8 ms·

Gitlab 11.8 Released

175 points by bjoko 8y ago

Jnr 8y ago
Gitlab is great and I have used it for years but I recently switched to Gogs for self hosted repositories because it is much faster, easier to set up and walk in a park to maintain. It doesn't have all the features (bloat) that Gitlab has but it can probably satisfy >95% of git users.
- StyloBill 8y ago
  Yes but Gogs is self-hosted whereas Gitlab offers hosting solutions.
  - tenebrisalietum 8y ago
    You can host Gitlab.
  - techntoke 8y ago
    GitLab has self hosted solutions
  - dsumenkovic 8y ago
    Here's a link to the self-hosted GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed
  - lucideer 8y ago
    I'm somewhat dumbfounded at the no-less-than-three sibling commenters here all chiming in with the same repeated misinterpretation of your post. I suspect those downvoting you didn't take time to read your comment properly either.
    - manwithaplan 8y ago
      I blame the misunderstandings on the non-standard syntax: > Yes but Gogs is self-hosted whereas Gitlab offers hosting solutions. Replying that, to someone who literally said they switched from GitLab to Gogs for self-hosted repositories, also made me parse it as implying one word: > Yes, but Gogs is self-hosted, whereas GitLab offers [only] hosting solutions. but the author probably meant something like: > Yes, but Gogs is [exclusively] self-hosted, whereas GitLab [also] offers hosting solutions [so switching is not always an option].
      - StyloBill 8y ago
        Spot on. I'm a non-native english speaker, so my syntax sometimes leaves to be desired. Sorry for the confusion.
- W-Stool 8y ago
  Did you look at Gitea before you stood up Gogs? I'm looking at both and will choose one shortly, any insight is most appreciated.
  - davidcollantes 8y ago
    Gitea has more options and features, but it is more bleeding edge. Unkwon (Gogs author) handles contributions to Gogs very carefully, taking painstakingly attention to the code being submitted. That has resulted on a very stable, and reliable software. You decide. :-)
    - tshannon 8y ago
      To rephrase what you said, Gitea is more community driven. You'd have a better chance contributing and fixing issues that impact you with Gitea, compared to Gogs. Personally I switched over to Gitea. One of the more tangible differences between the two is that Gitea bundles all the web assets into the executable used to run the service, so you just have a single exe replace on upgrades. It's been a while since I've used Gogs, but looking at their latest info you still need to remove some folders and not others when updating Gogs, because some of them are template and static files used by the web server.
- Suri_GitLab 8y ago
  Hello! Since GitLab is a single application that covers the entire software development lifecycle, we're a bit "bigger" than Gogs, which only tackles SCM. We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources, including forming a team to specialize in this area, and we're really grateful for your feedback. :)
  - letientai299 8y ago
    May I know what is the requirements for who would join that team?
    - Suri_GitLab 8y ago
      Hi! We just opened up hiring for an Engineering Manager and Senior Product Manager - I'd love it if you applied and we became teammates! :) Engineering Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4201458002 https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4201458002 Senior Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4192657002 https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4192657002
      - letientai299 8y ago
        I'm still in my early years of professional, so guess I'll wait for more low level and engineering focused roles open. Thanks.
  - chmln 8y ago
    > We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources I used to use gitlab at work daily and releases would mention how performance is being tackled consistently. However, I have not seen any large improvements at all, suggesting that there is an impenetrable wall made of the underlying technologies. Gitlab is based primarily on Ruby-on-Rails, which doesn't particularly shine with neither memory usage nor performance. What sort of effort would even reduce the use of resources significantly, short of a rewrite?
    - yutghgh 8y ago
StevePerkins 8y ago
You know, there was a thread the other day about a new release announcement for some IDE. It was quickly removed, on grounds that the Hacker News FAQ says you shouldn't repost something "If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so". I remember thinking that it was a real stretch to interpret different release announcements, separated by months, as "duplicate" posts. But this was coming from dang himself, so I guess that's the authoritative view. Just pointing out that Gitlab operates on a more or less monthly release cadence. Pretty much every release gets an announcement thread on HN's front-page for the full day. And usually there's a separate front-page thread or two in between, to announce stuff in upcoming releases. I've never once seen any of this removed, or even questioned.
- markdog12 8y ago
  I’ve submitted it a few times, just because I use it and like it, interested in discussion about it. I don’t know if I agree with the rule (a whole year?), but I’ll stop submitting it.
  - StevePerkins 8y ago
    Oh, to be clear... I'm perfectly HAPPY with release announcements, and believe that strict interpretation was ridiculous. I was simply taking issue with the inconsistency, arbitrary interpretation, selective enforcement, etc.
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      Same here. I'm generally extremely impressed with HN mods but this is one of two (three) minor nits I see. And to be clear I'd also prefer both to be accepted, at least a little softer duplicate check than today.
    - addicted 8y ago
      If the release isn’t noteworthy enough, wouldn’t the downvoted, or the lack of upvotes kill it anyways? I feel marking it as a dupe seems an unnecessary mitigation when these are the exact kind of things crowdvoting is really good at.
bbeausej 8y ago
I really like the update pace of Gitlab. Our teams are all based on an on-prem EE (low tier) and it's been a pleasure to receive a steady stream of valuable updates. Passing on all the good things that Gitlab does for us already; I _really_ wish gitlab would push to make more of the Project Management features accessible to the lower tiers (maybe even CE). Epics and Roadmaps linked to Gitlab's SCM and DevOps features would be a _real_ contender to JIRA/Confluence in the market but it's currently hidden behind a very steep ~100$/m "ultimate" plan.
- dsumenkovic 8y ago
  GitLab Community Advocate here. Thank you very much for the feedback. I understand your desire to move some features to the lower tiers and that's a good sign for us that we are on the right path with our offerings. From time to time it happens that we move some features to the lower tiers or even core/free tier. I wanted to share few more words on how we are trying to be the good stewards, you can find more about our stewardship rules and promises here https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-are-paid-only https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-...
- sytse 8y ago
  Thanks for your comment. Glad to hear you like the update pace. Regarding epics we're considering moving them to a more affordable plan while keeping the roadmap in Ultimate. But we're not close to a decision.
  - bbeausej 8y ago
    Thanks for the update! I really think there's a huge opportunity of growth there that goes beyond SCM/DevOps for medium sized teams.
orware 8y ago
Congrats on the new release! Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was hoping I might be able to share some GitLab for Education Requests: Working in a community college it's been really tricky to get the agreement signed for us to take advantage of this at all (that's more of an issue with the way we work in particular, but I just wanted to throw it out there that it would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed because for example our president doesn't want to do an esignature so that means sending it over to their office for signature, waiting a long while, getting it back, and then finding out our deadline passed and haven't to try it all over again so if that process could be changed, or better yet removed, that would be great). Related to the GitLab for Education license limitations...I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well, but it definitely seems to be limited to just Faculty/Staff type usage which ends up being a bummer for us since now I can't promote it anymore internally with us a free option we can sign up for anymore and other ideas I was potentially thinking of (the Group Issue Boards seemed like it could potentially be a nice way to organize Kanban Boards across the college and make it so that staff from other areas outside of IT could make use of Kanban Boards too...we've been using Kanboard inside of IT for a few years now, but haven't made a strong push to have other departments use it). In terms of affordability, that would limit us to licensing GitLab primarily for IT stuff only + for 10 users that's already going to be a pretty big cost for our small college / IT department. Lastly, I know there's Wiki functionality and GitLab Pages already and that can be used for documentation to a degree, but is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative into GitLab as well? Right now we'd like start using some sort of nice, comprehensive documentation option, but I'm not really sold on Confluence at the moment. Admittedly, right now with the info about us needing to license GitLab for our IT department staff as well being fairly new to me that's thrown the whole idea of using GitLab out the window (almost), but the lack of a Confluence option built-in to GitLab would be another potential blocker for us (I do like the idea of having everything all under one system if possible to simplify usage for us). tldr: If you can make edu licensing completely free (for staff too) and simple to use/signup for (without an agreement needing to be signed), plus add a Confluence alternative that would be awesome!
- 8y ago
sytse 8y ago
Overview of the three main improvements in this release: 1. JavaScript coverage in SAST GitLab Static Application Security Testing (SAST) scans source code and helps to detect potential security vulnerabilities early in the pipeline. In 11.8, we've added SAST support for JavaScript, building on top of our existing node.js support. Now any JavaScript file can be scanned, like static scripts and HTML. A vital practice in DevSecOps is to scan code changes with each commit, and with this change, we're covering one of the most popular web languages, helping you to find JavaScript risks as early as possible. 2. GitLab Pages for subgroups and templates GitLab Pages got a whole lot better this release, with two key improvements. First, we have introduced GitLab Pages support for projects in subgroups, enabling these projects to easily publish content to the web. GitLab 11.8 also bundles our most popular templates for Pages, so users can get started with just a single click. 3. Error Tracking with Sentry Application errors provide important insight into the health of your application, and can help detect problems without waiting for users to report them. GitLab 11.8 can now display the most recent errors directly within the project, making them easier and quicker to find and take action on.
laktak 8y ago
I like and use Gitlab, I just wish they would call it PR instead of merge request.
- williamchia 8y ago
  Funny thing, when I joined the team at GitLab over a year ago I was really annoyed by this since I'd been using PR for the better part of a decade. Now I'm so used to saying MR that PR sounds very strange. All in all, "merge request" is a more accurate term and no one ever gets confused about it like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pull-request-not-called-a-push-request https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pu... I think it would be great if other tools just called it an MR as that seems to be the term that is easier to understand.
  - chappi42 8y ago
    After joining you got brainwashed of course ;-)) It's a minor detail but it's still irritating for me that it doesn't have the same name as in Github. More accurate or not, but Github was first.
    - chinhodado 8y ago
      MR is much easier to explain to people who are not familiar with git than PR. Everyone who has used at least one version control system knows what merge is, whereas pull is a much less clear term.

175 points by bjoko 8y ago

Jnr 8y ago

Gitlab is great and I have used it for years but I recently switched to Gogs for self hosted repositories because it is much faster, easier to set up and walk in a park to maintain. It doesn't have all the features (bloat) that Gitlab has but it can probably satisfy >95% of git users.

StyloBill 8y ago
Yes but Gogs is self-hosted whereas Gitlab offers hosting solutions.
- tenebrisalietum 8y ago
  You can host Gitlab.
- techntoke 8y ago
  GitLab has self hosted solutions
- dsumenkovic 8y ago
  Here's a link to the self-hosted GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed
- lucideer 8y ago
  I'm somewhat dumbfounded at the no-less-than-three sibling commenters here all chiming in with the same repeated misinterpretation of your post. I suspect those downvoting you didn't take time to read your comment properly either.
  - manwithaplan 8y ago
    I blame the misunderstandings on the non-standard syntax: > Yes but Gogs is self-hosted whereas Gitlab offers hosting solutions. Replying that, to someone who literally said they switched from GitLab to Gogs for self-hosted repositories, also made me parse it as implying one word: > Yes, but Gogs is self-hosted, whereas GitLab offers [only] hosting solutions. but the author probably meant something like: > Yes, but Gogs is [exclusively] self-hosted, whereas GitLab [also] offers hosting solutions [so switching is not always an option].
    - StyloBill 8y ago
      Spot on. I'm a non-native english speaker, so my syntax sometimes leaves to be desired. Sorry for the confusion.
W-Stool 8y ago
Did you look at Gitea before you stood up Gogs? I'm looking at both and will choose one shortly, any insight is most appreciated.
- davidcollantes 8y ago
  Gitea has more options and features, but it is more bleeding edge. Unkwon (Gogs author) handles contributions to Gogs very carefully, taking painstakingly attention to the code being submitted. That has resulted on a very stable, and reliable software. You decide. :-)
  - tshannon 8y ago
    To rephrase what you said, Gitea is more community driven. You'd have a better chance contributing and fixing issues that impact you with Gitea, compared to Gogs. Personally I switched over to Gitea. One of the more tangible differences between the two is that Gitea bundles all the web assets into the executable used to run the service, so you just have a single exe replace on upgrades. It's been a while since I've used Gogs, but looking at their latest info you still need to remove some folders and not others when updating Gogs, because some of them are template and static files used by the web server.
Suri_GitLab 8y ago
Hello! Since GitLab is a single application that covers the entire software development lifecycle, we're a bit "bigger" than Gogs, which only tackles SCM. We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources, including forming a team to specialize in this area, and we're really grateful for your feedback. :)
- letientai299 8y ago
  May I know what is the requirements for who would join that team?
  - Suri_GitLab 8y ago
    Hi! We just opened up hiring for an Engineering Manager and Senior Product Manager - I'd love it if you applied and we became teammates! :) Engineering Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4201458002 https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4201458002 Senior Product Manager: https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4192657002 https://boards.greenhouse.io/gitlab/jobs/4192657002
    - letientai299 8y ago
      I'm still in my early years of professional, so guess I'll wait for more low level and engineering focused roles open. Thanks.
- chmln 8y ago
  > We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources I used to use gitlab at work daily and releases would mention how performance is being tackled consistently. However, I have not seen any large improvements at all, suggesting that there is an impenetrable wall made of the underlying technologies. Gitlab is based primarily on Ruby-on-Rails, which doesn't particularly shine with neither memory usage nor performance. What sort of effort would even reduce the use of resources significantly, short of a rewrite?
  - yutghgh 8y ago

StevePerkins 8y ago

You know, there was a thread the other day about a new release announcement for some IDE. It was quickly removed, on grounds that the Hacker News FAQ says you shouldn't repost something "If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so". I remember thinking that it was a real stretch to interpret different release announcements, separated by months, as "duplicate" posts. But this was coming from dang himself, so I guess that's the authoritative view. Just pointing out that Gitlab operates on a more or less monthly release cadence. Pretty much every release gets an announcement thread on HN's front-page for the full day. And usually there's a separate front-page thread or two in between, to announce stuff in upcoming releases. I've never once seen any of this removed, or even questioned.

markdog12 8y ago
I’ve submitted it a few times, just because I use it and like it, interested in discussion about it. I don’t know if I agree with the rule (a whole year?), but I’ll stop submitting it.
- StevePerkins 8y ago
  Oh, to be clear... I'm perfectly HAPPY with release announcements, and believe that strict interpretation was ridiculous. I was simply taking issue with the inconsistency, arbitrary interpretation, selective enforcement, etc.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    Same here. I'm generally extremely impressed with HN mods but this is one of two (three) minor nits I see. And to be clear I'd also prefer both to be accepted, at least a little softer duplicate check than today.
  - addicted 8y ago
    If the release isn’t noteworthy enough, wouldn’t the downvoted, or the lack of upvotes kill it anyways? I feel marking it as a dupe seems an unnecessary mitigation when these are the exact kind of things crowdvoting is really good at.

bbeausej 8y ago

I really like the update pace of Gitlab. Our teams are all based on an on-prem EE (low tier) and it's been a pleasure to receive a steady stream of valuable updates. Passing on all the good things that Gitlab does for us already; I _really_ wish gitlab would push to make more of the Project Management features accessible to the lower tiers (maybe even CE). Epics and Roadmaps linked to Gitlab's SCM and DevOps features would be a _real_ contender to JIRA/Confluence in the market but it's currently hidden behind a very steep ~100$/m "ultimate" plan.

dsumenkovic 8y ago
GitLab Community Advocate here. Thank you very much for the feedback. I understand your desire to move some features to the lower tiers and that's a good sign for us that we are on the right path with our offerings. From time to time it happens that we move some features to the lower tiers or even core/free tier. I wanted to share few more words on how we are trying to be the good stewards, you can find more about our stewardship rules and promises here https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-are-paid-only https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/#what-features-...
sytse 8y ago
Thanks for your comment. Glad to hear you like the update pace. Regarding epics we're considering moving them to a more affordable plan while keeping the roadmap in Ultimate. But we're not close to a decision.
- bbeausej 8y ago
  Thanks for the update! I really think there's a huge opportunity of growth there that goes beyond SCM/DevOps for medium sized teams.

orware 8y ago

Congrats on the new release! Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was hoping I might be able to share some GitLab for Education Requests: Working in a community college it's been really tricky to get the agreement signed for us to take advantage of this at all (that's more of an issue with the way we work in particular, but I just wanted to throw it out there that it would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without needing to wait and get an agreement signed because for example our president doesn't want to do an esignature so that means sending it over to their office for signature, waiting a long while, getting it back, and then finding out our deadline passed and haven't to try it all over again so if that process could be changed, or better yet removed, that would be great). Related to the GitLab for Education license limitations...I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well, but it definitely seems to be limited to just Faculty/Staff type usage which ends up being a bummer for us since now I can't promote it anymore internally with us a free option we can sign up for anymore and other ideas I was potentially thinking of (the Group Issue Boards seemed like it could potentially be a nice way to organize Kanban Boards across the college and make it so that staff from other areas outside of IT could make use of Kanban Boards too...we've been using Kanboard inside of IT for a few years now, but haven't made a strong push to have other departments use it). In terms of affordability, that would limit us to licensing GitLab primarily for IT stuff only + for 10 users that's already going to be a pretty big cost for our small college / IT department. Lastly, I know there's Wiki functionality and GitLab Pages already and that can be used for documentation to a degree, but is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence alternative into GitLab as well? Right now we'd like start using some sort of nice, comprehensive documentation option, but I'm not really sold on Confluence at the moment. Admittedly, right now with the info about us needing to license GitLab for our IT department staff as well being fairly new to me that's thrown the whole idea of using GitLab out the window (almost), but the lack of a Confluence option built-in to GitLab would be another potential blocker for us (I do like the idea of having everything all under one system if possible to simplify usage for us). tldr: If you can make edu licensing completely free (for staff too) and simple to use/signup for (without an agreement needing to be signed), plus add a Confluence alternative that would be awesome!

8y ago

sytse 8y ago

Overview of the three main improvements in this release: 1. JavaScript coverage in SAST GitLab Static Application Security Testing (SAST) scans source code and helps to detect potential security vulnerabilities early in the pipeline. In 11.8, we've added SAST support for JavaScript, building on top of our existing node.js support. Now any JavaScript file can be scanned, like static scripts and HTML. A vital practice in DevSecOps is to scan code changes with each commit, and with this change, we're covering one of the most popular web languages, helping you to find JavaScript risks as early as possible. 2. GitLab Pages for subgroups and templates GitLab Pages got a whole lot better this release, with two key improvements. First, we have introduced GitLab Pages support for projects in subgroups, enabling these projects to easily publish content to the web. GitLab 11.8 also bundles our most popular templates for Pages, so users can get started with just a single click. 3. Error Tracking with Sentry Application errors provide important insight into the health of your application, and can help detect problems without waiting for users to report them. GitLab 11.8 can now display the most recent errors directly within the project, making them easier and quicker to find and take action on.

laktak 8y ago

I like and use Gitlab, I just wish they would call it PR instead of merge request.

williamchia 8y ago
Funny thing, when I joined the team at GitLab over a year ago I was really annoyed by this since I'd been using PR for the better part of a decade. Now I'm so used to saying MR that PR sounds very strange. All in all, "merge request" is a more accurate term and no one ever gets confused about it like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pull-request-not-called-a-push-request https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pu... I think it would be great if other tools just called it an MR as that seems to be the term that is easier to understand.
- chappi42 8y ago
  After joining you got brainwashed of course ;-)) It's a minor detail but it's still irritating for me that it doesn't have the same name as in Github. More accurate or not, but Github was first.
  - chinhodado 8y ago
    MR is much easier to explain to people who are not familiar with git than PR. Everyone who has used at least one version control system knows what merge is, whereas pull is a much less clear term.