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Xfce switches to GitLab
- rvz 6y agoFantastic news for Xfce and for Gitlab self-hosted software. While already being self-hosted using cgit, this sounds like a sensible move for Xfce instead of using GitHub. They recently migrated their CI to Gitlab CI with fosshost [0]. Great news for open source software hosting. [0] https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2020/05/10/gitlab-ci-is-up-and-running/ https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2020/05/10/gitlab-ci-is-up-...
- x32n23nr 6y agoNot strictly related, but every time I see projects moving to Gitlab it makes me happy. GitHub certainly has been adding some very sweet features, a lot of great integrations - but with each one you lock yourself in. We cannot afford another monopoly.
- judge2020 6y ago> Please poke us on IRC or the mailinglist if you’re lacking repository access or ownership. (By default new users cannot fork before being manually approved. Yes. We are afraid of the spambots.) Do forks introduce potential PR spam or something of that sort on GitLab?
- mgbmtl 6y agoI help manage a Gitlab instance for a FOSS project with around 800 users, and we had spammers post spam on personal repos 3-4 times in the past 2 years. It can be hard to catch (I keep an eye on the latest new projects).
- pcx 6y agoGreat to see GitLab gain momentum in FOSS. It's a great fit for small teams too, it's easy to setup and keep updated. It's more important than ever to help GitLab gain adoption with GitHub making it free for private repos. I love GitHub as much as any developer, but I believe having a free, open alternative to it is important. I wish GitLab would improve their free-version of Merge Request reviews though, Github's is much much better right now.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 6y agoDoes anyone else have things that make the switch from GitHub to GitLab a hard sell? I'm always curious why open source projects don't embrace an open platform, although I get that GitHub is fantastic in a lot of ways. I'm guilty of it myself, but I've reached the 50/50 GL/GH split as I try using GL more.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 6y agoI truly believe it's because github has become a social network and developers use it as popularity contest. They want their commits to be there just like influencer wants to be on Instagram not on my fairly unknown platform.
- rhn_mk1 6y agoI can confirm, this is the exact reason I made two copies of (shameless plug) the SpicaStack project earlier this month. GitHub's reach, network and stars help fellow devs and users discover our forks, while GitLab's exportability and amazing CI will let us actually work on it.
- oweiler 6y agoHow do you keep the repos in sync?
- atommclain 6y agoMy guess is some form of: git checkout master git pull github/master git push gitlab/master
- chx 6y agoIt's quite easy to set a git repo up to push to multiple upstreams. https://gist.github.com/bjmiller121/f93cd974ff709d2b968f https://gist.github.com/bjmiller121/f93cd974ff709d2b968f also see https://stackoverflow.com/a/849960/308851 https://stackoverflow.com/a/849960/308851
- techboyg5 6y agoI think that that is interesting!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- scrollaway 6y agoGreat news :) We switched to Gitlab at Arch Linux recently as well: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/ https://gitlab.archlinux.org/ (well, we're still migrating projects and users, it's a long process)
- smitty1e 6y agoArch and Xfce are a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination of rock solid performance, flexibility, and minimal fuss.
- varbhat 6y ago.
- rxhernandez 6y agoThis past year, on my Thinkpad P50, I've switched between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch; Arch has by far been the least buggy. With Ubuntu, things would go haywire when docking/undocking. With Fedora, putting it to sleep was always a risk because after putting it to sleep I would sometimes I would open up my laptop to a black screen that I couldn't recover from. I was fine with that and just wouldn't put my laptop to sleep but eventually I started using Zoom and Fedora would crash within an hour and a half of using it. This pushed me over the edge to wipe my laptop and install Arch; I'm really glad I did. I still have an issue where the system is not detecting when my laptop lid closing but at least it's not crashing every day or two.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoThis fragmentation between what works on what dists makes me sad. Philosophically I've always admired BSD for the consistency, considering how there's just 3-ish of them, realistically I'm a Manjaro user as I don't have enough Linux-fu to set Arch up.
- Talanes 6y ago
- new_realist 6y agoI wish GitLab had a static site component. Even browsing simple files in a repository is way too slow. Everything is dynamic and laggy.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoIf you mean an equivalent of Github pages - they do :) https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/
- factorialboy 6y agoI've witnessed and worked with on-prem installations of GitLab that are remarkably fast. Of course not every instance shares a load similar to the .com version.
- factorialboy 6y agoGood luck and hope this leads to better productivity for Xfce developers. You are doing an amazing job, has been my go to desktop env for the last 9-10 years.
- rakoo 6y agoIs there any resource somewhere explaining why they migrated away from gitolite ? Not trying to sound negative, I'm just interested in the reasoning behind and see what really differentiates the two in this kind of usage.
- jamesu 6y agoFollowing on from this, why didn't they use, say, gogs/gitea?
- input_sh 6y agoTook a quick look into their GitLab account and they seem to use some continuous integration, which is a native GitLab feature. Gitea does integrate with some external CI/CD services, but it's not a part of the core product: https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ci-cd/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/ci-cd/. Gogs makes no mention of CI/CD in its documentation. I've switched from Gitea to GitLab for that same reason for my personal projects, and I'd bet that's by far the largest selling point of GitLab when compared to other self-hosted solutions. You just do a "git push" and stuff gets automatically tested in a VM or even deployed in a live environment.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago> You just do a "git push" and stuff gets automatically tested in a VM or even deployed in a live environment. Yea, same with my Gitea + Drone servers. It’s cool that GitLab has everything built in, but I don’t mind having distinct tools. Especially when both are very performance static binaries in a language I’m fond of working in (Golang) so that I can patch upstream. Truth be told, if it weren’t for GitLabs sluggishness on my very cheap VPS, I’d probably give it more of a go so I’d have less to maintain.
- bsdubernerd 6y agoMy first hot guess would be: "issues". Gitolite is just managing raw git repositories. I'm using gitolite for personal (read: non-public) projects, and I wouldn't want to use anything else. I love how minimal it is, and the way it works. However, how do you manage issues? Bugzilla is, IMHO, horrible. You can replace it with something much more lean, such as Mantis, but you still lack true integration with the repository (ie: knowing when a bug has been closed and which versions/branches it was dealt with). This is something I struggle with even when working alone on a simple project. I've used both sd (simple defects) and bugs-everywhere, however it seems that development on these has pretty much stalled, which is A Great Shame. I keep using "be" in these cases. However as soon as you have 2-3 devs, it's easier to fire up something like gitlab and have all features such as reviews/CI in a single shot than having to setup these separately.
- eeZah7Ux 6y agoI'd be happier to see SourceHut taking over.
- Shared404 6y agoSame here. I just finished moving my admittedly rather small/insignificant set of repo's over SourceHut. That being said, anything taking away from GH's dominance is an improvement imho.
- Polylactic_acid 6y agoI'd not. SourceHut adds far more friction to reporting issues than gitlab. A project like this would benefit from more users reporting issues.
- noahdesu 6y agoMigrating away from a development model based on attaching patches to bugzilla tickets is sure to improve the development experience, especially for new contributes. Good move switching.
- unsungNovelty 6y agoThis is a great news for FOSS & XFCE! GitLab is a great company with great services to provide for the FOSS community. We should embrace an open alternative and not a closed garden ecosystem. Can't wait to see more collaboration in XFCE project due to this change! It's also high time we look at the motivation and principles when it comes to products and services from a company, not just their technical superiority.
- liquidify 6y agoMy biggest problem with gitlab is that the review system is pretty terrible.
- user00012-ab 6y agoRemember back in the day when we had that one consistent place to find code. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png
- wdutch 6y agoNo I don't remember this ever being the case. Most projects I care about host their repos on their own servers.
- anthk 6y ago- SourceForge? - Savannah? - FreshMeat?
- ViViDboarder 6y agoSearch engines?
- kerng 6y agoNot sure of I missed it, but what product did they use before?
- fermienrico 6y agoI find Gitlab UI quite a bit bloated and slow compared to Github. They have some amazing features but I can't get past how many (2-5 seconds) to load a page and sometimes upto 10 seconds (analytics). I hope that's being addressed in future. Usually, I spend at least 2 hours on Github in a given day - and probably access the website about 50 times a day or more. These UI issues add up tremendously.
- mroche 6y agoAs noted in other comments, GL.com does have some performance problems. A self-hosted instance is a completely different story, thankfully. All of the on-prem or cloud hosted instances I’ve gotten to use were quite snappy.
- ashtonkem 6y agoIn my experience, this is highly dependent on the number of projects hosted on a GL instance.
- ViViDboarder 6y agoPhew. I’m not alone. I also fine the interface a bit confusing. It’s probably no worse than GitHub, but just less familiar. Or maybe I prefer too nav to side nav... I’ve been using Gitea for my personal hosting because it’s small, quick, and easy to grok. It isn’t nearly as fully featured as GitLab though, but I don’t mind. I’m not a team and I’m happy to glue different services together rather than use a large all in one (Gitea + Drone + Wekan).
- emilycook 6y agoWe do have a performance team who is working on continuously improving the speed, so hopefully that is improved in the future! https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/
- fermienrico 6y agoHi Emily, can you guys do an upper limit, say maximum 1.5 seconds load time for any page? Ruthelessly disapprove features unless it meets this spec time. When a website or service becomes too slow, it is on its way to an impending death. Then people wonder why some service fell apart? Put users and usability first and foremost before features.
- KarlKemp 6y agoI'll be forever grateful for what GitHub has done for the OSS community. People today don't remember what they replaced, namely Sourceforge and various home-grown tools of various levels of dysfunction. Would anyone doubt that open source contributions, and individual contributers even more so, have grown by an order of magnitude or more in the last decade or so? And that GitHub's process improvements and standardisation were the major factor in this? It used to be, you had to mail patches to some mailing list, with each projects having their own set of arcane rules, sometimes written and sometimes informal, but always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale organisations devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole remaining source of the old timer's power differential. Or at least that's how it seemed to me, for I never felt courageous enough to try. These days, I fire off smaller contributions several times a week, and contribute some medium-sized feature once or twice a year. Meanwhile, the most impressive thing about GitLab keeps being this strange quirk of them, that among all the companies I know, they are closest to being a total clone of an existing product. Or at least they were in the beginning, when their CSS still had ".gh-wide-3" class names. Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, they are also the only company that repeatedly lorded it over their competitor when they came late to implementing some minor feature. Seriously: I noticed it the first time because it's a level of pettiness not usually seen. And since then, there have been three or four more instances.
- astrobe_ 6y ago> [...] always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale organisations devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole remaining source of the old timer's power differential. Or at least that's how it seemed to me, for I never felt courageous enough to try. Why the same people that seem afraid of email, can however gratuitously accuse others of being on an ego trip on a public forum, I wonder.
- ptx 6y agoGitHub wasn't the only service responsible for replacing Sourceforge. Lots of open source projects used to be hosted on Bitbucket before Git gained total domination among the version control systems.
- p1mrx 6y agoI should probably move https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo to GitLab at some point, because its source repository hasn't supported IPv6 since Google Code shut down.
- arminiusreturns 6y agoMicrosoft buying github just felt so wrong on so many levels to me. While I find it wierd gitlab hosts their servers in azure, or at least used to, I really like the ci/cd integration in GL and hope this works out for them. XFCE is awesome, and is my second most used desktop after, well, Awesome.
- imadethis 6y agoFYI gitlab moved from Azure to GCP last year: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-from-azure-to-gcp/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-from...
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoSeems pretty damning of Azure. Are these issues general to Azure or particular to how they were using it?
- arminiusreturns 6y agoThats great to hear, thanks for the link!
- sngz 6y agoit is wrong and I hope more FOSS projects move to gitlab
- efiecho 6y agoUrgh, sad to see one more FOSS project move there. No browsing of code or issues without Javascript. If the Javascript actually enhanced something and made the experience better, then it could probably be tolerable, but it doesn't, GitLab feels slower and more bloated than any other Git repository manager I know of. I had not been surprised if Microsoft had ruined GitHub by "enhancing" the site with loads of Javascript and other things that would make the site worse, but this hasn't happened. GitHub has actually improved steadily since the acquisition. Ironically, it's the FOSS alternative that is slow and bloated this time.
- dan_can_code 6y agoMaybe xfce can see past the trivial issues with javascript for more benefits elsewhere within Gitlab for managing their project(s).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlleUndKalle 6y agoNoice