9 ms·

Gitlab Now the Main Development Platform for Wine

125 points by TangerineDream 4y ago

danpalmer 4y ago
The one thing I think GitHub is missing is a solid, well thought out bug/project/ticket management system. Issues is too basic, and Projects are only really collections of Issues. I think GitLab's issue tracker has a lot of usability issues, but it fits the template of an issue tracker (mostly defined by Jira) much better. For those selecting a new platform for a large project or organisation, I can completely understand GitLab's issue tracker being a safer bet than GitHub.
- jeltz 4y ago
  I would say GitHub is also missing CI. After having worked with GitHub Actions I cannot say I am impressed. It feels more like an MVP than a real CI system. It also as frequent outages.
  - gtirloni 4y ago
    What do you think is a better CI system for a project hosted on GitHub?
    - jeltz 4y ago
      I would say Jenkins is still the best CI system.
    - mdaniel 4y ago
      CircleCI is the best system I've encountered so far that enables running locally what one can run "in the cloud." GH Actions has "act" which is some kind soul's attempt, but is ultimately emulation. The gitlab-runner binary is a cruel joke (I mention that both in support of "seems local CI running is damn hard" and also because GL allows just using it for CI of GH repos, presumably a feature from back before GHA existed) Earthly just switched their license to MIT, so that's something I intend to try out, and Dagger is a new entrant into that race, but (a) requires learning cuelang (b) shit itself when I last tried it
  - danpalmer 4y ago
    I ported a lot of stuff from Jenkins and CircleCI to GitHub Actions, as well as building an iOS build/release pipeline with Actions, and honestly I don't understand this criticism. I find Actions to have a maturity far beyond how long it has existed for, with very strong primitives that compose better than anything else I've seen. GitLab CI always felt to me like it was a minor improvement over Travis, and that they hadn't yet realised that complex CI trends towards general compute orchestration. I found it hard to achieve complex, reliable, and fast pipelines with GitLab CI. There have been outages, but we didn't find this to be any worse than CircleCI, and was better than our experience running a Jenkins cluster.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I actually really appreciate GitHub issues for its simplicity: just a list of issues that need addressing. I found most more "advanced" systems to be much harder to use and get an overview of things, especially with larger projects. I found that "just a list of things" with some labels usually works best both from a programmer's and from a management perspective.
  - mahkoh 4y ago
    What could be simpler than having to press "Show More" 20 times because you can't Ctrl-F what you're looking for? Especially in larger project, as you say.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      You mean in large discussions some comments being hidden? It's not my favourite feature either, no. I'm not saying it's perfect or that I wouldn't change things, just that I appreciate its simplicity vs. a more complex system.
- tyingq 4y ago
  GitLab's issue tracker, though, can only tie an issue to a single repo.
  - dnsmichi 4y ago
    GitLab team member here. Epics can help with a group view over issues in multiple projects, with more planning features, for example roadmaps and boards. [0] Board/roadmaps are available for issues in projects too. To a larger extent, the planning with work items may help address the challenge with project/group boundaries. Recommend reviewing the direction page [1] and linked issues/epics, and add your thoughts :) [0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/ [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/project_management/team_planning/#what-we-are-currently-working-on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/project_management/t...
    - dnsmichi 4y ago
      I have pinged our product managers at GitLab, and they kindly shared the issue titled "Share an Issue/Epic To Multiple Projects or Groups" [0] which directly addresses the initial request. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/296668 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/296668
Shadonototra 4y ago
obvious and logical choice github is busy creating Instagram for "Coders"
- lizardactivist 4y ago
  Never occured to me before, but you're right, and it's an interesting way of putting it. Github boasts "83 million developers", but I think the number of actual developers is probably closer to 0.83 million (which is still a very large amount). But of course I am an insensitive jerk who likes to exclude people, because I think to be called a developer it takes more than registering an account, creating a repo with a couple of broken files and add noise to the signal.
  - core-utility 4y ago
    Totally agree. I have a programming background but don't really program anymore. My Github account has been used for nothing more than submitting issues for projects I use. Any source control I need for other things I do, I use GitLab because of the free private projects and CI integration, but even that's minimal.
    - gtirloni 4y ago
      GitHub also has free private projects and CI though. Is that the only reason?
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        GitHub has a lot more limitations on free projects last I checked, like making it private and using GitHub pages and how many people you can add.
        colejohnson66 4y ago
        Since the MS acquisition, free accounts can have unlimited private repos.
shultays 4y ago
I thought they switched from GitHub or another provider to Gitlab or something but they switched from "patches in email lists" process to this Welcome to $current_year I guess
superkuh 4y ago
That's too bad. Gitlab is the code host that doesn't use HTML. They're even more hostile to HTML than Microsoft Github. It's infeasible to use or even look at a directly listing on gitlab in a browser older than a year or two. It's all javascript over there, and not generic javascript: bleeding edge JS that only works in megacorp browsers.
- Phurist 4y ago
  Get with the times grapms - JS is here to stay ;)
- ectopod 4y ago
  And all this js makes it really slow too. Maybe the paid plans are faster, but the free hosting for open source is sluggish.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  I guess this is why I've been seeing so many projects on Sourcehut
ferdek 4y ago
Too bad Phabricator is no longer with us. Are there any actively maintained forks?
- jmholla 4y ago
  [Phorge](https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/) is the only one I know of.
serial_dev 4y ago
A couple of years ago I wanted to put my open source projects on GitLab, as I was thinking... "why is the biggest open source hub not open source". Back then the GitLab CI was much better compared to alternatives, and I had a couple of other features that I liked on GitLab. I tried for a couple of months, and gave up. I switched back to GitHub for a couple of reasons. - After some time, GitHub's CI became a thing, it became good enough for me (and other features improved, too). - Companies want to see your GitHub profile. Publishing your work on GitLab is not going to get you the same exposure as publishing on GitHub. - Open-source contributors are on GitHub. The majority is not going to create a GitLab account just to fix a bug or open an issue in my little library. If you want community, it's on GitHub. - Hosting open-source really didn't seem to be a priority for GitLab, so if they don't seem to care, why should I? - GitLab's quality started to decrease. More bloat (both in terms of UI and code size), slower and slower app whereas GitHub hit the sweet spot of keeping things simple while providing essential features that are fast.
- jraph 4y ago
  > Companies want to see your GitHub profile Yes, but see, this is exactly what we ought to fight. No? I don't want to be forced to host my open source projects at Microsoft. Or any place really. I don't think there should be any centralization for project hosting. GitLab.com is not perfect neither, it requires users to run reCAPTCHA. This is forced Google spying for any GitLab users and therefore potential contributors. I really want this fad that considers platforms hosting projects as social networks to end.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    then set up a github account and put up a project that says "my stuff is hosted over here instead"
    - jraph 4y ago
      I should not have to open an account on GitHub. But okay, maybe-ish. However, my point is actually larger than this. There's a whole ecosystem where your project doesn't exist if it's not on GitHub. For example, Hackoberfest, where only projects on GitHub are eligible (not that it necessarily a bad thing actually, but still, it really puts in the head of people that open source = GitHub) (edit: I see that they accepted GitLab in 2021. It's less bad than just GitHub, but still problematic). There are studies / research on software / open source that don't bother with projects not on GitHub. Libraries are often evaluated on the number of stars / forks / issues they have on GitHub. These issues are all about the network effect.
sylware 4y ago
gitlab is currently hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers. wrong alternative.
Curious_Furious 4y ago
Use Wine heavily for playing my old videogames that no longer work on Windows. Great to see they moved off of the Microsoft platform.
- theli 4y ago
  They were never really using GitHub
blueflow 4y ago
Has Github become the new Sourceforge?
- openstep 4y ago
  Nope
- gtirloni 4y ago
  Why do you think that?
- jjice 4y ago
  I'm going to wager not. I think this is a classic case of something making it to HN or the HN crowd finding it interesting, but in reality, GitHub is probably doing more than fine and continuing to grow. Or I'm completely wrong.
  - bragr 4y ago
    Between hosted premium GitHub, and self hosted GitHub enterprise, I think they're doing fine.
- itvision 4y ago
  A long time ago. Sourceforge has been more or less abandoned/forgotten for the past five years. Some projects continue to stick to it though due to inertia and laziness.
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    You interpreted their point very charitably. I think they knew that sourceforge has been effectively dead and is saying here that GitHub is following in it's footsteps. I don't agree with that, but i believe that was the point.
- TonyTrapp 4y ago
  What does a self-hosted GitLab instance have to do with GitHub?
mytheory 4y ago
They previously used mail to send patches. I was also curious about a Gitlab/GitHub comparaison, but there is none.
- bragr 4y ago
  They are broadly similar but given the project I presume it just came down to gitlab being "open source" and github not.

The one thing I think GitHub is missing is a solid, well thought out bug/project/ticket management system. Issues is too basic, and Projects are only really collections of Issues. I think GitLab's issue tracker has a lot of usability issues, but it fits the template of an issue tracker (mostly defined by Jira) much better. For those selecting a new platform for a large project or organisation, I can completely understand GitLab's issue tracker being a safer bet than GitHub.

jeltz 4y ago
I would say GitHub is also missing CI. After having worked with GitHub Actions I cannot say I am impressed. It feels more like an MVP than a real CI system. It also as frequent outages.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  What do you think is a better CI system for a project hosted on GitHub?
  - jeltz 4y ago
    I would say Jenkins is still the best CI system.
  - mdaniel 4y ago
    CircleCI is the best system I've encountered so far that enables running locally what one can run "in the cloud." GH Actions has "act" which is some kind soul's attempt, but is ultimately emulation. The gitlab-runner binary is a cruel joke (I mention that both in support of "seems local CI running is damn hard" and also because GL allows just using it for CI of GH repos, presumably a feature from back before GHA existed) Earthly just switched their license to MIT, so that's something I intend to try out, and Dagger is a new entrant into that race, but (a) requires learning cuelang (b) shit itself when I last tried it
- danpalmer 4y ago
  I ported a lot of stuff from Jenkins and CircleCI to GitHub Actions, as well as building an iOS build/release pipeline with Actions, and honestly I don't understand this criticism. I find Actions to have a maturity far beyond how long it has existed for, with very strong primitives that compose better than anything else I've seen. GitLab CI always felt to me like it was a minor improvement over Travis, and that they hadn't yet realised that complex CI trends towards general compute orchestration. I found it hard to achieve complex, reliable, and fast pipelines with GitLab CI. There have been outages, but we didn't find this to be any worse than CircleCI, and was better than our experience running a Jenkins cluster.
Beltalowda 4y ago
I actually really appreciate GitHub issues for its simplicity: just a list of issues that need addressing. I found most more "advanced" systems to be much harder to use and get an overview of things, especially with larger projects. I found that "just a list of things" with some labels usually works best both from a programmer's and from a management perspective.
- mahkoh 4y ago
  What could be simpler than having to press "Show More" 20 times because you can't Ctrl-F what you're looking for? Especially in larger project, as you say.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    You mean in large discussions some comments being hidden? It's not my favourite feature either, no. I'm not saying it's perfect or that I wouldn't change things, just that I appreciate its simplicity vs. a more complex system.
tyingq 4y ago
GitLab's issue tracker, though, can only tie an issue to a single repo.
- dnsmichi 4y ago
  GitLab team member here. Epics can help with a group view over issues in multiple projects, with more planning features, for example roadmaps and boards. [0] Board/roadmaps are available for issues in projects too. To a larger extent, the planning with work items may help address the challenge with project/group boundaries. Recommend reviewing the direction page [1] and linked issues/epics, and add your thoughts :) [0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/ [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/project_management/team_planning/#what-we-are-currently-working-on https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/project_management/t...
  - dnsmichi 4y ago
    I have pinged our product managers at GitLab, and they kindly shared the issue titled "Share an Issue/Epic To Multiple Projects or Groups" [0] which directly addresses the initial request. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/296668 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/296668

Shadonototra 4y ago

obvious and logical choice github is busy creating Instagram for "Coders"

lizardactivist 4y ago
Never occured to me before, but you're right, and it's an interesting way of putting it. Github boasts "83 million developers", but I think the number of actual developers is probably closer to 0.83 million (which is still a very large amount). But of course I am an insensitive jerk who likes to exclude people, because I think to be called a developer it takes more than registering an account, creating a repo with a couple of broken files and add noise to the signal.
- core-utility 4y ago
  Totally agree. I have a programming background but don't really program anymore. My Github account has been used for nothing more than submitting issues for projects I use. Any source control I need for other things I do, I use GitLab because of the free private projects and CI integration, but even that's minimal.
  - gtirloni 4y ago
    GitHub also has free private projects and CI though. Is that the only reason?
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      GitHub has a lot more limitations on free projects last I checked, like making it private and using GitHub pages and how many people you can add.
      - colejohnson66 4y ago
        Since the MS acquisition, free accounts can have unlimited private repos.

shultays 4y ago

I thought they switched from GitHub or another provider to Gitlab or something but they switched from "patches in email lists" process to this Welcome to $current_year I guess

superkuh 4y ago

That's too bad. Gitlab is the code host that doesn't use HTML. They're even more hostile to HTML than Microsoft Github. It's infeasible to use or even look at a directly listing on gitlab in a browser older than a year or two. It's all javascript over there, and not generic javascript: bleeding edge JS that only works in megacorp browsers.

Phurist 4y ago
Get with the times grapms - JS is here to stay ;)
ectopod 4y ago
And all this js makes it really slow too. Maybe the paid plans are faster, but the free hosting for open source is sluggish.
woojoo666 4y ago
I guess this is why I've been seeing so many projects on Sourcehut

ferdek 4y ago

Too bad Phabricator is no longer with us. Are there any actively maintained forks?

jmholla 4y ago
[Phorge](https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/) is the only one I know of.

serial_dev 4y ago

A couple of years ago I wanted to put my open source projects on GitLab, as I was thinking... "why is the biggest open source hub not open source". Back then the GitLab CI was much better compared to alternatives, and I had a couple of other features that I liked on GitLab. I tried for a couple of months, and gave up. I switched back to GitHub for a couple of reasons. - After some time, GitHub's CI became a thing, it became good enough for me (and other features improved, too). - Companies want to see your GitHub profile. Publishing your work on GitLab is not going to get you the same exposure as publishing on GitHub. - Open-source contributors are on GitHub. The majority is not going to create a GitLab account just to fix a bug or open an issue in my little library. If you want community, it's on GitHub. - Hosting open-source really didn't seem to be a priority for GitLab, so if they don't seem to care, why should I? - GitLab's quality started to decrease. More bloat (both in terms of UI and code size), slower and slower app whereas GitHub hit the sweet spot of keeping things simple while providing essential features that are fast.

jraph 4y ago
> Companies want to see your GitHub profile Yes, but see, this is exactly what we ought to fight. No? I don't want to be forced to host my open source projects at Microsoft. Or any place really. I don't think there should be any centralization for project hosting. GitLab.com is not perfect neither, it requires users to run reCAPTCHA. This is forced Google spying for any GitLab users and therefore potential contributors. I really want this fad that considers platforms hosting projects as social networks to end.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  then set up a github account and put up a project that says "my stuff is hosted over here instead"
  - jraph 4y ago
    I should not have to open an account on GitHub. But okay, maybe-ish. However, my point is actually larger than this. There's a whole ecosystem where your project doesn't exist if it's not on GitHub. For example, Hackoberfest, where only projects on GitHub are eligible (not that it necessarily a bad thing actually, but still, it really puts in the head of people that open source = GitHub) (edit: I see that they accepted GitLab in 2021. It's less bad than just GitHub, but still problematic). There are studies / research on software / open source that don't bother with projects not on GitHub. Libraries are often evaluated on the number of stars / forks / issues they have on GitHub. These issues are all about the network effect.

sylware 4y ago

gitlab is currently hostile to noscript/basic (x)html browsers. wrong alternative.

Curious_Furious 4y ago

Use Wine heavily for playing my old videogames that no longer work on Windows. Great to see they moved off of the Microsoft platform.

theli 4y ago
They were never really using GitHub

blueflow 4y ago

Has Github become the new Sourceforge?

openstep 4y ago
Nope
gtirloni 4y ago
Why do you think that?
jjice 4y ago
I'm going to wager not. I think this is a classic case of something making it to HN or the HN crowd finding it interesting, but in reality, GitHub is probably doing more than fine and continuing to grow. Or I'm completely wrong.
- bragr 4y ago
  Between hosted premium GitHub, and self hosted GitHub enterprise, I think they're doing fine.
itvision 4y ago
A long time ago. Sourceforge has been more or less abandoned/forgotten for the past five years. Some projects continue to stick to it though due to inertia and laziness.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  You interpreted their point very charitably. I think they knew that sourceforge has been effectively dead and is saying here that GitHub is following in it's footsteps. I don't agree with that, but i believe that was the point.
TonyTrapp 4y ago
What does a self-hosted GitLab instance have to do with GitHub?

mytheory 4y ago

They previously used mail to send patches. I was also curious about a Gitlab/GitHub comparaison, but there is none.

bragr 4y ago
They are broadly similar but given the project I presume it just came down to gitlab being "open source" and github not.