googled around, couldn't find a solution. With github, on the other hand, it just works. I love gitlab (even made a git tool to easily create repositories from the commandline, gitgitlab) but these small things make a real difference. I'll end up paying for a github organization account just to get this annoyance out of the way.

sytse 11y ago
This should work, see https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5958 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/pull/5958 Please open an issue with what you tried exactly.

allan_s 11y ago

For me the big things missing (not only for big open source projects) 1. more than one level of subdivision for groups/projects (see below) 2. groups of users (call it department/team): because of 1 we have a lot of groups, (because all the small libs are in separate projects, so the project itself is a group, but of course we have several projects), so everytime somebody join the company, we have to add him in every single project (for them to be able to read the code), and we have also subcontractors, we would like to have a nice way to separate from the others I think this things are most "day to day annoying", other than that gitlab is pretty good, the CI system, the hook system, it's pretty easy to put that links to issue section, ticket reference redirect to redmine , taiga , jira or whatever.

sytse 11y ago
Regarding: 1. Nested groups should solve that in the future https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2772 2. We're thinking about that but for now the invite other group feature in EE will have to do.

thejameskyle 11y ago

I'm one of the co-authors of the Dear GitHub letter. This is the type of response I want so badly from GitHub (but wasn't expecting). GitLab still has a ways to go in terms of performance/reliability and polishing their product, but GitHub aught to be very nervous about them.

johnmaguire2013 11y ago
Could you explain what still needs to be done? I use Gogs for personal use, but evaluated Gitlab briefly and it seemed about as polished, if not moreso, as Github to me.

lowpro 11y ago

Great PR move by gitlab, and I don't mean that negatively. This kind of direct response is exactly what a company looking to improve should do, hats off to gitlab! Once their performance increases, maybe we'll see the momentum shift from Github.

p1mrx 11y ago

GitLab could differentiate their service by offering IPv6 support, which GitHub has so far declined to do.

sytse 11y ago
Cool, I created an issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/43 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/43
- p1mrx 11y ago
  Thanks, subscribed. When Google Code shut down, I migrated the IPvFoo[1] source code to GitHub, but it felt dirty using an IPv4-only service for that purpose; I'll probably move again to GitLab if they follow through. [1] https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo
  - sytse 11y ago
    We will, Ian is already working on it.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

Thank you GitLab for being yet another option, and for at least maintaining one Open Source version of your software at the very least.

sytse 11y ago
You're very welcome!

nhumrich 11y ago

I love gitlab and its features, and will commit to actually using it once dockerhub has gitlab integration. I agree though that is more of a limitation on dockerhub.

cyphar 11y ago

While I've always admired GitLab being a free software alternative to GitHub, the whole EE licensing stuff really rubs me the wrong way. EE is completely proprietary software, even for people who have paid for it (it only allows the freedom to modify the code, but you cannot run it as you wish or distribute code freely). I understand charging money for your software, but you can also charge for feature requests and support. There's no need to lock away features from people using your free software just because you've deemed that feature "not useful for you" or "pay-to-use". What I really don't get is the argument that "we won't liberate feature XYZ from EE because it's only useful for companies with 100+ developers". I think it's quite impressive that you can know what every user of your free software needs, and that you'll protect them from code only suited for enterprise. I'll still use GitLab (the fact there's a free software version is great), and I'll be the first to fork (or back someone else's fork) CE as soon as you get acquired and your free software is no longer maintained by you (see: Oracle with Solaris, and every other acquahire ever).

sytse 11y ago
What do you mean with 'cannot run it as you wish'? Regarding choosing features for EE, I recently updated the text on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship to read "is this feature much more relevant for organizations that have more than 100 developers?". Obviously every features is relevant to smaller organizations too. We make a guess and if we find out we guessed wrong we'll open source the feature, as happened today in this article https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 We think it is great that people have the freedom to fork CE. We open sourced our release tools https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/release-tools and the Omnibus Packaging https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/ https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/ to ensure that people can easily generate and alternative distribution.

merb 11y ago

What I would like to have in the free version is: - Project importing from Stash to GitLab - Mirror Projects - Display merge request status for builds on Jenkins CI - Rebase merge requests before merge - Git hooks (commit message must mention an issue, no tag deletion, etc.) These are pretty essential.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for voicing your wish. 1. Project importing from Stash makes sense, we already have it for BitBucket.com, any reason why you want Stash instead of using any repo by URL? 2. Mirroring sounds like a good one to open source. Feel free to make an issue. 3. There is a open source Jenkins plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/GitLab+Plugin https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/GitLab+Plugin that uses our new build status API, so I think this is doable already in CE. 4. If you want to use rebase before merge and git hooks can I ask how large your organization is?
- merb 11y ago
  1. Currently It's hard to migrate a whole Stash Server / Bitbucket Server. 2. Thanks 3. Oh, ok we already use a thing like that for Stash 4. Currently we are 5 people, but we use Git Hooks extensively and used a rebase workflow before we used a Stash Server. Also we only use a special style of commits that go into our global git server, people should take time to write their commit message. > yearly per user purchased in packs of 10 $390 per pack Remove the Pack and we are happy. Paying monthly would help also we try to grow, but sometimes we need to shrink (if people don't fit) we move really slowly when it comes to people, we had some issue's at the beginning, so we learned from that the hard way.

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Entalpi 11y ago

Ellahn 11y ago

Congratulations on GitLab, I personally use it and love it, and it's awesome to see amazing people like the VLC team considering GitLab. A suggestion I have is to consider open-sourcing and re-branding EE on a GPL-Like license that also requires projects hosted with it to be open sourced, while specifying that contributions to this version can be re-licensed by GitLab to be used by paying customers (Or re-licensed to MIT and released on CE). This way open source people get it all, and if you want to use it on closed source you pay GitLab. This also has the benefit of allowing open source developers to work with GPL, and the changing to MIT could even be decided before merging (Sending to either CE on MIT or EE on GPL+GitLabProprietary, according to developer decision). There's a lot to fix on the OpenSource world, but there are also so many possible ways. Best of luck to the GitLab team, I hope we see more amazing stuff from you (Btw, GitLab CI got a lot better recently, I hope you keep improving it. :D)

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for the kind words Ellahn. You suggestion is interesting. I'm afraid that releasing EE under a GPL-like license that prevents private projects is confusing. It would be GPL-like instead of GPL. I think that such a license muddles the waters and would not be in the best interest of open source. I presume that people want to be free to do as they please with the software, not be restricted to how they use it.

caiowilsonb 11y ago

I love that this thread main comments have become a sale negotiation. lol