8 ms·

Great 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 GitL

by pcx 6y ago

Great 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 ago
Does 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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 ago
      How do you keep the repos in sync?
      - atommclain 6y ago
        My guess is some form of: git checkout master git pull github/master git push gitlab/master
        chx 6y ago
        It'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
      - rgibert 6y ago
        You can setup git push to push to multiple repos. git remote set-url --add origin ...
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        I use multiple hosts to backup my repos: I host gitolite.org on a $5 VM and then have it configured to automatically push to gitlab and GitHub on every change.
      - rhn_mk1 6y ago
        I use GitLab as the primary source, and mirror it to GitHub. Or, I would have, if the builtin GitLab mirroring feature wasn't broken for pushing to GitHub.
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    Absolutely - people now ask to see your Github repo as an integral part of your CV without even really considering if you might use another service. And you don't exactly want to pitch to them how you don't have your code on Github because you use this other "fringe" service which even if they look at it they are going to find unfamiliar. I now host 50/50 on Gitlab / Github because I'm not really affected by this, but I'm conscious of it.
- Insanity 6y ago
  Gitlab is open core but not open source either, I think. I am in the same boat as you though!
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    The Community Edition is open source.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - BlackLotus89 6y ago
      The community edition is a castrated mess with ads in it. I administrate a gitlab instance for a university and gitlab is hurting me in so many ways. 1) it had a message that tells you that the elastic search is so much better and that your admin can enable it (if he would only switch to enterprise) 2) it pretends to have functionality only to have it hidden behind an "available in ee" banner 3) it has a new functionality where it annoys everyone that has a new ip (24h disconnect anyone) that can't be disabled (only through patching) and suggests that enabling 2fa helps, but is send regardless of 2fa And every function that gets cut out and hidden behind the enterprise banner iy forever lost to you, because even if you implement it yourself it will nevet get merged since the function exists, in enterprise... Ps yeah there is a free enterprise license for universities, but it is not available for staff or external users (other universities) and the licensing model is so unflexible that you can't mix "free for students" and "pay for staff" or "students get enterprise" and "staff get basic features" Pps I had to patch out more than one thing over the years this was just the first thing that came to mind
      - type0 6y ago
        How about antispam features, are those still only for Enterprise?
        BlackLotus89 6y ago
- _ix 6y ago
  I like GitLab and GitHub quite a bit, but I lean toward GitLab for the simplicity of a unified tool chain. However, I think GitLab can only really shine when you host it yourself. In 2020, on-premise/self-managed anything is kind of a hard sell, but the reliability and performance of gitlab.com leaves a lot to be desired. (So much so, I often think about trying to work for GitLab so I could help from a reliability perspective.) I stuck my neck out for GitLab in a previous organization and we ended up migrating from github.com to gitlab.com. This set me up for some embarrassment for every outage they experienced last year which felt surprisingly frequent. But if you have the resources, self-managed GitLab is great! tl;dr: gitlab.your.org > github.com > gitlab.com
- aninteger 6y ago
  GL is not browsable with JavaScript disabled while GH is.
  - manigandham 6y ago
    Why is this a hard sell? How many people does this really affect? And why disable JS on GL?
    - carlhjerpe 6y ago
      A Turing complete language executing unsigned code in a sandbox that allows HTTP and HTTPS requests to 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0 is not something everyone wants in their life.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      I run noscript without any whitelist at all, and considering how popular noscript is I doubt I'm alone here. It makes the modern web so much more pleasant, paradoxically by breaking it, now that user-hostile machinations are the norm. And yes, gitlab's web interface is substantially more annoying than github, in my experience.
    - neunnech 6y ago
      In some cases "I'm browsing GitLab" might be the exact impetus for someone's attempt to disable JS. As noted above, GitLab is sluggish. I was an early adopter/advocate for GitLab, but you can feel the bloat on every page and I no longer use it.
    - aninteger 6y ago
      It's not a hard sell, but it is certainly an inconvenience. I prefer to browse with javascript off by default and only enable it for sites that absolutely need it. I've had issues where sites using JS have caused a single core on my laptop to spin at 100% thus affecting battery life negatively.
  - uHuge 6y ago
    Wonder how Gitea[0] stands on this line? It seems the easiest to setup for small teams. 0: https://gitea.io/en-us https://gitea.io/en-us
- root_axis 6y ago
  Gitlab CI pipeline was a deal breaker for our organization. Lots of UI bugs, quite a few issues with CI nodes hanging, and ultimately their yaml job configuration system turned out to be too constrained for our needs. We eventually switched back to github and jenkins. This was more than a year ago though, so I expect some of those issues have improved during that time.
  - j4yav 6y ago
    Product director for CI/CD here - we have tried to focus on improvements around making more complex pipelines easier to manage, but I would love to hear what you ran into just to make sure we are closing the loop on all the important ones.
- ken 6y ago
  I don't think there's any one single blocker that's keeping me on GitHub. It's just a bunch of little annoyances with GitLab that add up to make it not worth it -- either UI quirks, or ways in which third-party tools integrate just a little more easily with GitHub. Yes, GitHub absolutely has a bunch of annoyances, too. (I listed a bunch of them here on HN in response to a question by Nat, just the other day!) If everyone were using GitLab first, we'd probably find excuses to put off switching to GitHub, too. To attract users, you've got to have a pull. If that's "open source", then it needs to be a way in which the closed-source nature of GitHub is hurting my daily workflow. If it's "user interface", you need to be such an improvement over GitHub that it's worth the cost of switching. If it's "cost", that's tough because GitHub dropped prices and is now $0 for many users, and you probably don't want to get in a price war with Microsoft (see: Netscape). It doesn't have to be the same pull for every customer, but every customer needs at least one. "We're just as good as that big popular project" isn't a pull. I've seen hundreds of projects try that, and it never works.
  - Rapzid 6y ago
    This sums up my attitude towards it. Opportunity costs factor into switching cost; am I getting enough ROI for the switching costs vs something else I could be working on?
mumblemumble 6y ago
I'd love to hear more about what you dislike about merge request reviews. At work we've been talking about migrating looking for alternatives to GitHub over dissatisfaction with its code review interface, and, of course, GitLab is on the list of ones to check out.
- jeltz 6y ago
  I mostly like their merge request UI but one big missing feature for me as an easy way to view and review commit messages. For complex patches the commit messages can be vital.
- tardyp 6y ago
  Ability to review diff between two versions of PR is a great missing feature in GitHub. When dealing with large changes, GitLab review flow is IMHO easier for reviewer. Gitlab store each push of a MR branch as different version (as hidden refs), which make the feature possible. In GH, you force push a branch, you loose the old code for good, so reviewer has to remember why he did that comment before to see if it is still relevant.
  - noahdesu 6y ago
    This is such an important feature that has a direct impact on code quality and time savings that I'm not sure why it isn't a priority feature. As a reviewer, having to choose between "review everything again" or "trust the submitter didn't introduce extra changes in the revised pr" is such a terrible choice to have to make.
  - tobylane 6y ago
    They added this (reference and comparison to old heads of a PR) at about the start of the year.
    - tardyp 6y ago
      Couldn't find the feature today when doing a large review. Do you have to enable it somewhere?

by pcx 6y ago

SparkyMcUnicorn 6y ago

Does 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    How do you keep the repos in sync?
    - atommclain 6y ago
      My guess is some form of: git checkout master git pull github/master git push gitlab/master
      - chx 6y ago
        It'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
    - rgibert 6y ago
      You can setup git push to push to multiple repos. git remote set-url --add origin ...
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      I use multiple hosts to backup my repos: I host gitolite.org on a $5 VM and then have it configured to automatically push to gitlab and GitHub on every change.
    - rhn_mk1 6y ago
      I use GitLab as the primary source, and mirror it to GitHub. Or, I would have, if the builtin GitLab mirroring feature wasn't broken for pushing to GitHub.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  Absolutely - people now ask to see your Github repo as an integral part of your CV without even really considering if you might use another service. And you don't exactly want to pitch to them how you don't have your code on Github because you use this other "fringe" service which even if they look at it they are going to find unfamiliar. I now host 50/50 on Gitlab / Github because I'm not really affected by this, but I'm conscious of it.
Insanity 6y ago
Gitlab is open core but not open source either, I think. I am in the same boat as you though!
- mschuster91 6y ago
  The Community Edition is open source.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - BlackLotus89 6y ago
    The community edition is a castrated mess with ads in it. I administrate a gitlab instance for a university and gitlab is hurting me in so many ways. 1) it had a message that tells you that the elastic search is so much better and that your admin can enable it (if he would only switch to enterprise) 2) it pretends to have functionality only to have it hidden behind an "available in ee" banner 3) it has a new functionality where it annoys everyone that has a new ip (24h disconnect anyone) that can't be disabled (only through patching) and suggests that enabling 2fa helps, but is send regardless of 2fa And every function that gets cut out and hidden behind the enterprise banner iy forever lost to you, because even if you implement it yourself it will nevet get merged since the function exists, in enterprise... Ps yeah there is a free enterprise license for universities, but it is not available for staff or external users (other universities) and the licensing model is so unflexible that you can't mix "free for students" and "pay for staff" or "students get enterprise" and "staff get basic features" Pps I had to patch out more than one thing over the years this was just the first thing that came to mind
    - type0 6y ago
      How about antispam features, are those still only for Enterprise?
      - BlackLotus89 6y ago
_ix 6y ago
I like GitLab and GitHub quite a bit, but I lean toward GitLab for the simplicity of a unified tool chain. However, I think GitLab can only really shine when you host it yourself. In 2020, on-premise/self-managed anything is kind of a hard sell, but the reliability and performance of gitlab.com leaves a lot to be desired. (So much so, I often think about trying to work for GitLab so I could help from a reliability perspective.) I stuck my neck out for GitLab in a previous organization and we ended up migrating from github.com to gitlab.com. This set me up for some embarrassment for every outage they experienced last year which felt surprisingly frequent. But if you have the resources, self-managed GitLab is great! tl;dr: gitlab.your.org > github.com > gitlab.com
aninteger 6y ago
GL is not browsable with JavaScript disabled while GH is.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Why is this a hard sell? How many people does this really affect? And why disable JS on GL?
  - carlhjerpe 6y ago
    A Turing complete language executing unsigned code in a sandbox that allows HTTP and HTTPS requests to 0.0.0.0/0 and ::/0 is not something everyone wants in their life.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    I run noscript without any whitelist at all, and considering how popular noscript is I doubt I'm alone here. It makes the modern web so much more pleasant, paradoxically by breaking it, now that user-hostile machinations are the norm. And yes, gitlab's web interface is substantially more annoying than github, in my experience.
  - neunnech 6y ago
    In some cases "I'm browsing GitLab" might be the exact impetus for someone's attempt to disable JS. As noted above, GitLab is sluggish. I was an early adopter/advocate for GitLab, but you can feel the bloat on every page and I no longer use it.
  - aninteger 6y ago
    It's not a hard sell, but it is certainly an inconvenience. I prefer to browse with javascript off by default and only enable it for sites that absolutely need it. I've had issues where sites using JS have caused a single core on my laptop to spin at 100% thus affecting battery life negatively.
- uHuge 6y ago
  Wonder how Gitea[0] stands on this line? It seems the easiest to setup for small teams. 0: https://gitea.io/en-us https://gitea.io/en-us
root_axis 6y ago
Gitlab CI pipeline was a deal breaker for our organization. Lots of UI bugs, quite a few issues with CI nodes hanging, and ultimately their yaml job configuration system turned out to be too constrained for our needs. We eventually switched back to github and jenkins. This was more than a year ago though, so I expect some of those issues have improved during that time.
- j4yav 6y ago
  Product director for CI/CD here - we have tried to focus on improvements around making more complex pipelines easier to manage, but I would love to hear what you ran into just to make sure we are closing the loop on all the important ones.
ken 6y ago
I don't think there's any one single blocker that's keeping me on GitHub. It's just a bunch of little annoyances with GitLab that add up to make it not worth it -- either UI quirks, or ways in which third-party tools integrate just a little more easily with GitHub. Yes, GitHub absolutely has a bunch of annoyances, too. (I listed a bunch of them here on HN in response to a question by Nat, just the other day!) If everyone were using GitLab first, we'd probably find excuses to put off switching to GitHub, too. To attract users, you've got to have a pull. If that's "open source", then it needs to be a way in which the closed-source nature of GitHub is hurting my daily workflow. If it's "user interface", you need to be such an improvement over GitHub that it's worth the cost of switching. If it's "cost", that's tough because GitHub dropped prices and is now $0 for many users, and you probably don't want to get in a price war with Microsoft (see: Netscape). It doesn't have to be the same pull for every customer, but every customer needs at least one. "We're just as good as that big popular project" isn't a pull. I've seen hundreds of projects try that, and it never works.
- Rapzid 6y ago
  This sums up my attitude towards it. Opportunity costs factor into switching cost; am I getting enough ROI for the switching costs vs something else I could be working on?

mumblemumble 6y ago

I'd love to hear more about what you dislike about merge request reviews. At work we've been talking about migrating looking for alternatives to GitHub over dissatisfaction with its code review interface, and, of course, GitLab is on the list of ones to check out.

jeltz 6y ago
I mostly like their merge request UI but one big missing feature for me as an easy way to view and review commit messages. For complex patches the commit messages can be vital.
tardyp 6y ago
Ability to review diff between two versions of PR is a great missing feature in GitHub. When dealing with large changes, GitLab review flow is IMHO easier for reviewer. Gitlab store each push of a MR branch as different version (as hidden refs), which make the feature possible. In GH, you force push a branch, you loose the old code for good, so reviewer has to remember why he did that comment before to see if it is still relevant.
- noahdesu 6y ago
  This is such an important feature that has a direct impact on code quality and time savings that I'm not sure why it isn't a priority feature. As a reviewer, having to choose between "review everything again" or "trust the submitter didn't introduce extra changes in the revised pr" is such a terrible choice to have to make.
- tobylane 6y ago
  They added this (reference and comparison to old heads of a PR) at about the start of the year.
  - tardyp 6y ago
    Couldn't find the feature today when doing a large review. Do you have to enable it somewhere?