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I guess it all depends on perspective. When I picked up Gitlab (18 months ago) -- the major competition was Gitorious -- which if you think Gitlab has a bad in

I guess it all depends on perspective. When I picked up Gitlab (18 months ago) -- the major competition was Gitorious -- which if you think Gitlab has a bad install -- you have no idea. Gitorious _had_ (haven't looked at it recently, I guess they spent a lot of time addressing this) the worst install I have ever seen (any package, ever, 15+ year in the industry) ... it seemed built for complexity just to generate them consulting / professional support hours. Gitlab in comparison was blissfully simple. As for the bloat... we have nearly 180 projects and 10+ user accounts, and while the baseline setup has a lot of bloat (I blame choice of language / framework) -- it generally works fairl well -- sometimes you have to kick Ruby.

jeremiep 13y ago
The installation pain can be largely removed by using chef.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
The really annoying part is upgrading. Which right now the instructions tell you to do bit by bit instead of whole hog. If you end up behind it makes it harder to catch up, which seems like a bad thing.
- sytse 13y ago
  GitLab.com co-founder here. As you noted you should upgrade version by version. This makes sure everyone uses the same upgrade path so the single focus of the community is on making that path rock solid. This is annoying when you are a lot of versions behind. Maybe you can already guess my recommendation, consider upgrading more frequent :-)
  - bloodorange 13y ago
    As a user, it doesn't look nice to hear this from the developers. I think it would be nice to have a stable upgrade mechanism that doesn't break anything for people - or maybe an automated mechanism that does all the upgrades step by step so the user doesn't have to do much. Since I have seen this 'upgrade' problem repeatedly mentioned here, I think it would be a good problem to attack to help people feel more comfortable about using your product. I recently set up gitolite internally and this thread interests me because GitLab looks like something that could be considered for Git hosting. However, someone in my place may not be so comfortable with the idea when I get the general feeling that "upgrades are a pain". I only mean this as feedback to help you make your product more palatable (because I want to see a lot of good Git hosting solutions!)
    - sytse 13y ago
      Hi bloodorange, I'm sorry if I'm sounded strict. I agree that automatic updates would be very nice, but making these rock solid is not something we are comfortable with. Many people run GitLab with some kind of customization and we want to support that as well. We try to make upgrades as easy as possible but you do have to run each upgrade.

jeremiep 13y ago

The installation pain can be largely removed by using chef.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

The really annoying part is upgrading. Which right now the instructions tell you to do bit by bit instead of whole hog. If you end up behind it makes it harder to catch up, which seems like a bad thing.

sytse 13y ago
GitLab.com co-founder here. As you noted you should upgrade version by version. This makes sure everyone uses the same upgrade path so the single focus of the community is on making that path rock solid. This is annoying when you are a lot of versions behind. Maybe you can already guess my recommendation, consider upgrading more frequent :-)
- bloodorange 13y ago
  As a user, it doesn't look nice to hear this from the developers. I think it would be nice to have a stable upgrade mechanism that doesn't break anything for people - or maybe an automated mechanism that does all the upgrades step by step so the user doesn't have to do much. Since I have seen this 'upgrade' problem repeatedly mentioned here, I think it would be a good problem to attack to help people feel more comfortable about using your product. I recently set up gitolite internally and this thread interests me because GitLab looks like something that could be considered for Git hosting. However, someone in my place may not be so comfortable with the idea when I get the general feeling that "upgrades are a pain". I only mean this as feedback to help you make your product more palatable (because I want to see a lot of good Git hosting solutions!)
  - sytse 13y ago
    Hi bloodorange, I'm sorry if I'm sounded strict. I agree that automatic updates would be very nice, but making these rock solid is not something we are comfortable with. Many people run GitLab with some kind of customization and we want to support that as well. We try to make upgrades as easy as possible but you do have to run each upgrade.