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There is plenty of things that can make your life easier on Github/Gitlab, especially when working in a team: - Issue tracker - Merge requests that are easy t

by przmk 7y ago

There is plenty of things that can make your life easier on Github/Gitlab, especially when working in a team: - Issue tracker - Merge requests that are easy to analyze - Ability to put comments during a code review on specific lines of code and discuss it from there - Embedded wiki for a project - Managing different access rights to different repos I couldn't see myself using pure git without any additional tooling for anything more that personal projects that I work on alone.

masklinn 7y ago
They're also convenient synchronisation points for tooling e.g. CI, linters, fixers, merge bots, …
amelius 7y ago
Ok, different question, but does that justify gitlab's recent valuation of 2.75B?
- pnako 7y ago
  I don't know, but for reference GitHub was acquired for 7.5B and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    > and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B. Because Atlassian manages to extract boatloads of enterprise money for a product portfolio that can be best described as an inconsistent, unintegrated mess. Everything they have was bought together and crudely integrated, with each product having totally different ways of using and administrating them. Not to mention that core features (e.g. "merging" duplicate user accounts, SAML login) are paid-for plugins of varying quality. Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence. But still, enterprises are buying up that crap because the alternatives to JIRA and Confluence plainly suck even more. The only thing that has real competition is Bitbucket, with Gitlab and Github as more than viable alternatives.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      > Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence. One such 'feature request' is 'unsubscribe from email': https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-users-disable-Jira-email-notifications/qaq-p/392674 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-us... Mental. I have a rule to send it all to spam.
      - fnord123 7y ago
        This came up on the Hadoop JIRA lately. Someone submitted an issue several years ago and the team is investigating it now and he was trying to figure out how to get off the notification list. They ended up having to change the reporter. jfc jira's a mess.
    - guiriduro 7y ago
      Atlassian have very successfully aligned themselves with the managerial layer that like to think their organisations are "agile", or believe that buying some software suite will somehow bring that about, rather than simply codify and entrench their existing faulty workflows and add new processes to bureaucratize.
      - zaphirplane 7y ago
        Wow circle of life stuff. When you remember they got into enterprise through winning heart and mind
      - shantly 7y ago
        Agile equals a bunch of complicated "workflows" in Jira. This is a real thing that a non-small number of managers believe. Or if they don't believe it, they sure act like they do.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Extracting money is what a business does. They managed to extract enough to get their valuation. It has nothing to do with how bad the product is, and shows why sales is far more important than tech when building a company.
- wodenokoto 7y ago
  Yes. That's like asking if shitty burgers really "justify mcdonalds valuation". Maybe you are not impressed with the product, but millions of people are interested in buying it.
  - amelius 7y ago
    The difference is that with a little help (e.g. 10M) I can start a (serious) gitlab competitor tomorrow. Not so with the hamburger chain.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - pushpop 7y ago
      Building a product is the easy part. Building the user base is what makes an evaluation. Just the same as anyone can start a fast food chain but if no buys any food in there the chain isn’t worth squat.
    - alnorth 7y ago
      Go ahead then.
    - pnako 7y ago
      Gitea is already a decent competitor, valued at $0. What gives a company like this value are the contracts and the technical lock-ins making sure you can milk a relatively small group of captive, high-value users for many years. There are many companies using Gitlab.
    - UserIsUnused 7y ago
      Gitlab is not just git hosting, they want to own the full developing cycle. they already got ci pipelines, easy ways to deploy on kubernates, and much more and its feature are growing at a fast. You cannnot replicate every gitlab feature with 10M, and you still have to fight the network effect. For years Gitlab had a better offer then Github, and yet github was always more popular due to the network effect.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
  No it doesn’t justify the valuation, but a list of things one person likes about gitlab/github over plain git isn’t supposed to justify a valuation.
- fulvous 7y ago
  Less than half the price that Microsoft paid for Github.
zimbatm 7y ago
I don't understand the utility of the wiki. Markdown is already rendered in the repo and can live next to the code. Meaning that merge requests can update both the code and documentation at the same time. And GitLab / GitHub have embedded editors that allow you to edit the markdown files using from the browser, just like a wiki. Basically the only thing that is left is that the wiki can be edited without supervision.
- OJFord 7y ago
  I find they're rarely good, but I can see that having them live alongside code is good sometimes (as you say) but not so great when it needs to be changed independent of the code around it and you have a load 'fix markdown rendering' or 'fix typo' commits.
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    That feels like a failure of the tool/workflow— when you use the web UI edit button, it should put your edits on a branch for review, and make it easy to make further edits/corrections and then squash all of the piddly fixes into one big change at the end.
- shantly 7y ago
  Non-programmers are more comfortable in the Wiki. And it's probably safer to keep them there anyway, and edits can be allowed there with fewer safeguards. Then again I'm not sure how many non-technical folks are willing to dig into GH anyway. I've heard Issues & friends called "too confusing" for "non-technical" folks, in favor of Asana and Jira, of all things. Huge WTF from me since I'd say the opposite is strongly true regardless how "technical" one is, but that's the perception I guess.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  My company uses GitLab/Jira/Confluence, and two super-important features that make Confluence a winner in my mind are a) a way better story for media embedding (including photos and random uploads like PDFs, but also rich/interactive media such as LucidChart and rendering ticket lists from a Jira filter), and b) the inline discussion/annotation framework that lets you tag/nag people, ask for clarification, etc. A big part of inline discussion is that it's an instant marker for later readers that the content may not be up to date or is under discussion/review, whereas a Markdown file in some repo can have a ticket filed against it, but there's nothing in the repo that alerts a later reader to the existence of that ticket until the problem is actually resolved. I've always been an advocate for the "markdown in the repo" scheme with CI-generated Sphinx (or whatever) docs, but these features have really won me over to the standalone wiki at least in some cases.
u801e 7y ago
> Issue tracker There are bug trackers that have more features compared to Github/Gitlab. > Merge requests that are easy to analyze You can get that through pure git by using git format-patch and git send-email > Ability to put comments during a code review on specific lines of code and discuss it from there You can get that by replying inline to the email containing the patch (much like I'm doing here when replying to a certain part of your comment). > Embedded wiki for a project That could be maintained in the docs directory of the project > Managing different access rights to different repos Given that the project maintainer(s) maintain access to their repos, they could just as well handle the access rights without having to rely on Github/Gitlab.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
  That’s all true, but a lot of people prefer to have this all in one place.

by przmk 7y ago

masklinn 7y ago

They're also convenient synchronisation points for tooling e.g. CI, linters, fixers, merge bots, …

amelius 7y ago

Ok, different question, but does that justify gitlab's recent valuation of 2.75B?

pnako 7y ago
I don't know, but for reference GitHub was acquired for 7.5B and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B. Because Atlassian manages to extract boatloads of enterprise money for a product portfolio that can be best described as an inconsistent, unintegrated mess. Everything they have was bought together and crudely integrated, with each product having totally different ways of using and administrating them. Not to mention that core features (e.g. "merging" duplicate user accounts, SAML login) are paid-for plugins of varying quality. Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence. But still, enterprises are buying up that crap because the alternatives to JIRA and Confluence plainly suck even more. The only thing that has real competition is Bitbucket, with Gitlab and Github as more than viable alternatives.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    > Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence. One such 'feature request' is 'unsubscribe from email': https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-users-disable-Jira-email-notifications/qaq-p/392674 https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-us... Mental. I have a rule to send it all to spam.
    - fnord123 7y ago
      This came up on the Hadoop JIRA lately. Someone submitted an issue several years ago and the team is investigating it now and he was trying to figure out how to get off the notification list. They ended up having to change the reporter. jfc jira's a mess.
  - guiriduro 7y ago
    Atlassian have very successfully aligned themselves with the managerial layer that like to think their organisations are "agile", or believe that buying some software suite will somehow bring that about, rather than simply codify and entrench their existing faulty workflows and add new processes to bureaucratize.
    - zaphirplane 7y ago
      Wow circle of life stuff. When you remember they got into enterprise through winning heart and mind
    - shantly 7y ago
      Agile equals a bunch of complicated "workflows" in Jira. This is a real thing that a non-small number of managers believe. Or if they don't believe it, they sure act like they do.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Extracting money is what a business does. They managed to extract enough to get their valuation. It has nothing to do with how bad the product is, and shows why sales is far more important than tech when building a company.
wodenokoto 7y ago
Yes. That's like asking if shitty burgers really "justify mcdonalds valuation". Maybe you are not impressed with the product, but millions of people are interested in buying it.
- amelius 7y ago
  The difference is that with a little help (e.g. 10M) I can start a (serious) gitlab competitor tomorrow. Not so with the hamburger chain.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pushpop 7y ago
    Building a product is the easy part. Building the user base is what makes an evaluation. Just the same as anyone can start a fast food chain but if no buys any food in there the chain isn’t worth squat.
  - alnorth 7y ago
    Go ahead then.
  - pnako 7y ago
    Gitea is already a decent competitor, valued at $0. What gives a company like this value are the contracts and the technical lock-ins making sure you can milk a relatively small group of captive, high-value users for many years. There are many companies using Gitlab.
  - UserIsUnused 7y ago
    Gitlab is not just git hosting, they want to own the full developing cycle. they already got ci pipelines, easy ways to deploy on kubernates, and much more and its feature are growing at a fast. You cannnot replicate every gitlab feature with 10M, and you still have to fight the network effect. For years Gitlab had a better offer then Github, and yet github was always more popular due to the network effect.
smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
No it doesn’t justify the valuation, but a list of things one person likes about gitlab/github over plain git isn’t supposed to justify a valuation.
fulvous 7y ago
Less than half the price that Microsoft paid for Github.

zimbatm 7y ago

I don't understand the utility of the wiki. Markdown is already rendered in the repo and can live next to the code. Meaning that merge requests can update both the code and documentation at the same time. And GitLab / GitHub have embedded editors that allow you to edit the markdown files using from the browser, just like a wiki. Basically the only thing that is left is that the wiki can be edited without supervision.

OJFord 7y ago
I find they're rarely good, but I can see that having them live alongside code is good sometimes (as you say) but not so great when it needs to be changed independent of the code around it and you have a load 'fix markdown rendering' or 'fix typo' commits.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  That feels like a failure of the tool/workflow— when you use the web UI edit button, it should put your edits on a branch for review, and make it easy to make further edits/corrections and then squash all of the piddly fixes into one big change at the end.
shantly 7y ago
Non-programmers are more comfortable in the Wiki. And it's probably safer to keep them there anyway, and edits can be allowed there with fewer safeguards. Then again I'm not sure how many non-technical folks are willing to dig into GH anyway. I've heard Issues & friends called "too confusing" for "non-technical" folks, in favor of Asana and Jira, of all things. Huge WTF from me since I'd say the opposite is strongly true regardless how "technical" one is, but that's the perception I guess.
mikepurvis 7y ago
My company uses GitLab/Jira/Confluence, and two super-important features that make Confluence a winner in my mind are a) a way better story for media embedding (including photos and random uploads like PDFs, but also rich/interactive media such as LucidChart and rendering ticket lists from a Jira filter), and b) the inline discussion/annotation framework that lets you tag/nag people, ask for clarification, etc. A big part of inline discussion is that it's an instant marker for later readers that the content may not be up to date or is under discussion/review, whereas a Markdown file in some repo can have a ticket filed against it, but there's nothing in the repo that alerts a later reader to the existence of that ticket until the problem is actually resolved. I've always been an advocate for the "markdown in the repo" scheme with CI-generated Sphinx (or whatever) docs, but these features have really won me over to the standalone wiki at least in some cases.

u801e 7y ago

> Issue tracker There are bug trackers that have more features compared to Github/Gitlab. > Merge requests that are easy to analyze You can get that through pure git by using git format-patch and git send-email > Ability to put comments during a code review on specific lines of code and discuss it from there You can get that by replying inline to the email containing the patch (much like I'm doing here when replying to a certain part of your comment). > Embedded wiki for a project That could be maintained in the docs directory of the project > Managing different access rights to different repos Given that the project maintainer(s) maintain access to their repos, they could just as well handle the access rights without having to rely on Github/Gitlab.

smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
That’s all true, but a lot of people prefer to have this all in one place.