9 ms·

Gitlab 13.10 Released

114 points by bjoko 6y ago

sytse 6y ago
We try to make a little bit of progress on many features each month. So most of the time we won't have any giant new features, progress happens iteratively. You might also notice lots of deprecations as we get closer to 14.0 (immediately after 13.11) Happy to answer any questions.
- Operyl 6y ago
  Why isn't the what's new section in Gitlab updated for 13.10? It still says "13.9 (Your Version)". EDIT: That is, the one under the help tab in a Gitlab instance on the top right.
  - sytse 6y ago
    On https://gitlab.com/help https://gitlab.com/help I see 13.11.0-pre as the version. Maybe you're working on a self-managed version that still needs to be updated?
    - Operyl 6y ago
      I'm talking about this: https://i.imgur.com/isbEqn6.png https://i.imgur.com/isbEqn6.png My instance is definitely updated, I did it myself and verified the version number in the Admin section.
      - kennyGitLab 6y ago
        Hi Operyl - GitLab Product Leader here. Our process for updating the What's New content is delayed slightly from the release (as we use the release post images that are published on the 22nd for the What's New highlights). They'll show up shortly. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/blog/release-posts/#creating-an-mr-for-whats-new-entries https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/blog/release-pos...
      - kennyGitLab 6y ago
        Here is the MR for 13.10 What's New Content. You'll need to update to the first point release after 13.10.0 to get this content. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/57119 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/57119
        Operyl 6y ago
        This seems really bizarre to not be included with the .0 release. The features are live, but the label states "Your instance (current version) is 13.9". It could do with some more refining perhaps.
        mkarampalas 6y ago
        Hi Operyl, GitLab PM here. Thanks for the feedback on What's New. As you point out, it looks like we have some opportunity for refinement and better/clearer messaging for folks that update right away to the .0 release. I've opened up this issue to track that work and welcome your feedback or ideas there. Thank you! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325591 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325591
ktpsns 6y ago
I like Gitlab's OSS philosophy and documentation (including these lengthy release notes) a lot. If there's one feature I really miss in Gitlab than the limited issue trackers. Despite Jira is still the "go-to" solution in many companies, I feel that many try to avoid that monster of a software, especially since Atlassian no more offers a self-hosted variant. I'd love to see more things like GANTT charts included (there is only a Kanban board display for issues, not yet some Waterfall or agile/GANTT board).
- emerongi 6y ago
  An issue for us is that we need to provide outside users access to support tickets. Gitlab has Service Desk, but it's useful only if it's just your engineering team looking at the issues. Service Desk issues often need attention from someone outside the engineering team, though. There's a steep step-up from Premium (which we are at) to Ultimate to get guest accounts, but even with guest accounts, we'd need to separate access of service desk tickets from internal tickets.
  - ktpsns 6y ago
    Jep, I've also noticed many shortcomings from the gitlab service desk feature. For us the problem was that when replying users by email, they could not open attached files without an account on our installation. Redmine has these features since a long time, and I think it's worth for Github to catch up...
- tyingq 6y ago
  It does feel like Gitlab strategically keeps certain things out of the OSS product, like limiting the issues to two states.
  - john_cogs 6y ago
    We use buyer based tiering to decide which tier a feature will reside in. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#buyer-based-tiering-clarification https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#buyer-based-t...
ZeroCool2u 6y ago
I really like how GitLab is shaping up. I hope they start getting a bit more mind share from GitHub, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that recent pricing change. [1] Having to pay the same amount per license, for folks that just want to create/edit or even just view issues, as a full blown developer is simply not tractable. There's a lot of value in the platform and all else equal I'd probably pick GitLab if I had to choose between GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket, JetBrains Space, or Shudder Azure DevOps. But the price. Damn, it's just impossible to make that argument to yourself, never mind your CTO. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717
- TheChaplain 6y ago
  You can voice your input here on the matter of non-developer accounts; https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 The more feedback they get the better.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    Its been years like that. They aren't going to change.
- merb 6y ago
  yeah, my company aswell, we only need 1 required reviewer, but paying for that like $19 per user (we are 5, so $95 for that per month) is a little bit ridiculous. granted it probably comes with support, but as a small company you do not care about support, you care about $1200 a year. I loved the jira/stash pricing, 10 person shop was $10 a year so $30 with stash + jira agile (there was a time where agile costed extra), but no support. the price of course was ridiculously cheap, but granted that was something were you did not even needed to talk about the cost, it was assumed that it was worth it and there was no cost/feature evalulation. edit: kudos to them they already offer tons of stuff for free.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
systemvoltage 6y ago
I am curious, at what point will the features stop? Do we keep adding features until Gitlab becomes impossibly complex to use or onboard anyone? Why isn't Gitlab built like a modular app - add what you want but core should be simple as possible and feature complete. I am afraid but this is how a lot of applications die. Gitlab is starting to get bulky and obese already.
- Operyl 6y ago
  I feel like it's already .. kind of there. There are so many features that I'm lost in them, and some of them feel like they've been abandoned already.
- zertrin 6y ago
  Yeah, I was an avid user of self hosted gitlab previously, but the pace of added bloat^Wfeatures was just too much and I ditched it for gitea about 1 year ago. I feel gitlab's is now mainly aiming at large enough companies which actually use all of these features.
  - enraged_camel 6y ago
    Not sure why you feel that added features result in "bloat". We've been on Gitlab for 4 years now, and our core workflow not only hasn't changed, but also has not been impacted by any of the new features. On the other hand, we've expanded our usage beyond it, and it's always nice to need a feature and find out that it is right there under a menu and just needs some configuration to get it to work.
    - tyldum 6y ago
      With them dropping the lowest license tier, you better start using all the features... We have been Enterprise users since 2015, but are evaluating our options.
- wernerb 6y ago
  Just take a look at the gitlab ci reference. It is huge. And there are competing features in there that are intended to "deprecate" the older feature but this doesn't happen. They are also constantly held back on providing backwards support. For instance, adding dpeendency-like flow as opposed to stage based flow has been added but it's not possible to model dependencies from same stage making the whole thing kind of useless. Versioning the yaml specs/apis is the correct move. I hope future CI systems take note.
nickjj 6y ago
If anyone from Gitlab happens to read this, how is ActionCable working out for you on gitlab.com? If you're not from Gitlab but use ActionCable at moderate scale feel free to share your story too! I casually read a few PRs and issues from a year ago where you discussed introducing ActionCable but it looks like a full blown report hasn't been written up on how it panned out, but I do see it being referenced in your HTML. Concerns were mainly around memory usage, such as it growing to pretty huge sizes even with idle connections. I know there were lots of horror stories of major memory usage early on. The memory growth climbed very quickly with active connections, but I wonder now with Rails 6.1+ if those issues have been ironed out.
- sytse 6y ago
  Last thing I heard we're no longer worried about memory usage. We where thinking about using AnyCable to address memory concerns but that is off the table at the moment because it isn't an issue anymore.
  - nickjj 6y ago
    Thanks. Are you no longer concerned because memory usage dropped significantly? How's the overall latency? I remember seeing some benchmarks where ActionCable was using like 1-2gb of memory for around a thousand active connections with 95% percentile latency in the multi-second range to broadcast a message. I do see AnyCable makes huge improvements here and I love the idea of it but also not too sure how backwards compatible it is with Hotwire / Turbo Streams. I've always thought Rails was good / fast enough but the ActionCable stuff worries me a little because a single low end VPS could happily handle a very solid amount of traffic (tens of thousands of daily page views, etc.) but once you start factoring in websocket connections that changes everything. Suddenly pages that have completed the request / response cycle are still on the hook to keep a ws connection open even if they're not doing anything that causes a state change.
stevenhuang 6y ago
I feel that Gitlab needs to optimize for the 90% use case instead of adding more features. For example does anyone else find Gitlabs diff lacking? It makes reviewing large patches painful, with the seemingly constant fetching of individual file diffs and inability to show large file diffs. The UI in general feels sluggish, especially when compared to something like Gerrit or GitHub.
- ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
  So much second this. It actually feels like it is getting slower on each upgrade, and more buggy. Am I the only one who finds that the "go to next unresolved" button now often goes into an inconsistent non-working state that requires a (slow) refresh? Given that I spend most of my time on GitLab reviewing, this is a real pain point for me.
  - phikai 6y ago
    > Am I the only one who finds that the "go to next unresolved" button now often goes into an inconsistent non-working state that requires a (slow) refresh? I don't think I've seen that reported before and we have been working through some interesting to reproduce issues in recent milestones. Would you mind opening an issue for this? Feel free to tag me (same name).
    - acdha 6y ago
      There's an open issue for one thing I notice all the time: the next/previous unresolved commands update some internal state but scrolling and other navigation do not. This means that if you use any other navigation mechanism (e.g. search) the next time you hit “go to next unresolved” button it will instead scroll backwards to whatever thread follows the last one you navigated to using the “go to next unresolved” mechanism even if that's scrolling hundreds of lines back.
    - shubhamaggarwal 6y ago
      There’s already an issue for this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/281947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/281947
lrm242 6y ago
Can we just get a decent unified Notification Center, please? Notifications in GitLab are painful, just copy how GitHub does it and stop trying to make it so complicated.
- masklinn 6y ago
  Not being a gitlab user I'm surprised its notification are worse than github's, because it's not like github's notifications are any good. Between the comment notifications which don't link you anywhere half the time (possibly on inline comments? I never remember) and the update notifications which give you a completely empty diff on a push force, it only serves to signal that something happened on this thing you don't even care about.
  - lrm242 6y ago
    All GitLab notifications are via email unless someone explicitly @s you. Furthermore, there is no api to notification. Basically, unless you monitor email, you don’t get notifications. It’s horrible.
    - spockz 6y ago
      Instead of watching general notifications I just subscribed to specific RSS feeds for issues, mr, etc and use RSS as my notification engine.
    - masklinn 6y ago
      Wow that does sound nasty indeed.
kuizu 6y ago
The Gitlab licensing model was recently change and the lowest tier starter license was removed. Anyone knows which of these new features a customer receives that is still on "starter" (which can be kept for up to one year after the change to the license model)?
- thiagocsf 6y ago
  You stay on basic until your subscription expires or you upgrade: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscription-tiers/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscriptio...
- john_cogs 6y ago
  All new features target Free/Premium/Ultimate. Starter customer are still getting new features, improvements and fixes — they are the same features that are also available on the Free tier. For Starter customers who elected to upgrade to Premium for free, they will also have access to the new Premium features.
ksec 6y ago
For every release I just go straight to performance improvement https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/03/22/gitlab-13-10-released/#performance-improvements https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/03/22/gitlab-13-10-re...
- dnsmichi 6y ago
  Hi, you can also subscribe to this epic to follow the performance improvements planned for 2021: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3273 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3273
crubier 6y ago
From my perspective, Gitlab needs to urgently reallocate 90% of its developper force from "Adding new features in 10 different axes" to "Stop adding new features and exclusively work on performance and consistent unified UX". I know it hurts, I know it's probably not what devs at Gitlab aspire to, but I believe it is much needed. Possibly, an entire rewrite of some core aspects are needed. I have a lot of trouble selling Gitlab to my team. Everyone just wants to move to Github to have a simple UX that works.
- sofixa 6y ago
  Their best shot at competing with GitHub is on features ( and they do a pretty good job at it too), so i think they can't afford to stop shipping new features. GitHub's UX is simple because it doesn't even come close to what GitLab provides, even in the free tier, and their iteration is much slower. If GitHub had GitLab's features it'd have a complex in some places UX as well.
- wingerd 6y ago
  They have no clue how to fix performance issues. These performance issue have been there for multiple years and users have been asking them to fix these. Instead, their core competency seems to be hire people to advertize and post "thank you" and "we are here to address your issues" kind of messages here at HN. They have a whole army of those users here (you can check past HN threads related to gitlab).
sm4rk0 6y ago
This one should've landed, too: "New predefined variables for job start time and pipeline created time" https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22901 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22901
ilmiont 6y ago
The feature releases don’t show up in GitLab’s RSS now... why not? Can’t find any way to subscribe to them. 13.9 didn’t appear and I had to go looking. 13.10 hasn’t either. Blog “news” posts, unfiltered and patch releases all show up in RSS... why aren’t the monthly releases being included anymore?
- dnsmichi 6y ago
  Hi, which source are you using? https://about.gitlab.com/atom.xml https://about.gitlab.com/atom.xml currently shows 13.10 as the second entry.
  - ilmiont 6y ago
    Thanks, that works! I was subscribed to https://www.gitlab.com/atom.xml https://www.gitlab.com/atom.xml - at least, that's what Feedly's UI shows, but that URL doesn't seem to resolve at all. In my Feedly, the newest article was "building a better Heroku". When you search for GitLab in Feedly, you also see that feed, without the 13.10 post. The "GitLab" source at top of search results shows "about.gitlab.com", 6k followers, but no 13.10 post. I've directly added your atom.xml link so my situation is resolved for now. Thanks!
- JetSpiegel 6y ago
  There's a MR for this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/77419 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...
snicker7 6y ago
I use GitLab at work and sourcehut for personal projects. And as much as I like minimalism, I have to admit how /nice/ GitLab is in comparison. But some complaints since some GitLab employees are watching: - Syntax highlighting (for Python at least) is wonky. - Changing profile pictures can take hours or days to propagate. Seems like a silly request, but I like changing my profile pic quickly. - Metarepos (git repos using lots of submodules) are a mess in git and gitlab doesn't make it easier. It's either monorepo or manyrepo with no support for us inbetweeners. - Frontend perf is snappier than some competitors, but not snappy /enough/. - The search UI is bad. The widgets get in my way 90% of the time. And its slow.
- sytse 6y ago
  Thanks for these! Some people at GitLab are looking at your post.
efiecho 6y ago
How is the process going with reducing Javascript on the frontend? Simple things like reading replies to issues or merge requests should not require Javascript, it also makes Gitlab feel annoyingly sluggish compared to GitHub.

114 points by bjoko 6y ago

We try to make a little bit of progress on many features each month. So most of the time we won't have any giant new features, progress happens iteratively. You might also notice lots of deprecations as we get closer to 14.0 (immediately after 13.11) Happy to answer any questions.

Operyl 6y ago
Why isn't the what's new section in Gitlab updated for 13.10? It still says "13.9 (Your Version)". EDIT: That is, the one under the help tab in a Gitlab instance on the top right.
- sytse 6y ago
  On https://gitlab.com/help https://gitlab.com/help I see 13.11.0-pre as the version. Maybe you're working on a self-managed version that still needs to be updated?
  - Operyl 6y ago
    I'm talking about this: https://i.imgur.com/isbEqn6.png https://i.imgur.com/isbEqn6.png My instance is definitely updated, I did it myself and verified the version number in the Admin section.
    - kennyGitLab 6y ago
      Hi Operyl - GitLab Product Leader here. Our process for updating the What's New content is delayed slightly from the release (as we use the release post images that are published on the 22nd for the What's New highlights). They'll show up shortly. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/blog/release-posts/#creating-an-mr-for-whats-new-entries https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/blog/release-pos...
    - kennyGitLab 6y ago
      Here is the MR for 13.10 What's New Content. You'll need to update to the first point release after 13.10.0 to get this content. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/57119 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/57119
      - Operyl 6y ago
        This seems really bizarre to not be included with the .0 release. The features are live, but the label states "Your instance (current version) is 13.9". It could do with some more refining perhaps.
        mkarampalas 6y ago
        Hi Operyl, GitLab PM here. Thanks for the feedback on What's New. As you point out, it looks like we have some opportunity for refinement and better/clearer messaging for folks that update right away to the .0 release. I've opened up this issue to track that work and welcome your feedback or ideas there. Thank you! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325591 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/325591

ktpsns 6y ago

I like Gitlab's OSS philosophy and documentation (including these lengthy release notes) a lot. If there's one feature I really miss in Gitlab than the limited issue trackers. Despite Jira is still the "go-to" solution in many companies, I feel that many try to avoid that monster of a software, especially since Atlassian no more offers a self-hosted variant. I'd love to see more things like GANTT charts included (there is only a Kanban board display for issues, not yet some Waterfall or agile/GANTT board).

emerongi 6y ago
An issue for us is that we need to provide outside users access to support tickets. Gitlab has Service Desk, but it's useful only if it's just your engineering team looking at the issues. Service Desk issues often need attention from someone outside the engineering team, though. There's a steep step-up from Premium (which we are at) to Ultimate to get guest accounts, but even with guest accounts, we'd need to separate access of service desk tickets from internal tickets.
- ktpsns 6y ago
  Jep, I've also noticed many shortcomings from the gitlab service desk feature. For us the problem was that when replying users by email, they could not open attached files without an account on our installation. Redmine has these features since a long time, and I think it's worth for Github to catch up...
tyingq 6y ago
It does feel like Gitlab strategically keeps certain things out of the OSS product, like limiting the issues to two states.
- john_cogs 6y ago
  We use buyer based tiering to decide which tier a feature will reside in. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#buyer-based-tiering-clarification https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#buyer-based-t...

ZeroCool2u 6y ago

I really like how GitLab is shaping up. I hope they start getting a bit more mind share from GitHub, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot with that recent pricing change. [1] Having to pay the same amount per license, for folks that just want to create/edit or even just view issues, as a full blown developer is simply not tractable. There's a lot of value in the platform and all else equal I'd probably pick GitLab if I had to choose between GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket, JetBrains Space, or Shudder Azure DevOps. But the price. Damn, it's just impossible to make that argument to yourself, never mind your CTO. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717

TheChaplain 6y ago
You can voice your input here on the matter of non-developer accounts; https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 The more feedback they get the better.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  Its been years like that. They aren't going to change.
merb 6y ago
yeah, my company aswell, we only need 1 required reviewer, but paying for that like $19 per user (we are 5, so $95 for that per month) is a little bit ridiculous. granted it probably comes with support, but as a small company you do not care about support, you care about $1200 a year. I loved the jira/stash pricing, 10 person shop was $10 a year so $30 with stash + jira agile (there was a time where agile costed extra), but no support. the price of course was ridiculously cheap, but granted that was something were you did not even needed to talk about the cost, it was assumed that it was worth it and there was no cost/feature evalulation. edit: kudos to them they already offer tons of stuff for free.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

systemvoltage 6y ago

I am curious, at what point will the features stop? Do we keep adding features until Gitlab becomes impossibly complex to use or onboard anyone? Why isn't Gitlab built like a modular app - add what you want but core should be simple as possible and feature complete. I am afraid but this is how a lot of applications die. Gitlab is starting to get bulky and obese already.

Operyl 6y ago
I feel like it's already .. kind of there. There are so many features that I'm lost in them, and some of them feel like they've been abandoned already.
zertrin 6y ago
Yeah, I was an avid user of self hosted gitlab previously, but the pace of added bloat^Wfeatures was just too much and I ditched it for gitea about 1 year ago. I feel gitlab's is now mainly aiming at large enough companies which actually use all of these features.
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  Not sure why you feel that added features result in "bloat". We've been on Gitlab for 4 years now, and our core workflow not only hasn't changed, but also has not been impacted by any of the new features. On the other hand, we've expanded our usage beyond it, and it's always nice to need a feature and find out that it is right there under a menu and just needs some configuration to get it to work.
  - tyldum 6y ago
    With them dropping the lowest license tier, you better start using all the features... We have been Enterprise users since 2015, but are evaluating our options.
wernerb 6y ago
Just take a look at the gitlab ci reference. It is huge. And there are competing features in there that are intended to "deprecate" the older feature but this doesn't happen. They are also constantly held back on providing backwards support. For instance, adding dpeendency-like flow as opposed to stage based flow has been added but it's not possible to model dependencies from same stage making the whole thing kind of useless. Versioning the yaml specs/apis is the correct move. I hope future CI systems take note.

nickjj 6y ago

If anyone from Gitlab happens to read this, how is ActionCable working out for you on gitlab.com? If you're not from Gitlab but use ActionCable at moderate scale feel free to share your story too! I casually read a few PRs and issues from a year ago where you discussed introducing ActionCable but it looks like a full blown report hasn't been written up on how it panned out, but I do see it being referenced in your HTML. Concerns were mainly around memory usage, such as it growing to pretty huge sizes even with idle connections. I know there were lots of horror stories of major memory usage early on. The memory growth climbed very quickly with active connections, but I wonder now with Rails 6.1+ if those issues have been ironed out.

sytse 6y ago
Last thing I heard we're no longer worried about memory usage. We where thinking about using AnyCable to address memory concerns but that is off the table at the moment because it isn't an issue anymore.
- nickjj 6y ago
  Thanks. Are you no longer concerned because memory usage dropped significantly? How's the overall latency? I remember seeing some benchmarks where ActionCable was using like 1-2gb of memory for around a thousand active connections with 95% percentile latency in the multi-second range to broadcast a message. I do see AnyCable makes huge improvements here and I love the idea of it but also not too sure how backwards compatible it is with Hotwire / Turbo Streams. I've always thought Rails was good / fast enough but the ActionCable stuff worries me a little because a single low end VPS could happily handle a very solid amount of traffic (tens of thousands of daily page views, etc.) but once you start factoring in websocket connections that changes everything. Suddenly pages that have completed the request / response cycle are still on the hook to keep a ws connection open even if they're not doing anything that causes a state change.

stevenhuang 6y ago

I feel that Gitlab needs to optimize for the 90% use case instead of adding more features. For example does anyone else find Gitlabs diff lacking? It makes reviewing large patches painful, with the seemingly constant fetching of individual file diffs and inability to show large file diffs. The UI in general feels sluggish, especially when compared to something like Gerrit or GitHub.

ulrikrasmussen 6y ago
So much second this. It actually feels like it is getting slower on each upgrade, and more buggy. Am I the only one who finds that the "go to next unresolved" button now often goes into an inconsistent non-working state that requires a (slow) refresh? Given that I spend most of my time on GitLab reviewing, this is a real pain point for me.
- phikai 6y ago
  > Am I the only one who finds that the "go to next unresolved" button now often goes into an inconsistent non-working state that requires a (slow) refresh? I don't think I've seen that reported before and we have been working through some interesting to reproduce issues in recent milestones. Would you mind opening an issue for this? Feel free to tag me (same name).
  - acdha 6y ago
    There's an open issue for one thing I notice all the time: the next/previous unresolved commands update some internal state but scrolling and other navigation do not. This means that if you use any other navigation mechanism (e.g. search) the next time you hit “go to next unresolved” button it will instead scroll backwards to whatever thread follows the last one you navigated to using the “go to next unresolved” mechanism even if that's scrolling hundreds of lines back.
  - shubhamaggarwal 6y ago
    There’s already an issue for this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/281947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/281947

lrm242 6y ago

Can we just get a decent unified Notification Center, please? Notifications in GitLab are painful, just copy how GitHub does it and stop trying to make it so complicated.

masklinn 6y ago
Not being a gitlab user I'm surprised its notification are worse than github's, because it's not like github's notifications are any good. Between the comment notifications which don't link you anywhere half the time (possibly on inline comments? I never remember) and the update notifications which give you a completely empty diff on a push force, it only serves to signal that something happened on this thing you don't even care about.
- lrm242 6y ago
  All GitLab notifications are via email unless someone explicitly @s you. Furthermore, there is no api to notification. Basically, unless you monitor email, you don’t get notifications. It’s horrible.
  - spockz 6y ago
    Instead of watching general notifications I just subscribed to specific RSS feeds for issues, mr, etc and use RSS as my notification engine.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    Wow that does sound nasty indeed.

kuizu 6y ago

The Gitlab licensing model was recently change and the lowest tier starter license was removed. Anyone knows which of these new features a customer receives that is still on "starter" (which can be kept for up to one year after the change to the license model)?

thiagocsf 6y ago
You stay on basic until your subscription expires or you upgrade: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscription-tiers/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscriptio...
john_cogs 6y ago
All new features target Free/Premium/Ultimate. Starter customer are still getting new features, improvements and fixes — they are the same features that are also available on the Free tier. For Starter customers who elected to upgrade to Premium for free, they will also have access to the new Premium features.

ksec 6y ago

For every release I just go straight to performance improvement https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/03/22/gitlab-13-10-released/#performance-improvements https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/03/22/gitlab-13-10-re...

dnsmichi 6y ago
Hi, you can also subscribe to this epic to follow the performance improvements planned for 2021: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3273 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3273

crubier 6y ago

From my perspective, Gitlab needs to urgently reallocate 90% of its developper force from "Adding new features in 10 different axes" to "Stop adding new features and exclusively work on performance and consistent unified UX". I know it hurts, I know it's probably not what devs at Gitlab aspire to, but I believe it is much needed. Possibly, an entire rewrite of some core aspects are needed. I have a lot of trouble selling Gitlab to my team. Everyone just wants to move to Github to have a simple UX that works.

sofixa 6y ago
Their best shot at competing with GitHub is on features ( and they do a pretty good job at it too), so i think they can't afford to stop shipping new features. GitHub's UX is simple because it doesn't even come close to what GitLab provides, even in the free tier, and their iteration is much slower. If GitHub had GitLab's features it'd have a complex in some places UX as well.
wingerd 6y ago
They have no clue how to fix performance issues. These performance issue have been there for multiple years and users have been asking them to fix these. Instead, their core competency seems to be hire people to advertize and post "thank you" and "we are here to address your issues" kind of messages here at HN. They have a whole army of those users here (you can check past HN threads related to gitlab).

sm4rk0 6y ago

This one should've landed, too: "New predefined variables for job start time and pipeline created time" https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22901 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22901

ilmiont 6y ago

The feature releases don’t show up in GitLab’s RSS now... why not? Can’t find any way to subscribe to them. 13.9 didn’t appear and I had to go looking. 13.10 hasn’t either. Blog “news” posts, unfiltered and patch releases all show up in RSS... why aren’t the monthly releases being included anymore?

dnsmichi 6y ago
Hi, which source are you using? https://about.gitlab.com/atom.xml https://about.gitlab.com/atom.xml currently shows 13.10 as the second entry.
- ilmiont 6y ago
  Thanks, that works! I was subscribed to https://www.gitlab.com/atom.xml https://www.gitlab.com/atom.xml - at least, that's what Feedly's UI shows, but that URL doesn't seem to resolve at all. In my Feedly, the newest article was "building a better Heroku". When you search for GitLab in Feedly, you also see that feed, without the 13.10 post. The "GitLab" source at top of search results shows "about.gitlab.com", 6k followers, but no 13.10 post. I've directly added your atom.xml link so my situation is resolved for now. Thanks!
JetSpiegel 6y ago
There's a MR for this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/77419 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request...

snicker7 6y ago

I use GitLab at work and sourcehut for personal projects. And as much as I like minimalism, I have to admit how /nice/ GitLab is in comparison. But some complaints since some GitLab employees are watching: - Syntax highlighting (for Python at least) is wonky. - Changing profile pictures can take hours or days to propagate. Seems like a silly request, but I like changing my profile pic quickly. - Metarepos (git repos using lots of submodules) are a mess in git and gitlab doesn't make it easier. It's either monorepo or manyrepo with no support for us inbetweeners. - Frontend perf is snappier than some competitors, but not snappy /enough/. - The search UI is bad. The widgets get in my way 90% of the time. And its slow.

sytse 6y ago
Thanks for these! Some people at GitLab are looking at your post.

efiecho 6y ago

How is the process going with reducing Javascript on the frontend? Simple things like reading replies to issues or merge requests should not require Javascript, it also makes Gitlab feel annoyingly sluggish compared to GitHub.