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Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? They upgrade every week. Who the hell does that to paying customers? And half of their website functiona

by iambvk 9y ago

Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? They upgrade every week. Who the hell does that to paying customers? And half of their website functionality doesn't work when they upgrade -- but their upgrade-banner always says "no down time is expected". It is a running joke in my company. We constantly get error 500 during upgrades. Merge requests don't commit. Rebase feature didn't work till a few weeks back. Gitlab runners get stuck every now and then. I use it everyday because of company policy, but folks, Gitlab is a really poor product. Feels like they test their product on paying customers. Also, do they even know how good their competition is at? You can't see the what is changed in response to your comment between two MR uploads. You can't add comments on unchanged parts of the code in the diff-view. You can't add comments when you view the diff between two uploads of an MR. My list of complaints is endless.

dom0 9y ago
> Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? Not at all. Some gripes: - Bad UX, just one example: many things that require one-click + type in competetitors products require more than one click (2-3). Another: Hard to see in the issue tracker which issues were updated. - Bad notifications: It seriously creates notifications for actions done by oneself. That makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever. - Somewhat sluggish performance .... compared to Github! - Poor review UX - Annoyingly bad issue listings (e.g. select some issues and change something about them) ... and I've literally only used it in one rather small project. Incidentally no one of the regular users I know are satisfied or ok with Gitlab.
- CogitoCogito 9y ago
  > It seriously creates notifications for actions done by oneself. That makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever. Ironically I wish this feature existed on Github (does it???). To be more specific, I wish I could get emailed when I make comments on PRs. As crazy as it sounds, it is much easier for me to track whether the comments have been addressed in a list of emails instead of trying to dig through Github's comment interface after I've made many different comments. Of course this wouldn't be necessary if that compact list just existed in Github already...
  - nishs 9y ago
    Yes, you can have your own updates sent to you. - Go to https://github.com/settings/notifications https://github.com/settings/notifications - Check "Email" under Watching - Then check "Include your own updates" in the section below
    - lloeki 9y ago
      OMG this being a thing is awesome. Thanks a lot. It's extremely useful to be able to read whole threads on email when you have a potent MUA.
- sytse 9y ago
  Thanks for the examples. - We're working on improving the UX. Issue filters allow you to type now. UX team work can be seen in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/163xL_FLQLsWD8Yv9GfkRdBHkqb_MqB-lnJBrihjQ-A0/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/163xL_FLQLsWD8Yv9GfkR... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDzyHnedoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDzyHnedoE The UX research in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZE9BNAnIPDKxgSyQU5subG2UfbraAn1dJy0emwdB2Sw/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZE9BNAnIPDKxgSyQU5su... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-Jto8FTmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-Jto8FTmA Sorry for the general answer, I can't be more specific since I don't know what flow you mean. - As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354087 some people like getting their own notifications, but maybe we should make it configurable. - GitLab.com is slow compared to GitHub.com, we're working on this in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 The GNOME team is looking to self host so they don't have this problem. - What is the nr. 1 thing you would improve in the review UX? I'm excited about https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1984 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1984 - I think mass updates to issues are getting some love in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28340 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28340
  - derimagia 9y ago
    For 2) as the link you posted pointed out it's by default in and for the few that like getting these notifications there's a out-in button. I'd agree that not having this be a default is a little bit bad UX but not having it at all is really bad UX.
    - sytse 9y ago
      I agree it makes sense to make this configurable. I've created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32383 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32383 to discuss.
      - sytse 9y ago
        As you can see in the linked issue this was implemented in GitLab 9.0 3 months ago.
wfleming 9y ago
I suspect GitLab's customer niche right now is teams that want private/on-prem source control but aren't willing to pay for GitHub enterprise. If that is in fact the case, I don't think it's surprising that they're lagging behind their competition on features and UX, since the cost-conscious customer doesn't value those things as much. (Or, more likely, the person holding the purse strings is not the one suffering from those deficiencies.)
- the_duke 9y ago
  The integrated CI is a big win. Everything else requires maintaining more pieces of infrastructure and is not integrated so nicely. I agree that Gitlab is far from perfect, but it's the best solution in this space IMO.
  - ovao 9y ago
    I think there are some areas where GitLab can improve their CI story, but I agree that having a One Stop Shop for that is actually very compelling.
    - sytse 9y ago
      This month we're coming out with scheduled CI builds and next month with multi-project builds. What improvement would you like to see in our CI?
      - jancsika 9y ago
        * compatibility with msys2. It's one of the best environments on Windows for building cross-platform apps (where cross-platform is Windows, OSX, and Linux). Ideally, I'd like to run a Windows VM for the CI build and have artifact uploads, all through the msys2 shell. I see a single rumbling here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/1699 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/...
        9y ago
rbanffy 9y ago
Well... The Gnome developers are... developers. If they find GitLab sucks, they can help fix it.
- afarrell 9y ago
  ... To a certain degree, sure. But having to stop working on the thing you're building in order to learn someone else's toolchain, build a fix and (and this is key) persuade another organization that a fix is valuable is incredibly expensive.
  - jjawssd 9y ago
    The KDE guys blew through several build systems before finally settling on cmake. It was a wild ride.
- awalton 9y ago
  This is the trap we fell into with Bugzilla...
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    One way to avoid it is to stop when it's good enough, understanding it will never be perfect. I've fallen in this trap more times than I dare to count.
kiloreux 9y ago
Finally someone sharing my opinion about it. I don't get all the hype they get especially on HN. Basically every experience I had with the product has been terrible so far. (And I gave it a lot of chances). I was keeping my thesis code on it and sometimes I go home and try to pull the work I have done in the lab and there's some error that I am facing. I moved my code to both bitbucket/GitHub and have been very satisfied. I am not quite sure what pushed Gnome to such proposal or even considering it. But IMHO using anyone of two other providers would save much time for Gnome contributors.
- detaro 9y ago
  They are clearly looking to self-host, which removes some of the issues of GitLab and gives it a massive cost benefit (not even sure if the enterprise products are even usable for public instances). EDIT: it's also the only open-source option of the 3, which per the linked document is important as well.
  - pooper 9y ago
    Sid will correct me if I am wrong but I think a big project like Gnome will want Enterprise because the last time I looked git hook was enterprise feature (hey they have to make money somewhere to keep the lights on) Overall, I am very grateful that gitlab exists but gitlab.com does make me feel like gitlab over all is a slow piece of software.
    - detaro 9y ago
      Unless there's some special pricing, I don't see any of the enterprise options work out. You can't pay per month per contributor for a projects public bug tracker. So I'd think they'd stay with the CE and hack in/around the features they need.
    - sytse 9y ago
      Gnome is considering to use GitLab CE. Git Hooks are available in that edition https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/custom_hooks.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/custom_hooks.html The only Enterprise Edition feature that is under discussion is merging without creating a merge commit. We're considering to open source this to make this move work. GitLab.com still feels slow but running an instance specifically for GNOME should be fast.
dirtylowprofile 9y ago
I definitely agree that GitLab is a very poor product. Upgrades every week and I get a 500 return, I mean I can't remember GitHub or Bitbucket having this sort of issue. Transferring my repos to GitLab is one of my bad decisions in my development life.
- deleted 9y ago
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- cmatija 9y ago
  Sorry that you had a bad experience using GitLab.com. We’re working on improving stability and performance on GitLab.com. There's several ongoing efforts in improving stability and performance (Gitaly[1], Infrastructure issues[2], ...) We always run the latest version of GitLab on GitLab.com and we’re working on making (almost) all our deploys downtime free (Issue: [3], MR: [4]). Of course, you can opt to self-host GitLab. It’s easy and quick to setup and requires very little maintenance via our omnibus package [5], and of course, we're here to help you if you get stuck along the way. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/?scope=a... [3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26130 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26130 [4] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/9976 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/9976 [5] - https://about.gitlab.com/installation/ https://about.gitlab.com/installation/
Perihelion 9y ago
I'm really sorry to hear about the crappy experience you've had with GitLab. If you'd like to detail some more complaints, I'd love to hear them and open some issues about these things. Feel free to shoot me an email (located in my profile) or reply here. Either way, thanks for the feedback you've provided here. As far as the frequent upgrades go, we've been using .com as a way of dogfooding GitLab at scale. Sometimes this goes well and other times it doesn't. We're actively working to improve this process so that downtime and breaking changes are less frequent. The end goal is to eradicate both issues so that upgrades are seamless.
- ghrifter 9y ago
  One issue I encounter often-ish is that when I'm on a gitlab page then hit the back button in the browser - I get a bunch of JSON spit onto the page instead of an actual HTML document. Whats up with that?
  - Perihelion 9y ago
    I've actually experienced this exact thing. Usually a refresh fixes it for me so I never gave it too much thought. I'm not sure what causes it exactly but I'll follow up with the team about it. It usually happens to me on merge requests -- do you notice it on specific pages at all?
    - sytse 9y ago
      I think this is due to Rails Turbolinks. Since we're deprecating Turbolinks https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ I think this problem should go away.
      - sytse 9y ago
        It seems to be caused by and fixed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28909 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28909
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deleted 9y ago
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briandear 9y ago
It's like that scene in Mean Girls when one of the girls desperately wants the expression "fetch" to become a thing but the other girls keep saying "Fetch isn't going to happen." I feel that way about Gitlab -- so many people want Gitlab to replace Github, but I can't understand why. "Let's replace product A with product B because Y Combinator." I'm just not sold. If Gitlab were 10x better, then maybe I'd get it, but it's not.
- aaronharder 9y ago
  Definitely not 10x better. But being open source and freely self-hostable give GitLab an edge over GitHub in two respects that are very important to some users.
  - irq11 9y ago
    being open source and freely self-hostable give GitLab an edge over GitHub in two respects that are very important to some users. users who don't pay for things.
  - kiloreux 9y ago
    Frankly it might matter to some people that it is self-hosted and open source. But I myself for one don't give a single wit about it. I want something that works for me and that makes my life easier as a developer. I already have my development problems to solve and in no way I want to add problems of the party that hosts my code.It's just not worth it.
  - rurban 9y ago
    This was the same with gitorious. Enterprises used their own gitorious servers, and waited for it to become better. Didn't happen. Github always was miles ahead. Same now for Gitlab. Will not happen.
- izacus 9y ago
  It's almost like we're in a free market economy where people can choose the best fit for them from multiple competing products. And then talk about benefits of them!
deleted 9y ago
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Keats 9y ago
> Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? I completely agree. I only use it because it has a CI for private projects for free but that's literally the only reason. The UX is not great (Github PRs are light years ahead of Gitlab merge requests), the overall UI is confusing and is hard to find stuff you want to, it is still extremely slow and lots of downtimes. They have some good ideas but the execution is usually not great. The only 2 selling points are the free CI and the fact that is open-source but overall I think Gitlab wouldn't be a hard competitor to beat for newcomers.
- dimitrieh 9y ago
  > Github PRs are light years ahead of Gitlab merge requests I would love to know more about your thoughts on this statement ;) in order to get to actionable issues on which we can improve!
  - Keats 9y ago
    Github pros: - Can see new stuff that happened since the last time I was on the PR - Review mode - Faster - Can view rendered file (like .md) without leaving the page - Commits visible on the main tab And for a more subjective one: the gitlab feels extremely crowded and a general lack of polish. Take the right sidebar on a merge request for examples, they are icons since it is hidden by default even in full screen. Hovering on the + shows a Add Todo dialog but hovering over any other icon does nothing. I had to click to see what the watch and stopwatch were. In general, I wasn't able to guess what any of the icons were, except for the labels icon. On the other hand, Github doesn't use icons: just a bunch of text which is imo nicer in terms of design and more user friendly.
    - dimitrieh 9y ago
      thanks! Will keep these things in mind!
    - cmatija 9y ago
      Hiya, Thanks for leaving some feedback. * Speed GNOME is looking to self-host their own GitLab CE instance. We understand that GitLab.com might have some performance issues. This is specific to our hosted GitLab instance due to its scale. A self-hosted instance on a much smaller scale is much much faster. Also, we're always looking to improve GitLab performance - check out issues labeled "performance" in the GitLab CE repo [1] as well as issues in the infrastructure repo which are about .com specifically [2] * Commits visible on the main tab A list of commits is just a click away in the MR view, in the "Commits" tab. Also commits that are added are also displayed in the main tab. * Can see new stuff that happened The main MR tab lists the actions that happened related to it in a chronological order, from first to last. You can always look at that and see any new MR changes * Sidebar The sidebar is expanded by default on larger screen sizes and collapsed on smaller ones to preserve screen real estate for the MR itself. I opened an issue about the icons themselves, see [3] * View rendered files in MR We have renderers for all kinds of files. But in a MR, we diff the MD source files. If we rendered them, diffing them would be almost impossible. I opened an issue about having toggle-able rendering in the changes tab in MRs. Feel free to chime in in [4] * Review mode Could you explain this in a bit more detail? Maybe we could open a feature proposal for this functionality. Hopefully I addressed all your concerns, feel free to add anything or dive into any of the issues, or even contact me personally. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al... [3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32413 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32413 [4] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32414 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32414
daverstam 9y ago
Didn't the article state that they would run their own GitLab inside Gnome's infrastructure? This mean they will have full control of the update process, right?
lauretas 9y ago
No you're not the only one :) I quote 100% what you said. Also I think you don't hear much complaints simply because people quit GitLab once they try it and just move to GitHub instead (or something else for self hosting).
- cmatija 9y ago
  Sad to hear that. If you have any specific complaints or issues. We'd love to hear about them so we can improve.
deleted 9y ago
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tcash 9y ago
We use it internally at the company I work for. I wouldn't say it's a bad product, but I wouldn't say it's a good product either. We've logged countless UX regression issues on their issue tracker and each one has taken 9 - 12 months to fix. Meanwhile, they keep churning out new features that we don't use. I wish they'd just stop adding new features and spend 6 months fixing their UX and improving stability + performance.
- lloeki 9y ago
  > We've logged countless UX regression issues on their issue tracker and each one has taken 9 - 12 months to fix Another data point: I've reported quite a number of issues, all of them have been triaged real quick, and many have been swiftly handled (the last couple were dealt with within a week). The longer ones are mainly larger scope (or depend on one thereof), or - wait for it - adding features. > I wish they'd just stop adding new features Every release brings a couple of features that we really enjoy having though, there's a balance to be had. BTW we're self-hosting and performance as well as reliability has been excellent. (disclaimer: happy EE customers).
- pedroms 9y ago
  Thanks for logging UX issues, especially regressions. Can you please link to one of those issues so the UX team can take a look?
Heliosmaster 9y ago
Not sure. My experience with our Self-hosted GitLab instance has been quite great. I only have some gripes in the UX/UI: - On GitHub i find the layout / navigation pretty clear. It's a bit hard to explain this feeling, but the information is always well packaged and that makes it easier to grasp (whether we're talking about commit, issues, reviews and whatnot). - GitLab has definitely improved (even though it's not that nice that you upgrade and everything moves) but still with their layout (probably using too much % of the screen?) i always am confused. I feel there's "too much information" on the screen and that makes it hard to understand where I am and what I am doing. But I really really love GitLab Pipelines: we use it pretty much as it was intended (CI using Docker images on a runner, manual tasks for deployments, etc.). And it simplifies a LOT our devops.
- svesselov 9y ago
  I really appreciate your feedback, improving the UX/UI of GitLab is my number one priority. We have been doing extensive research on Navigation, you can see the issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/7 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/7 I would love for you to take a look and give us feedback on the two directions we are considering. When we made a significant change to our navigation by removing the sidebar, most felt that there was "too little" information being shown, so I am intrigued by your "too much" comment.
adrianm 9y ago
I'll distinguish between their product (actually very good) and service (unreliable, slow). I consistently wish GitLab were as reliable and fast as GitHub, but I stick with them anyway because I think they are on the right path in business and product.
- dimitrieh 9y ago
  Improvements are high on our priority and are actively being worked on. To get to know more about our efforts, please take a look at our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg
dimitrieh 9y ago
Hi, i am sorry to hear your experience have been as it is thusfar. We are hard at work improving the product constantly. We though have to prioritise ;) > You can't add comments on unchanged parts of the code in the diff-view. Please join the discussion at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26722 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26722 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14396 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14396 > You can't see the what is changed in response to your comment between two MR uploads. and > You can't add comments when you view the diff between two uploads of an MR. My list of complaints is endless. For the following issues I created these gitlab issues to start the conversation. Internally and on the issue there may be a reference to already existing issues covering these subjects. Thanks for your feedback! You can always join the conversation and/or contribute in order to get things like this shipped faster! See: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32399 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32399 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32400 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32400
- iambvk 9y ago
  It seems description on 32399 could be misleading. I didn't mean diff-between-two-comments, but in-response-to-a-comment. Gerrit enables this by showing comments in-line even when we view diff between two MR uploads. On the left I see the old MR and my comments on that upload and on the right I see the new diff around the commented lines.
dominotw 9y ago
gitlab please please change your homepage to highlight free opensource hosting like github. Remove all the marketing mumbo jumbo from the homepage.
victorwu 9y ago
Thank you for the feedback regarding commenting on merge requests. The diff view is indeed very important for collaboration. In the upcoming 9.2 release (slated for May 22nd), we are adding the ability to comment on older versions of the code and diff between versions. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10388 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10388 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10572 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10572

by iambvk 9y ago

dom0 9y ago

> Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? Not at all. Some gripes: - Bad UX, just one example: many things that require one-click + type in competetitors products require more than one click (2-3). Another: Hard to see in the issue tracker which issues were updated. - Bad notifications: It seriously creates notifications for actions done by oneself. That makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever. - Somewhat sluggish performance .... compared to Github! - Poor review UX - Annoyingly bad issue listings (e.g. select some issues and change something about them) ... and I've literally only used it in one rather small project. Incidentally no one of the regular users I know are satisfied or ok with Gitlab.

CogitoCogito 9y ago
> It seriously creates notifications for actions done by oneself. That makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever. Ironically I wish this feature existed on Github (does it???). To be more specific, I wish I could get emailed when I make comments on PRs. As crazy as it sounds, it is much easier for me to track whether the comments have been addressed in a list of emails instead of trying to dig through Github's comment interface after I've made many different comments. Of course this wouldn't be necessary if that compact list just existed in Github already...
- nishs 9y ago
  Yes, you can have your own updates sent to you. - Go to https://github.com/settings/notifications https://github.com/settings/notifications - Check "Email" under Watching - Then check "Include your own updates" in the section below
  - lloeki 9y ago
    OMG this being a thing is awesome. Thanks a lot. It's extremely useful to be able to read whole threads on email when you have a potent MUA.
sytse 9y ago
Thanks for the examples. - We're working on improving the UX. Issue filters allow you to type now. UX team work can be seen in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/163xL_FLQLsWD8Yv9GfkRdBHkqb_MqB-lnJBrihjQ-A0/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/163xL_FLQLsWD8Yv9GfkR... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDzyHnedoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtDzyHnedoE The UX research in https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZE9BNAnIPDKxgSyQU5subG2UfbraAn1dJy0emwdB2Sw/edit#slide=id.p https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZE9BNAnIPDKxgSyQU5su... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-Jto8FTmA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8-Jto8FTmA Sorry for the general answer, I can't be more specific since I don't know what flow you mean. - As mentioned in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14354087 some people like getting their own notifications, but maybe we should make it configurable. - GitLab.com is slow compared to GitHub.com, we're working on this in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 The GNOME team is looking to self host so they don't have this problem. - What is the nr. 1 thing you would improve in the review UX? I'm excited about https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1984 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1984 - I think mass updates to issues are getting some love in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28340 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28340
- derimagia 9y ago
  For 2) as the link you posted pointed out it's by default in and for the few that like getting these notifications there's a out-in button. I'd agree that not having this be a default is a little bit bad UX but not having it at all is really bad UX.
  - sytse 9y ago
    I agree it makes sense to make this configurable. I've created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32383 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32383 to discuss.
    - sytse 9y ago
      As you can see in the linked issue this was implemented in GitLab 9.0 3 months ago.

wfleming 9y ago

I suspect GitLab's customer niche right now is teams that want private/on-prem source control but aren't willing to pay for GitHub enterprise. If that is in fact the case, I don't think it's surprising that they're lagging behind their competition on features and UX, since the cost-conscious customer doesn't value those things as much. (Or, more likely, the person holding the purse strings is not the one suffering from those deficiencies.)

the_duke 9y ago
The integrated CI is a big win. Everything else requires maintaining more pieces of infrastructure and is not integrated so nicely. I agree that Gitlab is far from perfect, but it's the best solution in this space IMO.
- ovao 9y ago
  I think there are some areas where GitLab can improve their CI story, but I agree that having a One Stop Shop for that is actually very compelling.
  - sytse 9y ago
    This month we're coming out with scheduled CI builds and next month with multi-project builds. What improvement would you like to see in our CI?
    - jancsika 9y ago
      * compatibility with msys2. It's one of the best environments on Windows for building cross-platform apps (where cross-platform is Windows, OSX, and Linux). Ideally, I'd like to run a Windows VM for the CI build and have artifact uploads, all through the msys2 shell. I see a single rumbling here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/1699 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/issues/...
      - 9y ago

rbanffy 9y ago

Well... The Gnome developers are... developers. If they find GitLab sucks, they can help fix it.

afarrell 9y ago
... To a certain degree, sure. But having to stop working on the thing you're building in order to learn someone else's toolchain, build a fix and (and this is key) persuade another organization that a fix is valuable is incredibly expensive.
- jjawssd 9y ago
  The KDE guys blew through several build systems before finally settling on cmake. It was a wild ride.
awalton 9y ago
This is the trap we fell into with Bugzilla...
- rbanffy 9y ago
  One way to avoid it is to stop when it's good enough, understanding it will never be perfect. I've fallen in this trap more times than I dare to count.

kiloreux 9y ago

Finally someone sharing my opinion about it. I don't get all the hype they get especially on HN. Basically every experience I had with the product has been terrible so far. (And I gave it a lot of chances). I was keeping my thesis code on it and sometimes I go home and try to pull the work I have done in the lab and there's some error that I am facing. I moved my code to both bitbucket/GitHub and have been very satisfied. I am not quite sure what pushed Gnome to such proposal or even considering it. But IMHO using anyone of two other providers would save much time for Gnome contributors.

detaro 9y ago
They are clearly looking to self-host, which removes some of the issues of GitLab and gives it a massive cost benefit (not even sure if the enterprise products are even usable for public instances). EDIT: it's also the only open-source option of the 3, which per the linked document is important as well.
- pooper 9y ago
  Sid will correct me if I am wrong but I think a big project like Gnome will want Enterprise because the last time I looked git hook was enterprise feature (hey they have to make money somewhere to keep the lights on) Overall, I am very grateful that gitlab exists but gitlab.com does make me feel like gitlab over all is a slow piece of software.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Unless there's some special pricing, I don't see any of the enterprise options work out. You can't pay per month per contributor for a projects public bug tracker. So I'd think they'd stay with the CE and hack in/around the features they need.
  - sytse 9y ago
    Gnome is considering to use GitLab CE. Git Hooks are available in that edition https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/custom_hooks.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/administration/custom_hooks.html The only Enterprise Edition feature that is under discussion is merging without creating a merge commit. We're considering to open source this to make this move work. GitLab.com still feels slow but running an instance specifically for GNOME should be fast.

dirtylowprofile 9y ago

I definitely agree that GitLab is a very poor product. Upgrades every week and I get a 500 return, I mean I can't remember GitHub or Bitbucket having this sort of issue. Transferring my repos to GitLab is one of my bad decisions in my development life.

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cmatija 9y ago
Sorry that you had a bad experience using GitLab.com. We’re working on improving stability and performance on GitLab.com. There's several ongoing efforts in improving stability and performance (Gitaly[1], Infrastructure issues[2], ...) We always run the latest version of GitLab on GitLab.com and we’re working on making (almost) all our deploys downtime free (Issue: [3], MR: [4]). Of course, you can opt to self-host GitLab. It’s easy and quick to setup and requires very little maintenance via our omnibus package [5], and of course, we're here to help you if you get stuck along the way. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/?scope=a... [3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26130 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26130 [4] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/9976 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/9976 [5] - https://about.gitlab.com/installation/ https://about.gitlab.com/installation/

Perihelion 9y ago

I'm really sorry to hear about the crappy experience you've had with GitLab. If you'd like to detail some more complaints, I'd love to hear them and open some issues about these things. Feel free to shoot me an email (located in my profile) or reply here. Either way, thanks for the feedback you've provided here. As far as the frequent upgrades go, we've been using .com as a way of dogfooding GitLab at scale. Sometimes this goes well and other times it doesn't. We're actively working to improve this process so that downtime and breaking changes are less frequent. The end goal is to eradicate both issues so that upgrades are seamless.

ghrifter 9y ago
One issue I encounter often-ish is that when I'm on a gitlab page then hit the back button in the browser - I get a bunch of JSON spit onto the page instead of an actual HTML document. Whats up with that?
- Perihelion 9y ago
  I've actually experienced this exact thing. Usually a refresh fixes it for me so I never gave it too much thought. I'm not sure what causes it exactly but I'll follow up with the team about it. It usually happens to me on merge requests -- do you notice it on specific pages at all?
  - sytse 9y ago
    I think this is due to Rails Turbolinks. Since we're deprecating Turbolinks https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ I think this problem should go away.
    - sytse 9y ago
      It seems to be caused by and fixed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28909 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28909
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briandear 9y ago

It's like that scene in Mean Girls when one of the girls desperately wants the expression "fetch" to become a thing but the other girls keep saying "Fetch isn't going to happen." I feel that way about Gitlab -- so many people want Gitlab to replace Github, but I can't understand why. "Let's replace product A with product B because Y Combinator." I'm just not sold. If Gitlab were 10x better, then maybe I'd get it, but it's not.

aaronharder 9y ago
Definitely not 10x better. But being open source and freely self-hostable give GitLab an edge over GitHub in two respects that are very important to some users.
- irq11 9y ago
  being open source and freely self-hostable give GitLab an edge over GitHub in two respects that are very important to some users. users who don't pay for things.
- kiloreux 9y ago
  Frankly it might matter to some people that it is self-hosted and open source. But I myself for one don't give a single wit about it. I want something that works for me and that makes my life easier as a developer. I already have my development problems to solve and in no way I want to add problems of the party that hosts my code.It's just not worth it.
- rurban 9y ago
  This was the same with gitorious. Enterprises used their own gitorious servers, and waited for it to become better. Didn't happen. Github always was miles ahead. Same now for Gitlab. Will not happen.
izacus 9y ago
It's almost like we're in a free market economy where people can choose the best fit for them from multiple competing products. And then talk about benefits of them!

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Keats 9y ago

> Am I the only one who thinks gitlab is a poor product? I completely agree. I only use it because it has a CI for private projects for free but that's literally the only reason. The UX is not great (Github PRs are light years ahead of Gitlab merge requests), the overall UI is confusing and is hard to find stuff you want to, it is still extremely slow and lots of downtimes. They have some good ideas but the execution is usually not great. The only 2 selling points are the free CI and the fact that is open-source but overall I think Gitlab wouldn't be a hard competitor to beat for newcomers.

dimitrieh 9y ago
> Github PRs are light years ahead of Gitlab merge requests I would love to know more about your thoughts on this statement ;) in order to get to actionable issues on which we can improve!
- Keats 9y ago
  Github pros: - Can see new stuff that happened since the last time I was on the PR - Review mode - Faster - Can view rendered file (like .md) without leaving the page - Commits visible on the main tab And for a more subjective one: the gitlab feels extremely crowded and a general lack of polish. Take the right sidebar on a merge request for examples, they are icons since it is hidden by default even in full screen. Hovering on the + shows a Add Todo dialog but hovering over any other icon does nothing. I had to click to see what the watch and stopwatch were. In general, I wasn't able to guess what any of the icons were, except for the labels icon. On the other hand, Github doesn't use icons: just a bunch of text which is imo nicer in terms of design and more user friendly.
  - dimitrieh 9y ago
    thanks! Will keep these things in mind!
  - cmatija 9y ago
    Hiya, Thanks for leaving some feedback. * Speed GNOME is looking to self-host their own GitLab CE instance. We understand that GitLab.com might have some performance issues. This is specific to our hosted GitLab instance due to its scale. A self-hosted instance on a much smaller scale is much much faster. Also, we're always looking to improve GitLab performance - check out issues labeled "performance" in the GitLab CE repo [1] as well as issues in the infrastructure repo which are about .com specifically [2] * Commits visible on the main tab A list of commits is just a click away in the MR view, in the "Commits" tab. Also commits that are added are also displayed in the main tab. * Can see new stuff that happened The main MR tab lists the actions that happened related to it in a chronological order, from first to last. You can always look at that and see any new MR changes * Sidebar The sidebar is expanded by default on larger screen sizes and collapsed on smaller ones to preserve screen real estate for the MR itself. I opened an issue about the icons themselves, see [3] * View rendered files in MR We have renderers for all kinds of files. But in a MR, we diff the MD source files. If we rendered them, diffing them would be almost impossible. I opened an issue about having toggle-able rendering in the changes tab in MRs. Feel free to chime in in [4] * Review mode Could you explain this in a bit more detail? Maybe we could open a feature proposal for this functionality. Hopefully I addressed all your concerns, feel free to add anything or dive into any of the issues, or even contact me personally. [1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf... [2] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&utf8=&state=opened&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al... [3] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32413 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32413 [4] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32414 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32414

daverstam 9y ago

Didn't the article state that they would run their own GitLab inside Gnome's infrastructure? This mean they will have full control of the update process, right?

lauretas 9y ago

No you're not the only one :) I quote 100% what you said. Also I think you don't hear much complaints simply because people quit GitLab once they try it and just move to GitHub instead (or something else for self hosting).

cmatija 9y ago
Sad to hear that. If you have any specific complaints or issues. We'd love to hear about them so we can improve.

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tcash 9y ago

We use it internally at the company I work for. I wouldn't say it's a bad product, but I wouldn't say it's a good product either. We've logged countless UX regression issues on their issue tracker and each one has taken 9 - 12 months to fix. Meanwhile, they keep churning out new features that we don't use. I wish they'd just stop adding new features and spend 6 months fixing their UX and improving stability + performance.

lloeki 9y ago
> We've logged countless UX regression issues on their issue tracker and each one has taken 9 - 12 months to fix Another data point: I've reported quite a number of issues, all of them have been triaged real quick, and many have been swiftly handled (the last couple were dealt with within a week). The longer ones are mainly larger scope (or depend on one thereof), or - wait for it - adding features. > I wish they'd just stop adding new features Every release brings a couple of features that we really enjoy having though, there's a balance to be had. BTW we're self-hosting and performance as well as reliability has been excellent. (disclaimer: happy EE customers).
pedroms 9y ago
Thanks for logging UX issues, especially regressions. Can you please link to one of those issues so the UX team can take a look?

Heliosmaster 9y ago

Not sure. My experience with our Self-hosted GitLab instance has been quite great. I only have some gripes in the UX/UI: - On GitHub i find the layout / navigation pretty clear. It's a bit hard to explain this feeling, but the information is always well packaged and that makes it easier to grasp (whether we're talking about commit, issues, reviews and whatnot). - GitLab has definitely improved (even though it's not that nice that you upgrade and everything moves) but still with their layout (probably using too much % of the screen?) i always am confused. I feel there's "too much information" on the screen and that makes it hard to understand where I am and what I am doing. But I really really love GitLab Pipelines: we use it pretty much as it was intended (CI using Docker images on a runner, manual tasks for deployments, etc.). And it simplifies a LOT our devops.

svesselov 9y ago
I really appreciate your feedback, improving the UX/UI of GitLab is my number one priority. We have been doing extensive research on Navigation, you can see the issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/7 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/issues/7 I would love for you to take a look and give us feedback on the two directions we are considering. When we made a significant change to our navigation by removing the sidebar, most felt that there was "too little" information being shown, so I am intrigued by your "too much" comment.

adrianm 9y ago

I'll distinguish between their product (actually very good) and service (unreliable, slow). I consistently wish GitLab were as reliable and fast as GitHub, but I stick with them anyway because I think they are on the right path in business and product.

dimitrieh 9y ago
Improvements are high on our priority and are actively being worked on. To get to know more about our efforts, please take a look at our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnMGQ8QHMAnVIsI3xJrihhg

dimitrieh 9y ago

Hi, i am sorry to hear your experience have been as it is thusfar. We are hard at work improving the product constantly. We though have to prioritise ;) > You can't add comments on unchanged parts of the code in the diff-view. Please join the discussion at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26722 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/26722 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14396 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14396 > You can't see the what is changed in response to your comment between two MR uploads. and > You can't add comments when you view the diff between two uploads of an MR. My list of complaints is endless. For the following issues I created these gitlab issues to start the conversation. Internally and on the issue there may be a reference to already existing issues covering these subjects. Thanks for your feedback! You can always join the conversation and/or contribute in order to get things like this shipped faster! See: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32399 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32399 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32400 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32400

iambvk 9y ago
It seems description on 32399 could be misleading. I didn't mean diff-between-two-comments, but in-response-to-a-comment. Gerrit enables this by showing comments in-line even when we view diff between two MR uploads. On the left I see the old MR and my comments on that upload and on the right I see the new diff around the commented lines.

dominotw 9y ago

gitlab please please change your homepage to highlight free opensource hosting like github. Remove all the marketing mumbo jumbo from the homepage.

victorwu 9y ago

Thank you for the feedback regarding commenting on merge requests. The diff view is indeed very important for collaboration. In the upcoming 9.2 release (slated for May 22nd), we are adding the ability to comment on older versions of the code and diff between versions. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10388 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10388 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10572 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/10572