13 ms·

Gitter is open source

522 points by chx 9y ago

mkesper 9y ago
Page should tell at first glance what gitter DOES.
- akerro 9y ago
  Gitter is one of the most popular chat room services that was based on github repositories and authentication, but was bought by their competitor - gitlab.
  - mabbo 9y ago
    I read the entire readme and had no idea that's what it was.
- thangngoc89 9y ago
  Gitter[1] is a chat service integrated with Github. They was acquired by Gitlab a few months ago [1] http://gitter.im/
- crisispalar 9y ago
  Yes they should have at least added the website url which is btw. http://gitter.im http://gitter.im
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Great point. We "soft launched" this yesterday so are still working on the documentation and hadn't made any official announcement yet until we've ironed out in any kinks. Looks like HN announced it for us...
  - chx 9y ago
    Blame reddit rather, that's where I saw it and only then posted here. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6l2jjj/gitter_is_open_source/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6l2jjj/gitter_...
    - dgellow 9y ago
      s/blame/thank/g
  - aluhut 9y ago
    ...and please turn off that heads on world animation thing. It's annoying and distracting. Just leave them on. We get the message.
- thinkMOAR 9y ago
  I was slightly annoyed by this too (that it lacks this simple info)
- kennydude 9y ago
  File a bug?
  - mydigitalself 9y ago
    Send a Merge Request ;)
- cmatija 9y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I opened an issue about having a description of the project in the landing page: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1746 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1746 There's also https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 which always shows you where you are (within GitLab), which is tangentially related
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  We've edited the description of the project now that has a simple explanation and a link to Gitter. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming!
volent 9y ago
If you go through the commit history you can see that they removed a lot of secret keys from the repo. What if the main reason why people don't want to opensource their project is because they don't know how to use their secret keys without including them in the repo ?
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Not having started out as an open source project, this was always a major consideration. Once we've finished fully open sourcing everything, we should look to write up our experience around the conversation, in particular, the tools we used.
  - bdcravens 9y ago
    ENVs in a private repo would definitely be convenient, but the best practices I've always seen are to omit those values even from a private repo (for security but also portability)
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  Andrew, co-founder of Gitter here. Removing secrets was a lot of work - more than I expected - while we open-sourced the product. I agree with your sentiment though. Handling secrets in a codebase is not something that it currently easy or standardised. As an aside, BFG Repo Cleaner really helped a lot with cleaning things up: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/ https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    I quite like git-crypt for secrets, I store them in a single place (eg as environment variables) and encrypt that.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    It's been my impression that the standard (promoted by services like Heroku and Travis) is to pass secrets as environment variables.
siliconc0w 9y ago
Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Mattermost just needs (AFAIK) a relational database. Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. Like 85% of the page is navigation. I like open source competitors to incumbents but maybe just copy Github here - no one is gonna say anything.
- teen 9y ago
  A relational database is overkill. My BBCode-enabled chatroom runs off txt files.
  - zingmars 9y ago
    Mattermost isn't exactly a simple bbcode-enabled chatroom though. They have support for multiple projects, an API etc. Achieving this with just text files would be quite the headache.
    - omnimus 9y ago
      They also have horrible android client and you have to pay for mobile notifications. I ended up using matrix/riot instead. Much better clients and grows nicely.
      - it33 9y ago
        Hi omnimus, thanks for the mention. Mattermost has a brand new, open source Android client in beta written in React Native used by thousands of testers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost.react.native&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost... It's greatly improved from the original version and official release is this month. Mattermost mobile notifications aren't a commercial feature, they are just off by default due to privacy (push notifications appear on a mobile device when the device is locked). Go to System Console > Notifications > Mobile Push > Send Push Notifications to enable. You can also deploy your own Mattermost Push Notification Server (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy) and compile your own Mattermost Android and iOS apps (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile) for total control.
kennydude 9y ago
Huh, they seem to be using Marionette for most of the UI apart from using React for "topics UI"
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  We started Gitter before React was A Thing and Marionette had a lot of the functionality we needed. We even hacked it to do server-side pre-rending and live collection binding. Topics was an experiment in how we could look to move towards react and evaluate blending technologies.
jsiepkes 9y ago
While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations. I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better. Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Great question. We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter. Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost. What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product. We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.
- kronos29296 9y ago
  Maybe something like GNU social. They already use Gitlab CE for the repos. Add gitter and we have replaced IRC.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    You say that as if it's a good thing...
    - kronos29296 9y ago
      IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter. Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting. I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter
palerdot 9y ago
As an aside, I badly miss the Github language statistics in gitlab repositories. This is one of the crucial info for any developer browsing through new repos and it is very counter-intuitive to have this info hidden from homepage.
- aargh_aargh 9y ago
  In addition to that, I'd like to see the number of SLOC for each language to get an idea how large the project is. Is this a weekend project? Is this Linux kernel?
  - drej 9y ago
    With `npm` and the current JavaScript culture, both a weekend project and the Linux kernel could have the same number of SLOC.
    - jononor 9y ago
      If people check in their node_modules, that's a good sign to stay away from the project.
      - heartbreak 9y ago
        What? Why? Why shouldn't I be able to run my entire application without relying on 3rd party distribution channels? Caching my dependencies in node_modules is perfectly reasonable to me. It's not like I'm getting binary diffs. It's Javascript.
        pritambaral 9y ago
        > Why shouldn't I be able to run my entire application without relying on 3rd party distribution channels? You should. That does not mean you should host source code and build output together. > Caching my dependencies in node_modules is perfectly reasonable to me. Precisely. That's caching. Not source hosting. > It's not like I'm getting binary diffs. It's Javascript. Binary node modules aren't uncommon, BTW. ---- Of course, you could be using git for more than source hosting, and I think that's precisely what your parent was commenting about.
banashark 9y ago
I've really enjoyed Gitter as a better means of communications when I have questions that are small enough to not need their own issue, yet also not worth it to ask on SO or some other platform. It has been nice to be able to have a nice way to talk with other open-source collaborators or get quick clarification on a small repo-specific question. It's cool to see how it was put together. Thanks for open sourcing this.
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  Thank you :)
- lamlam 9y ago
  The biggest problem I have with something like this is that unlike SO the answers aren't archived for others who may have the same issue. It would be nice if discussions like this on Gitter could be archived and searched the way mailing lists are.
  - suprememoocow 9y ago
    All public rooms are archived and searchable: https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/all https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/all https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/2017/06/14 https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/2017/06/14 I agree that chat isn't as digestible as SO, but it is definitely archived.
    - lamlam 9y ago
      Right, I meant more in a Q&A fashion with perpendicular discussion like with SA. But I'm happy to see there is an archive. I've had decade old Mozilla bug reports save me more than once.
soret 9y ago
That'll be helpful.
likelynew 9y ago
Didn't knew gitlab built gitter.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- DigitalSea 9y ago
  They didn't build it. They purchased it and announced it would be open sourced a couple of months ago.
  - drevet 9y ago
    Thanks for the news ;)
- filipa 9y ago
  Hi! GitLab did not built Gitter. It is explained in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/
richardknop 9y ago
Gitlab UI is truly horrid compared to Github. When I go to a repository page on Gitlab, the navigation and whitespace takes around 80% of my screen. On Github I can immediately see the directory structure. Also the colour scheme is bad IMO, everything is a light shade of grey, hard to quickly navigate the page as things look all the same while scrolling. Try using some darker shades and more contrast to make different parts of the page more easily distinguished.
- cmatija 9y ago
  Hiya, Anything specific about the UI you'd suggest changing? We'd love to hear your feedback so we can improve. Feel free to suggest improvements in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
  - majkinetor 9y ago
    I agree with commenter. My particular problems (not all about UI). - Submenu is so gray its hardly visible (the one showing files, commits etc) - Pipeline interface is horrible. If job is manual it cant be executed from the job page or repeated with latest code without resurfing trough menu. - Project builds can not be deleted in bulk without using API - Public projest are basically hidden, I have to explain to everybody how to find something. - Snippets do not have comments if not part of project. - Code review not possible outside of commit.
    - svesselov 9y ago
      Thank you for the specifics, it is helpful to know what UI elements we can improve on. The submenu is going away. We have done extensive testing on our navigation and are making significant improvements. Take a look at the issue, I would love to know your thoughts: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 We have a few issues to address improving the pipelines interface, take a look or create issues with your suggestions on how we can make the UI better for you.
- 9y ago
nik736 9y ago
Is there any option on GitLab to see instantly in what language a repo is written? (Like GitHub does)
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  From the project page, choose Repository | Charts. Beware though, it's pretty slow right now. It might be quicker to just look at a screenshot of it instead http://imgur.com/a/qBGVf http://imgur.com/a/qBGVf For reference: JavaScript 86.45 % CSS 6.79 % HTML 4.79 % Shell 1.07 % Lua 0.82 % Makefile 0.05 % Groovy 0.03 % Python 0.01 %
MoD411 9y ago
Hey, what do you use neo4j for? I am interested in your use case as I have recently started using it also. Thanks!
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  Gitter co-founder here: we use neo4j for suggesting rooms. So, if you're in room A and room B, and most people in those two rooms are also in room C, then we suggest that you join room C. As I mentioned elsewhere, we also use some non-neo4j based methods for suggestions (including your GitHub graph). One of the problems we've had with neo4j is that we haven't been able to make it scale. It frequently burns up from being overloaded. This is almost certainly down to the way we use neo4j but at some point I'd like to ditch it for a clustered suggestion algo that uses batch processes to cluster rooms together.
  - scaryclam 9y ago
    Sounds like you're going to be doing a lot of writes, which neo4j isn't designed for. While I get why you're using it, I'd suggest that it's not really the right tool for that job, which is possibly why you're having problems with it. Do you really need persistance at all? If the application crashes everyone would be kicked out of the channels anyway no? I think making an in memory graph and ditching the graph DB entirely would be more helpful for that kind of suggestion tool.
    - suprememoocow 9y ago
      We update on a batch[1] fairly infrequently (daily iirc). We don't need exact room membership since the results are aggregated. > If the application crashes everyone would be kicked out of the channels anyway no No, Gitter's room membership is persistent (between restarts, crashes and sessions) 1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/scripts/graphs/upload-graph.js https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/scri...
  - dsala 9y ago
    Neo4j Powers a 1.2 Terabytes Size Data with Nearly Three Billion Nodes and Nine Billion Relationships to Create the World’s Largest Consumer Identity Graph. Neo4j’s native graph clustering architecture is ideally suited to deliver real-time query performance at scale, across massive customer graphs. Please see: https://neo4j.com/news/qualia-media-customers-experience-greater-roi-identity-graph-analysis/ https://neo4j.com/news/qualia-media-customers-experience-gre...
reimertz 9y ago
I just wish I had time to work in my side-project http://git.chat http://git.chat and investigate the ability to implement chat-like functionalities into the git-repo/protocol itself. I really think any kind of discussions related to open-sourced projects should be stored together with it rather than a 3rd party in a closed environment.
- andreineculau 9y ago
  Start small: a CLI chat client, no auth (auth is the ability to push to the remote), install a fetch hook to notify user of unread chat msgs, done. At that point anyone can use it.
marknadal 9y ago
I absolutely LOVE gitter and am floored and enthralled to hear this news. Congrats team!
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  Glad to hear and thank you very much!
hobarrera 9y ago
Awful timing for this sort of announcement -- the same day they programmed a one-hour downtime for a deploy.
- kosinus 9y ago
  As mentioned further down this thread, it was not officially announced, just discovered.
notsrg 9y ago
Gitter is a great idea in theory. In practice it's just been a place for my questions to go unanswered.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  It may work better integrated directly with Gitlab as they will probably pay close attention to the community development.
- lbotos 9y ago
  This sounds like more of a problem of the projects that you are interacting with more so than the platform? I could say the same thing about many IRC channels, heck, even the internet in general.
- gedrap 9y ago
  Personally, I don't think that it's even a right format for questions which are not part of a larger discussion (e.g. deciding on details of some issue or PR). I have never seen link to gitter in google search results, and answers vanishing forever (not sure how good gitter search is though) does not sound good. Once I joined a few channels because I wanted to ask maintainers a quick question if $xyz sounds feasible or am I strongly misunderstanding things, because had some ideas how I could contribute. These were rather popular repos and all channels were full of low effort questions that could be either google-able or answered by spending a few minutes playing around.
- accnt 9y ago
  That doesn't sound like a Gitter issue but a lack of activity in that particular project/community. Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away. I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.
  - moxious 9y ago
    Totally not a gitter platform issue, but these platforms aren't really distinguishable from their user communities at the end of the day. If Facebook only had 2-3 of your friends on it, no one would be impressed by the features and sophistication, they wouldn't get that far.
hossen 9y ago
GitLab, a startup that provides open source and premium source code repository software that people use to collaborate on software, is announcing today that it has acquired Gitter, a startup that provides chat rooms that are attached to repositories of code so that collaborators can exchange messages. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  They announced the acquisition in March¹. Back then they also announced that gitter would be open source so now they released it. 1. https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/
iLemming 9y ago
I hope they'd finally make the search usable. Searching for things in Gitter godawful.
andreineculau 9y ago
> Whilst drinking your tea, make sure you have Gulp installed. You can do this with npm install -g gulp. You may need to use sudo for this. How blind can you be not to understand how evil this request is to your users? And you request this because... because you don't want to `sed 's|gulp |node_modules/.bin/gulp|g' Makefile` ? Similarly, too hard to check npm's version in Makefile, and run or not run `linklocal` yourselves?
- jbro72 9y ago
  Would you mind elaborating? As a user who would follow this instruction without thinking twice I'd like to understand better why this is a bad idea.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    Running any npm module install script through sudo is a bad idea unless you are very sure of exactly what will be installed and how. There's a reason why distribution packages are generally signed and package managers require packages match repo sigs.
  - beckler 9y ago
    It's not really that bad, unless you install it with sudo. The need to have gulp installed globally is unnecessary. They could just add it as a normal dependency and put the specific gulp command in the scripts section of their package.json. It wouldn't require the user to do anything extra.
  - andreineculau 9y ago
    Two others touched on the sudo part but the global flag is as bad. So they have a gulp file that works with gulp "v1". Gitter goes bust (inactive), next year gulp is bumped to "v2", you want to try out gitter, gulp fails, you have to digg why. Another scenario is when another project asks you do the same, install gulp globally, but it actually means gulp "v0". Now you can't run to projects side by side. Global deps should be versioned, the same way you do not see a respectable npm module with "*" semver in its package.json. Seeing things like this in 2017 from smth like gitter! now owned by gitlab! is just a big red warning "amateur work, please look away". How can you have a Makefile, a Makefile! and still require gulp, and still require people to run "npm install"? How? Where's the bare minimum logic?
ZeusNuts 9y ago
> Gitter requires MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch and Neo4J Why use one database when you can use four!
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Do you think they should store account data in redis? Or maybe they should use the ever-so-performant MongoDB as their cache, that'll work out great. Actually, scratch that, Gitter should probably store all its relational data in ElasticSearch because why use one database when you can use four?.
dom96 9y ago
Will the Android app be open sourced as well? Btw on my phone the notifications are never cleared, always showing a super old message from hundreds of days ago for me. It's annoying because I cannot see why I got the notification. I wonder if this is already in your bug tracker.
- vikp 9y ago
  In the original blog post announcing the Gitlab acquisition (http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/), there's mention of open sourcing the mobile apps -- "Next piece of wow: we will be open sourcing all of the Gitter. That’s right, the web application, the mobile apps, the whole nine yards, free and open."
kidsil 9y ago
Gitter is what IRC with fellow developers used to be like. Thanks for recreating that wonderful experience!

522 points by chx 9y ago

mkesper 9y ago

Page should tell at first glance what gitter DOES.

akerro 9y ago
Gitter is one of the most popular chat room services that was based on github repositories and authentication, but was bought by their competitor - gitlab.
- mabbo 9y ago
  I read the entire readme and had no idea that's what it was.
thangngoc89 9y ago
Gitter[1] is a chat service integrated with Github. They was acquired by Gitlab a few months ago [1] http://gitter.im/
crisispalar 9y ago
Yes they should have at least added the website url which is btw. http://gitter.im http://gitter.im
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mydigitalself 9y ago
Great point. We "soft launched" this yesterday so are still working on the documentation and hadn't made any official announcement yet until we've ironed out in any kinks. Looks like HN announced it for us...
- chx 9y ago
  Blame reddit rather, that's where I saw it and only then posted here. https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6l2jjj/gitter_is_open_source/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6l2jjj/gitter_...
  - dgellow 9y ago
    s/blame/thank/g
- aluhut 9y ago
  ...and please turn off that heads on world animation thing. It's annoying and distracting. Just leave them on. We get the message.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
I was slightly annoyed by this too (that it lacks this simple info)
kennydude 9y ago
File a bug?
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Send a Merge Request ;)
cmatija 9y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I opened an issue about having a description of the project in the landing page: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1746 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1746 There's also https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 which always shows you where you are (within GitLab), which is tangentially related
mydigitalself 9y ago
We've edited the description of the project now that has a simple explanation and a link to Gitter. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming!

volent 9y ago

If you go through the commit history you can see that they removed a lot of secret keys from the repo. What if the main reason why people don't want to opensource their project is because they don't know how to use their secret keys without including them in the repo ?

mydigitalself 9y ago
Not having started out as an open source project, this was always a major consideration. Once we've finished fully open sourcing everything, we should look to write up our experience around the conversation, in particular, the tools we used.
- bdcravens 9y ago
  ENVs in a private repo would definitely be convenient, but the best practices I've always seen are to omit those values even from a private repo (for security but also portability)
suprememoocow 9y ago
Andrew, co-founder of Gitter here. Removing secrets was a lot of work - more than I expected - while we open-sourced the product. I agree with your sentiment though. Handling secrets in a codebase is not something that it currently easy or standardised. As an aside, BFG Repo Cleaner really helped a lot with cleaning things up: https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/ https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/
- StavrosK 9y ago
  I quite like git-crypt for secrets, I store them in a single place (eg as environment variables) and encrypt that.
- kobeya 9y ago
  It's been my impression that the standard (promoted by services like Heroku and Travis) is to pass secrets as environment variables.

siliconc0w 9y ago

Asking users to run mongo, es, neo4j, and redis is a tall order. Mattermost just needs (AFAIK) a relational database. Also, less relevant but the Gitlab UI has far too much wasted whitespace. Like 85% of the page is navigation. I like open source competitors to incumbents but maybe just copy Github here - no one is gonna say anything.

teen 9y ago
A relational database is overkill. My BBCode-enabled chatroom runs off txt files.
- zingmars 9y ago
  Mattermost isn't exactly a simple bbcode-enabled chatroom though. They have support for multiple projects, an API etc. Achieving this with just text files would be quite the headache.
  - omnimus 9y ago
    They also have horrible android client and you have to pay for mobile notifications. I ended up using matrix/riot instead. Much better clients and grows nicely.
    - it33 9y ago
      Hi omnimus, thanks for the mention. Mattermost has a brand new, open source Android client in beta written in React Native used by thousands of testers: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost.react.native&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mattermost... It's greatly improved from the original version and official release is this month. Mattermost mobile notifications aren't a commercial feature, they are just off by default due to privacy (push notifications appear on a mobile device when the device is locked). Go to System Console > Notifications > Mobile Push > Send Push Notifications to enable. You can also deploy your own Mattermost Push Notification Server (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-push-proxy) and compile your own Mattermost Android and iOS apps (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile) for total control.

kennydude 9y ago

Huh, they seem to be using Marionette for most of the UI apart from using React for "topics UI"

mydigitalself 9y ago
We started Gitter before React was A Thing and Marionette had a lot of the functionality we needed. We even hacked it to do server-side pre-rending and live collection binding. Topics was an experiment in how we could look to move towards react and evaluate blending technologies.

jsiepkes 9y ago

While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations. I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better. Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.

mydigitalself 9y ago
Great question. We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter. Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost. What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product. We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.
kronos29296 9y ago
Maybe something like GNU social. They already use Gitlab CE for the repos. Add gitter and we have replaced IRC.
- kobeya 9y ago
  You say that as if it's a good thing...
  - kronos29296 9y ago
    IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter. Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting. I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter

palerdot 9y ago

As an aside, I badly miss the Github language statistics in gitlab repositories. This is one of the crucial info for any developer browsing through new repos and it is very counter-intuitive to have this info hidden from homepage.

aargh_aargh 9y ago
In addition to that, I'd like to see the number of SLOC for each language to get an idea how large the project is. Is this a weekend project? Is this Linux kernel?
- drej 9y ago
  With `npm` and the current JavaScript culture, both a weekend project and the Linux kernel could have the same number of SLOC.
  - jononor 9y ago
    If people check in their node_modules, that's a good sign to stay away from the project.
    - heartbreak 9y ago
      What? Why? Why shouldn't I be able to run my entire application without relying on 3rd party distribution channels? Caching my dependencies in node_modules is perfectly reasonable to me. It's not like I'm getting binary diffs. It's Javascript.
      - pritambaral 9y ago
        > Why shouldn't I be able to run my entire application without relying on 3rd party distribution channels? You should. That does not mean you should host source code and build output together. > Caching my dependencies in node_modules is perfectly reasonable to me. Precisely. That's caching. Not source hosting. > It's not like I'm getting binary diffs. It's Javascript. Binary node modules aren't uncommon, BTW. ---- Of course, you could be using git for more than source hosting, and I think that's precisely what your parent was commenting about.

banashark 9y ago

I've really enjoyed Gitter as a better means of communications when I have questions that are small enough to not need their own issue, yet also not worth it to ask on SO or some other platform. It has been nice to be able to have a nice way to talk with other open-source collaborators or get quick clarification on a small repo-specific question. It's cool to see how it was put together. Thanks for open sourcing this.

suprememoocow 9y ago
Thank you :)
lamlam 9y ago
The biggest problem I have with something like this is that unlike SO the answers aren't archived for others who may have the same issue. It would be nice if discussions like this on Gitter could be archived and searched the way mailing lists are.
- suprememoocow 9y ago
  All public rooms are archived and searchable: https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/all https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/all https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/2017/06/14 https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter/archives/2017/06/14 I agree that chat isn't as digestible as SO, but it is definitely archived.
  - lamlam 9y ago
    Right, I meant more in a Q&A fashion with perpendicular discussion like with SA. But I'm happy to see there is an archive. I've had decade old Mozilla bug reports save me more than once.

soret 9y ago

That'll be helpful.

likelynew 9y ago

Didn't knew gitlab built gitter.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
DigitalSea 9y ago
They didn't build it. They purchased it and announced it would be open sourced a couple of months ago.
- drevet 9y ago
  Thanks for the news ;)
filipa 9y ago
Hi! GitLab did not built Gitter. It is explained in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/

richardknop 9y ago

Gitlab UI is truly horrid compared to Github. When I go to a repository page on Gitlab, the navigation and whitespace takes around 80% of my screen. On Github I can immediately see the directory structure. Also the colour scheme is bad IMO, everything is a light shade of grey, hard to quickly navigate the page as things look all the same while scrolling. Try using some darker shades and more contrast to make different parts of the page more easily distinguished.

cmatija 9y ago
Hiya, Anything specific about the UI you'd suggest changing? We'd love to hear your feedback so we can improve. Feel free to suggest improvements in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
- majkinetor 9y ago
  I agree with commenter. My particular problems (not all about UI). - Submenu is so gray its hardly visible (the one showing files, commits etc) - Pipeline interface is horrible. If job is manual it cant be executed from the job page or repeated with latest code without resurfing trough menu. - Project builds can not be deleted in bulk without using API - Public projest are basically hidden, I have to explain to everybody how to find something. - Snippets do not have comments if not part of project. - Code review not possible outside of commit.
  - svesselov 9y ago
    Thank you for the specifics, it is helpful to know what UI elements we can improve on. The submenu is going away. We have done extensive testing on our navigation and are making significant improvements. Take a look at the issue, I would love to know your thoughts: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/32794 We have a few issues to address improving the pipelines interface, take a look or create issues with your suggestions on how we can make the UI better for you.
9y ago

nik736 9y ago

Is there any option on GitLab to see instantly in what language a repo is written? (Like GitHub does)

suprememoocow 9y ago
From the project page, choose Repository | Charts. Beware though, it's pretty slow right now. It might be quicker to just look at a screenshot of it instead http://imgur.com/a/qBGVf http://imgur.com/a/qBGVf For reference: JavaScript 86.45 % CSS 6.79 % HTML 4.79 % Shell 1.07 % Lua 0.82 % Makefile 0.05 % Groovy 0.03 % Python 0.01 %

MoD411 9y ago

Hey, what do you use neo4j for? I am interested in your use case as I have recently started using it also. Thanks!

suprememoocow 9y ago
Gitter co-founder here: we use neo4j for suggesting rooms. So, if you're in room A and room B, and most people in those two rooms are also in room C, then we suggest that you join room C. As I mentioned elsewhere, we also use some non-neo4j based methods for suggestions (including your GitHub graph). One of the problems we've had with neo4j is that we haven't been able to make it scale. It frequently burns up from being overloaded. This is almost certainly down to the way we use neo4j but at some point I'd like to ditch it for a clustered suggestion algo that uses batch processes to cluster rooms together.
- scaryclam 9y ago
  Sounds like you're going to be doing a lot of writes, which neo4j isn't designed for. While I get why you're using it, I'd suggest that it's not really the right tool for that job, which is possibly why you're having problems with it. Do you really need persistance at all? If the application crashes everyone would be kicked out of the channels anyway no? I think making an in memory graph and ditching the graph DB entirely would be more helpful for that kind of suggestion tool.
  - suprememoocow 9y ago
    We update on a batch[1] fairly infrequently (daily iirc). We don't need exact room membership since the results are aggregated. > If the application crashes everyone would be kicked out of the channels anyway no No, Gitter's room membership is persistent (between restarts, crashes and sessions) 1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/scripts/graphs/upload-graph.js https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/master/scri...
- dsala 9y ago
  Neo4j Powers a 1.2 Terabytes Size Data with Nearly Three Billion Nodes and Nine Billion Relationships to Create the World’s Largest Consumer Identity Graph. Neo4j’s native graph clustering architecture is ideally suited to deliver real-time query performance at scale, across massive customer graphs. Please see: https://neo4j.com/news/qualia-media-customers-experience-greater-roi-identity-graph-analysis/ https://neo4j.com/news/qualia-media-customers-experience-gre...

reimertz 9y ago

I just wish I had time to work in my side-project http://git.chat http://git.chat and investigate the ability to implement chat-like functionalities into the git-repo/protocol itself. I really think any kind of discussions related to open-sourced projects should be stored together with it rather than a 3rd party in a closed environment.

andreineculau 9y ago
Start small: a CLI chat client, no auth (auth is the ability to push to the remote), install a fetch hook to notify user of unread chat msgs, done. At that point anyone can use it.

marknadal 9y ago

I absolutely LOVE gitter and am floored and enthralled to hear this news. Congrats team!

suprememoocow 9y ago
Glad to hear and thank you very much!

hobarrera 9y ago

Awful timing for this sort of announcement -- the same day they programmed a one-hour downtime for a deploy.

kosinus 9y ago
As mentioned further down this thread, it was not officially announced, just discovered.

notsrg 9y ago

Gitter is a great idea in theory. In practice it's just been a place for my questions to go unanswered.

owebmaster 9y ago
It may work better integrated directly with Gitlab as they will probably pay close attention to the community development.
lbotos 9y ago
This sounds like more of a problem of the projects that you are interacting with more so than the platform? I could say the same thing about many IRC channels, heck, even the internet in general.
gedrap 9y ago
Personally, I don't think that it's even a right format for questions which are not part of a larger discussion (e.g. deciding on details of some issue or PR). I have never seen link to gitter in google search results, and answers vanishing forever (not sure how good gitter search is though) does not sound good. Once I joined a few channels because I wanted to ask maintainers a quick question if $xyz sounds feasible or am I strongly misunderstanding things, because had some ideas how I could contribute. These were rather popular repos and all channels were full of low effort questions that could be either google-able or answered by spending a few minutes playing around.
accnt 9y ago
That doesn't sound like a Gitter issue but a lack of activity in that particular project/community. Some projects prefer email/github issues over chat as there isn't an active community around it 24/7 for anyone to just jump in and ask away. I maintain an open source project where we have set up Gitter awhile ago. So far -even with a really small community like ours- I'm answering questions and interacting with users regularly.
- moxious 9y ago
  Totally not a gitter platform issue, but these platforms aren't really distinguishable from their user communities at the end of the day. If Facebook only had 2-3 of your friends on it, no one would be impressed by the features and sophistication, they wouldn't get that far.

hossen 9y ago

GitLab, a startup that provides open source and premium source code repository software that people use to collaborate on software, is announcing today that it has acquired Gitter, a startup that provides chat rooms that are attached to repositories of code so that collaborators can exchange messages. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

owebmaster 9y ago
They announced the acquisition in March¹. Back then they also announced that gitter would be open source so now they released it. 1. https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/

iLemming 9y ago

I hope they'd finally make the search usable. Searching for things in Gitter godawful.

andreineculau 9y ago

> Whilst drinking your tea, make sure you have Gulp installed. You can do this with npm install -g gulp. You may need to use sudo for this. How blind can you be not to understand how evil this request is to your users? And you request this because... because you don't want to `sed 's|gulp |node_modules/.bin/gulp|g' Makefile` ? Similarly, too hard to check npm's version in Makefile, and run or not run `linklocal` yourselves?

jbro72 9y ago
Would you mind elaborating? As a user who would follow this instruction without thinking twice I'd like to understand better why this is a bad idea.
- kbenson 9y ago
  Running any npm module install script through sudo is a bad idea unless you are very sure of exactly what will be installed and how. There's a reason why distribution packages are generally signed and package managers require packages match repo sigs.
- beckler 9y ago
  It's not really that bad, unless you install it with sudo. The need to have gulp installed globally is unnecessary. They could just add it as a normal dependency and put the specific gulp command in the scripts section of their package.json. It wouldn't require the user to do anything extra.
- andreineculau 9y ago
  Two others touched on the sudo part but the global flag is as bad. So they have a gulp file that works with gulp "v1". Gitter goes bust (inactive), next year gulp is bumped to "v2", you want to try out gitter, gulp fails, you have to digg why. Another scenario is when another project asks you do the same, install gulp globally, but it actually means gulp "v0". Now you can't run to projects side by side. Global deps should be versioned, the same way you do not see a respectable npm module with "*" semver in its package.json. Seeing things like this in 2017 from smth like gitter! now owned by gitlab! is just a big red warning "amateur work, please look away". How can you have a Makefile, a Makefile! and still require gulp, and still require people to run "npm install"? How? Where's the bare minimum logic?

ZeusNuts 9y ago

> Gitter requires MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch and Neo4J Why use one database when you can use four!

scrollaway 9y ago
Do you think they should store account data in redis? Or maybe they should use the ever-so-performant MongoDB as their cache, that'll work out great. Actually, scratch that, Gitter should probably store all its relational data in ElasticSearch because why use one database when you can use four?.

dom96 9y ago

Will the Android app be open sourced as well? Btw on my phone the notifications are never cleared, always showing a super old message from hundreds of days ago for me. It's annoying because I cannot see why I got the notification. I wonder if this is already in your bug tracker.

vikp 9y ago
In the original blog post announcing the Gitlab acquisition (http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/), there's mention of open sourcing the mobile apps -- "Next piece of wow: we will be open sourcing all of the Gitter. That’s right, the web application, the mobile apps, the whole nine yards, free and open."

kidsil 9y ago

Gitter is what IRC with fellow developers used to be like. Thanks for recreating that wonderful experience!