12 ms·

GitLab acquires Gitorious

190 points by waffle_ss 12y ago

sytse 12y ago
GitLab CEO here, I would love to discuss what people think about this and any questions please have about moving their code.
- robinhoodexe 12y ago
  Not really related to the acquisition, but what's the status on running GitLab on the arm architecture such as the Raspberry Pi? I'd love to run that.
  - sytse 12y ago
    No problem, thanks for asking. With the 1GB RAM Pi coming out running GitLab is a lot easier. It would be nice to have a precompiled Omnibus package for it (like the ones for other platforms on https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/). We hope someone will contribute this. For now you'll have to install from source https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/installation.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... More about the memory requirements can be found in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md#memory https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...
    - kierank 12y ago
      It doesn't work currently on the rpi2 - there is at least one crash during install: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 and https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer/issues/317 https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer/issues/317 Gogs works though.
      - sytse 12y ago
        Thanks for raising this, we'll look into it. Some of our team just got a RPi2 in our (very delayed) christmas gifts. So we'll be trying to improve the situation. But if someone knows why precompiling fails only on Rpi's please comment in the issues.
        sytse 12y ago
        We're using https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 to discuss this issue. It seems solvable by using Node instead of the RubyRacer.
- doughj3 12y ago
  How do you think this will affect major users/projects, e.g. Qt, on Gitorious? How much will their workflow have to change?
  - sytse 12y ago
    They will have to import their repo's into GitLab. This means that all their urls will change. This is quite unfortunate but we hope they'll appreciate the improved interface and features that GitLab brings such as a great merge request flow. Please let me know if you have any specific concerns.
    - callahad 12y ago
      I'm concerned about losing access to public projects that are not actively maintained, and thus won't make the transition to GitLab. Is it possible to leave Gitorious online in read-only mode after the May deadline?
      - sytse 12y ago
        Unfortunately that is not possible because of the hosting costs for Gitorious.org. We're reaching out to archive.org to index everything but it is probably not easy to git clone from there. Feel free to create mirrors of things that are important.
        CyberShadow 12y ago
        Wouldn't it be possible to migrate the git repositories automatically, and set up redirects? Destroying what might be the only public repository of some projects, and breaking a ton of existing links, is not something that sounds good.
        sytse 12y ago
        We don't want to move people's code without them agreeing with that move to another organization. But I agree the broken links are not nice. I'm not sure how practical it is to redirect projects that moved themselves.
- conductor 12y ago
  First I want to thank you and the developers for your work on GitLab. Currently GitLab's binary packages are distributed as a big rpm/deb with every package needed by GitLab (like PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx etc.) inside it, and there are no official repositories, so one must manually download and install the Big package. Why can't we use the more traditional way with package dependencies?
  - sytse 12y ago
    You're welcome. We're working on an official repository by using the awesome packagecloud.io software. This will be a big package but it will be easier to update (just use apt-get). Making a small native package is pretty hard but we're open to contributions http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/6151718-native-debian-deb-and-fedora-rpm-packages http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions...
  - worklogin 12y ago
    I want to piggy-back off this: PLEASE all projects, continue to offer monolithic packages as an option. It takes an act of Congress to get some servers internet access to fetch packages; being able to download a VMWare image or a blob to install makes testing a whole lot easier.
    - sytse 12y ago
      Indeed, downloading from rubygems or package servers from a server in a DMZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing) is really hard.
      - fsiefken 12y ago
        Theoretically you could mirror the rubygems and update from that server. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8411045/how-to-build-a-rubygems-mirror-server http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8411045/how-to-build-a-ru...
        12y ago
- digitalsushi 12y ago
  I build and admin a public RPM repo for our product. After installing gitlab's RPM, I was blown away. I have never seen a single RPM that large work that perfectly on the first shot. Either I am lucky, or more likely, you really put a lot of effort into your packaging. Cheers to you for a brilliant demo. It didn't quite fit into our workflow - I think we would like to use gitlab as a beautiful web client, but then push our code there back into our own vanilla git repo on https/ssh. Gitlab seems as it is a turnkey product, repo hosted internally. It was certainly very easy to import our existing projects into it.
  - sytse 12y ago
    Good to hear that! We put a lot of effort into packaging GitLab to make it a 2 minute install even though it is a Rails application. We could not have done it without the awesome Omnibus packaging system that Chef so kindly open-sourced. May I ask what the reason is you don't want to host the repo's in GitLab itself?
- mlinksva 12y ago
  I expect a few projects won't migrate to gitlab.com from gitorious due to strong commitment to http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html There is an opening for someone to provide gratis gitlab CE or other exclusively free software based git hosting.
  - sytse 12y ago
    GitLab.com runs the proprietary GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE). This is mostly to allow us to performance test EE features at scale, for more context see https://about.gitlab.com/2014/06/27/gitlab-com-runs-ee/ https://about.gitlab.com/2014/06/27/gitlab-com-runs-ee/ You can use the open source GitLab Community Edition (CE) to start a SaaS similar to GitLab.com. We hope people will recognize that CE is not crippleware and will be OK with hosting their code on GitLab.com. If not there are alternatives based on CE such as https://modernrepo.com/ https://modernrepo.com/
    - mlinksva 12y ago
      Yes I've read that context and it makes sense. I was just observing that some people would want an absolutely pure (ie 100% free software) option rather than critiquing what you offer. That said I do hope you take steps to reassure people who want to be using an option which preserves their software freedom, for example that the CE will not be slowly deprecated, more features moving into EE. I admit that making a fully credible commitment is challenging: options include multi-copyrightholder-copyleft which presumably you don't want at all as an MIT licensed project + some proprietary bits in EE, and a variation on the Fiduciary License Agreement used for Qt. But those two options are copyright-focused; there are probably other mechanisms to be thought of.
      - sytse 12y ago
        We try to reassure people by adding more features to the open source version every month. In fact, since we released the proprietary enterprise edition, the pace of development for the open source version has accelerated. We never moved any features from the open source version to the enterprise edition and plan to never do this (except in edge cases with overlapping functionality). We're happy with the current MIT license. We tried an MIT license for the enterprise edition before but that was very confusing to customers.
- click170 12y ago
  Deleted - I was confused. Thought it was GitHub buying gitlab to extinguish the competition.
- pnathan 12y ago
  I think that the free/open source community lost one of the few places to do free/open source hosting. :-/
  - sytse 12y ago
    We offer free hosting on GitLab.com (also for private repositories) and there is a great list on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_software_hosting_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_soft...
- nymisunderrated 12y ago
  Thank you for coming forward in many discussions (not only HN), and giving time for people's questions. I resent the way things went down, such as removing people's repositories, and paying gitorious developers to shut down the project. Those are history now, and I can't say they prevents anyone (anyone paying attention, that is) from taking a different route - fortunately, both projects are freely licensed and data is in git repositories. They raise questions about the future though: next time people's code would be also removed? Will there be at least three months then, or less? Why exactly doesn't Gitlab move freely licensed projects? Since it bought the gitorious.org site, it's like you have two hosting sites, and want to close one down. For freely-licensed projects, making a copy is easy (whether people use it or not) - if Gitlab wanted to.
  - sytse 12y ago
    We didn't put Gitorious to shut down the project. Gitorious was no longer sustainable. We don't move projects because we don't want to move them to a new organization and url without explicit consent. We're working with archive.org to make sure nothing is lost.
joshfng 12y ago
If you're looking for hosted GitLab that is private to you or your team/company check out https://githost.io https://githost.io
- sytse 12y ago
  Josh is an awesome guy and he does a great job managing GitLab servers for people.
ing33k 12y ago
Congratulations on the acquisition. is there any plan to create mobile app for creating / browsing issues ( offline support ) in near future ?
- sytse 12y ago
  Thanks! We have no plans for a mobile app at this point. We try to make GitLab work really well on mobile screens. There are also native mobile apps created by the community https://about.gitlab.com/applications/ https://about.gitlab.com/applications/ but I'm not sure if they support working offline.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  Please don't. We don't need apps for this, a website that works offline is more than enough. Plus, it's really cross platform, and you don't have to work on 5 different versions of the same app, while not excluding any mobile OS.
davexunit 12y ago
Sad news. I moved all of my repos from GitHub to Gitorious in order to get away from proprietary software, and now I'm (almost) back at square one. The public GitLab instance at gitlab.com runs the proprietary version, so I cannot move my repos there. I like GitLab more than Gitorious on a purely technical level, but GitLab unfortunately has a CLA[0] and uses the MIT expat license, whereas Gitorious used the AGPL. I guess I will just self-host my own GitLab CE instance now. [0] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html
- sytse 12y ago
  I'm sorry to hear this. For the reasons of running a proprietary version please see my other answer in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559 We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. But your article looks interesting and I'll read it. Great to hear you plan to run GitLab CE, we hope you'll enjoy it.
  - davexunit 12y ago
    >We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. I appreciate that. I think you have good intentions. The author of the article is Bradley Kuhn, who works at the Software Freedom Conservancy. He's an expert when it comes to the legal aspects surrounding free software projects, so perhaps having a conversation with him about the CLA would be a worthwhile experience.
    - sytse 12y ago
      OK, thanks, we'll consider that.
  - nymisunderrated 12y ago
    "We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law." The CLA is only a license, another license than MIT, but doing _almost_ the same things. IIRC, the difference is that it gives you okay to make proprietary distributions without respecting MIT conditions. You do not need it to be "on the right side of copyright law". Using MIT-licensed code is on the right side of copyright law just as well. (unless what you want is to disobey poor old MIT)
pnathan 12y ago
Kallithea[1] is a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. It is written in Python and has an active mailing list. It supports both Mercurial and Git. https://kallithea-scm.org/ https://kallithea-scm.org/
- sytse 12y ago
  To add come context, it is a fork of the Rhodecode project that stopped being open source. Great to see that the community created an open alternative.
- jboynyc 12y ago
  For a collection of GitHub alternatives (broadly speaking), including Kallithea, you can consult this list: http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives
  - sytse 12y ago
    Thanks for including GitLab on your list. Do you know GitLab also offers integrated issue tracking? For example see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
    - thecatspaw 12y ago
      gitlab does offer integrated issue tracking, yes. in fact, you linked to it yourself.
  - panzi 12y ago
    BitBucket also has issue tracking.
  - e12e 12y ago
    Shouldn't Allura be listed with source-forge (and it listed as open source)? It was my understanding that sf.net isn't running a proprietary fork? (Or maybe the ad server etc isn't part of Allura?). Might want to list trac/apache bloodhound, possibly redmine and fossil as well. Otherwise a nice list :) [edit: Oh, and Launchpad seems like a natural fit for this list as well? Looks like there's some (recent) progress adding support for git to Launchpad as well: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1032731 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1032731 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/292557 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/292557 ]
jordigh 12y ago
What exactly was bought? The gitorious employees? Looks like the gitorious code is gonna get scrapped. Edit: I mean, what was the purpose of buying gitorious? The employees? Enticing the gitorious customers and users to use gitlab?
- sytse 12y ago
  The latter, we want to communicate an upgrade path to existing Gitorious customer and users. Unfortunately we could not repurpose anything from the Gitorious codebase.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Acquishutdown! So were they going out of business or is there another reason for shutting them down?
    - sytse 12y ago
      Their business was no longer sustainable and they wanted to shut the company down without a bankruptcy.
      - zem 12y ago
        thanks for the straight answer to that! hope it works out.
thristian 12y ago
I've got a few small projects on Gitorious, mostly because I wanted to avoid a GitHub monoculture (and the Gitorious software being AGPL'd helped too). Having an easy way to import from Gitorious to GitLab is nice, but I'd like to check out GitLab's public hosting features first. I had a poke around GitLab's website, but every page seems dedicated to selling GitLab-as-a-product. Are there any publically-visible projects hosted by GitLab?
- sytse 12y ago
  The page on the website about our SaaS GitLab.com is https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ You can view all public projects on GitLab.com via https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore An interesting project is F-Droid, an installable catalogue of FOSS https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata
- fideloper 12y ago
  Can you elaborate in the github monoculture? What's the downside of github you're seeing? (Just curious!)
nickysielicki 12y ago
>GitLab acquires Gitorious to bolster its on premises code collaboration platform You guys are maybe celebrating a bit too much. Cut down on the drinks. ;)
- sytse 12y ago
  We wrote the blog post together and this was from our (pretty awesome) account manager. Not very fit for the crowd here :)
tetron 12y ago
Gogs (https://github.com/gogits/gogs https://github.com/gogits/gogs) is a rather nice up and coming alternative to gitlab for self hosted repositories.
- mlinksva 12y ago
  But gogs doesn't self-host its own development! IIRC gitlab didn't initially either. That it does now inspires a lot more confidence.
  - Vendan 12y ago
    meh, gogs doesn't inspire confidence. There is some serious issues going on, resulting in the inability to handle more then one request at a time. I brought it up to the dev, and did some explorations that found lots of data race problems, and got this lovely gem back from the dev: "In my point of view, as long as no deadlock..data race is unavoidable."
workingonit 12y ago
Uggg are you kidding me? Why does GitLab have to kill the AGPL instance of Gitorious they aqquired? Most of the people I know who use Gitorious.org did so so we could use an AGPL service to host our repositories. GitLab simply does not do this as it uses a lax permissive license. In addition to this they impose CLAs on any contributors :/ sigh It is really a shame that GitLab feels the need to remove the only AGPL service that fills this need. I do not know where I will be migrating my repositories, but it will not be GitLab unless they wish to offer the community an AGPL instance.
cnst 12y ago
Why is there a setting for Skype on user profile? Why no XMPP, or phone, or physical address?
- sytse 12y ago
  Skype is probably there because someone added it. Feel free to add XMPP and phone. I don't think a physical address is very practical.
hans4 12y ago
we were experimenting with the use of GitBucket https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket as alternative, and so far seems very good for smaller repos.

190 points by waffle_ss 12y ago

sytse 12y ago

GitLab CEO here, I would love to discuss what people think about this and any questions please have about moving their code.

robinhoodexe 12y ago
Not really related to the acquisition, but what's the status on running GitLab on the arm architecture such as the Raspberry Pi? I'd love to run that.
- sytse 12y ago
  No problem, thanks for asking. With the 1GB RAM Pi coming out running GitLab is a lot easier. It would be nice to have a precompiled Omnibus package for it (like the ones for other platforms on https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/ https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/). We hope someone will contribute this. For now you'll have to install from source https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/installation.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... More about the memory requirements can be found in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/install/requirements.md#memory https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...
  - kierank 12y ago
    It doesn't work currently on the rpi2 - there is at least one crash during install: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 and https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer/issues/317 https://github.com/cowboyd/therubyracer/issues/317 Gogs works though.
    - sytse 12y ago
      Thanks for raising this, we'll look into it. Some of our team just got a RPi2 in our (very delayed) christmas gifts. So we'll be trying to improve the situation. But if someone knows why precompiling fails only on Rpi's please comment in the issues.
      - sytse 12y ago
        We're using https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/8809 to discuss this issue. It seems solvable by using Node instead of the RubyRacer.
doughj3 12y ago
How do you think this will affect major users/projects, e.g. Qt, on Gitorious? How much will their workflow have to change?
- sytse 12y ago
  They will have to import their repo's into GitLab. This means that all their urls will change. This is quite unfortunate but we hope they'll appreciate the improved interface and features that GitLab brings such as a great merge request flow. Please let me know if you have any specific concerns.
  - callahad 12y ago
    I'm concerned about losing access to public projects that are not actively maintained, and thus won't make the transition to GitLab. Is it possible to leave Gitorious online in read-only mode after the May deadline?
    - sytse 12y ago
      Unfortunately that is not possible because of the hosting costs for Gitorious.org. We're reaching out to archive.org to index everything but it is probably not easy to git clone from there. Feel free to create mirrors of things that are important.
      - CyberShadow 12y ago
        Wouldn't it be possible to migrate the git repositories automatically, and set up redirects? Destroying what might be the only public repository of some projects, and breaking a ton of existing links, is not something that sounds good.
        sytse 12y ago
        We don't want to move people's code without them agreeing with that move to another organization. But I agree the broken links are not nice. I'm not sure how practical it is to redirect projects that moved themselves.
conductor 12y ago
First I want to thank you and the developers for your work on GitLab. Currently GitLab's binary packages are distributed as a big rpm/deb with every package needed by GitLab (like PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx etc.) inside it, and there are no official repositories, so one must manually download and install the Big package. Why can't we use the more traditional way with package dependencies?
- sytse 12y ago
  You're welcome. We're working on an official repository by using the awesome packagecloud.io software. This will be a big package but it will be easier to update (just use apt-get). Making a small native package is pretty hard but we're open to contributions http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/6151718-native-debian-deb-and-fedora-rpm-packages http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions...
- worklogin 12y ago
  I want to piggy-back off this: PLEASE all projects, continue to offer monolithic packages as an option. It takes an act of Congress to get some servers internet access to fetch packages; being able to download a VMWare image or a blob to install makes testing a whole lot easier.
  - sytse 12y ago
    Indeed, downloading from rubygems or package servers from a server in a DMZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMZ_(computing) is really hard.
    - fsiefken 12y ago
      Theoretically you could mirror the rubygems and update from that server. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8411045/how-to-build-a-rubygems-mirror-server http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8411045/how-to-build-a-ru...
      - 12y ago
digitalsushi 12y ago
I build and admin a public RPM repo for our product. After installing gitlab's RPM, I was blown away. I have never seen a single RPM that large work that perfectly on the first shot. Either I am lucky, or more likely, you really put a lot of effort into your packaging. Cheers to you for a brilliant demo. It didn't quite fit into our workflow - I think we would like to use gitlab as a beautiful web client, but then push our code there back into our own vanilla git repo on https/ssh. Gitlab seems as it is a turnkey product, repo hosted internally. It was certainly very easy to import our existing projects into it.
- sytse 12y ago
  Good to hear that! We put a lot of effort into packaging GitLab to make it a 2 minute install even though it is a Rails application. We could not have done it without the awesome Omnibus packaging system that Chef so kindly open-sourced. May I ask what the reason is you don't want to host the repo's in GitLab itself?
mlinksva 12y ago
I expect a few projects won't migrate to gitlab.com from gitorious due to strong commitment to http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html There is an opening for someone to provide gratis gitlab CE or other exclusively free software based git hosting.
- sytse 12y ago
  GitLab.com runs the proprietary GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE). This is mostly to allow us to performance test EE features at scale, for more context see https://about.gitlab.com/2014/06/27/gitlab-com-runs-ee/ https://about.gitlab.com/2014/06/27/gitlab-com-runs-ee/ You can use the open source GitLab Community Edition (CE) to start a SaaS similar to GitLab.com. We hope people will recognize that CE is not crippleware and will be OK with hosting their code on GitLab.com. If not there are alternatives based on CE such as https://modernrepo.com/ https://modernrepo.com/
  - mlinksva 12y ago
    Yes I've read that context and it makes sense. I was just observing that some people would want an absolutely pure (ie 100% free software) option rather than critiquing what you offer. That said I do hope you take steps to reassure people who want to be using an option which preserves their software freedom, for example that the CE will not be slowly deprecated, more features moving into EE. I admit that making a fully credible commitment is challenging: options include multi-copyrightholder-copyleft which presumably you don't want at all as an MIT licensed project + some proprietary bits in EE, and a variation on the Fiduciary License Agreement used for Qt. But those two options are copyright-focused; there are probably other mechanisms to be thought of.
    - sytse 12y ago
      We try to reassure people by adding more features to the open source version every month. In fact, since we released the proprietary enterprise edition, the pace of development for the open source version has accelerated. We never moved any features from the open source version to the enterprise edition and plan to never do this (except in edge cases with overlapping functionality). We're happy with the current MIT license. We tried an MIT license for the enterprise edition before but that was very confusing to customers.
click170 12y ago
Deleted - I was confused. Thought it was GitHub buying gitlab to extinguish the competition.
pnathan 12y ago
I think that the free/open source community lost one of the few places to do free/open source hosting. :-/
- sytse 12y ago
  We offer free hosting on GitLab.com (also for private repositories) and there is a great list on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_software_hosting_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_soft...
nymisunderrated 12y ago
Thank you for coming forward in many discussions (not only HN), and giving time for people's questions. I resent the way things went down, such as removing people's repositories, and paying gitorious developers to shut down the project. Those are history now, and I can't say they prevents anyone (anyone paying attention, that is) from taking a different route - fortunately, both projects are freely licensed and data is in git repositories. They raise questions about the future though: next time people's code would be also removed? Will there be at least three months then, or less? Why exactly doesn't Gitlab move freely licensed projects? Since it bought the gitorious.org site, it's like you have two hosting sites, and want to close one down. For freely-licensed projects, making a copy is easy (whether people use it or not) - if Gitlab wanted to.
- sytse 12y ago
  We didn't put Gitorious to shut down the project. Gitorious was no longer sustainable. We don't move projects because we don't want to move them to a new organization and url without explicit consent. We're working with archive.org to make sure nothing is lost.

joshfng 12y ago

If you're looking for hosted GitLab that is private to you or your team/company check out https://githost.io https://githost.io

sytse 12y ago
Josh is an awesome guy and he does a great job managing GitLab servers for people.

ing33k 12y ago

Congratulations on the acquisition. is there any plan to create mobile app for creating / browsing issues ( offline support ) in near future ?

sytse 12y ago
Thanks! We have no plans for a mobile app at this point. We try to make GitLab work really well on mobile screens. There are also native mobile apps created by the community https://about.gitlab.com/applications/ https://about.gitlab.com/applications/ but I'm not sure if they support working offline.
hobarrera 12y ago
Please don't. We don't need apps for this, a website that works offline is more than enough. Plus, it's really cross platform, and you don't have to work on 5 different versions of the same app, while not excluding any mobile OS.

davexunit 12y ago

Sad news. I moved all of my repos from GitHub to Gitorious in order to get away from proprietary software, and now I'm (almost) back at square one. The public GitLab instance at gitlab.com runs the proprietary version, so I cannot move my repos there. I like GitLab more than Gitorious on a purely technical level, but GitLab unfortunately has a CLA[0] and uses the MIT expat license, whereas Gitorious used the AGPL. I guess I will just self-host my own GitLab CE instance now. [0] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html

sytse 12y ago
I'm sorry to hear this. For the reasons of running a proprietary version please see my other answer in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559 We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. But your article looks interesting and I'll read it. Great to hear you plan to run GitLab CE, we hope you'll enjoy it.
- davexunit 12y ago
  >We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. I appreciate that. I think you have good intentions. The author of the article is Bradley Kuhn, who works at the Software Freedom Conservancy. He's an expert when it comes to the legal aspects surrounding free software projects, so perhaps having a conversation with him about the CLA would be a worthwhile experience.
  - sytse 12y ago
    OK, thanks, we'll consider that.
- nymisunderrated 12y ago
  "We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law." The CLA is only a license, another license than MIT, but doing _almost_ the same things. IIRC, the difference is that it gives you okay to make proprietary distributions without respecting MIT conditions. You do not need it to be "on the right side of copyright law". Using MIT-licensed code is on the right side of copyright law just as well. (unless what you want is to disobey poor old MIT)

pnathan 12y ago

Kallithea[1] is a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. It is written in Python and has an active mailing list. It supports both Mercurial and Git. https://kallithea-scm.org/ https://kallithea-scm.org/

sytse 12y ago
To add come context, it is a fork of the Rhodecode project that stopped being open source. Great to see that the community created an open alternative.
jboynyc 12y ago
For a collection of GitHub alternatives (broadly speaking), including Kallithea, you can consult this list: http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives
- sytse 12y ago
  Thanks for including GitLab on your list. Do you know GitLab also offers integrated issue tracking? For example see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
  - thecatspaw 12y ago
    gitlab does offer integrated issue tracking, yes. in fact, you linked to it yourself.
- panzi 12y ago
  BitBucket also has issue tracking.
- e12e 12y ago
  Shouldn't Allura be listed with source-forge (and it listed as open source)? It was my understanding that sf.net isn't running a proprietary fork? (Or maybe the ad server etc isn't part of Allura?). Might want to list trac/apache bloodhound, possibly redmine and fossil as well. Otherwise a nice list :) [edit: Oh, and Launchpad seems like a natural fit for this list as well? Looks like there's some (recent) progress adding support for git to Launchpad as well: https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1032731 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/1032731 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/292557 https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/292557 ]

jordigh 12y ago

What exactly was bought? The gitorious employees? Looks like the gitorious code is gonna get scrapped. Edit: I mean, what was the purpose of buying gitorious? The employees? Enticing the gitorious customers and users to use gitlab?

sytse 12y ago
The latter, we want to communicate an upgrade path to existing Gitorious customer and users. Unfortunately we could not repurpose anything from the Gitorious codebase.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Acquishutdown! So were they going out of business or is there another reason for shutting them down?
  - sytse 12y ago
    Their business was no longer sustainable and they wanted to shut the company down without a bankruptcy.
    - zem 12y ago
      thanks for the straight answer to that! hope it works out.

thristian 12y ago

I've got a few small projects on Gitorious, mostly because I wanted to avoid a GitHub monoculture (and the Gitorious software being AGPL'd helped too). Having an easy way to import from Gitorious to GitLab is nice, but I'd like to check out GitLab's public hosting features first. I had a poke around GitLab's website, but every page seems dedicated to selling GitLab-as-a-product. Are there any publically-visible projects hosted by GitLab?

sytse 12y ago
The page on the website about our SaaS GitLab.com is https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ You can view all public projects on GitLab.com via https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore An interesting project is F-Droid, an installable catalogue of FOSS https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata
fideloper 12y ago
Can you elaborate in the github monoculture? What's the downside of github you're seeing? (Just curious!)

nickysielicki 12y ago

>GitLab acquires Gitorious to bolster its on premises code collaboration platform You guys are maybe celebrating a bit too much. Cut down on the drinks. ;)

sytse 12y ago
We wrote the blog post together and this was from our (pretty awesome) account manager. Not very fit for the crowd here :)

tetron 12y ago

Gogs (https://github.com/gogits/gogs https://github.com/gogits/gogs) is a rather nice up and coming alternative to gitlab for self hosted repositories.

mlinksva 12y ago
But gogs doesn't self-host its own development! IIRC gitlab didn't initially either. That it does now inspires a lot more confidence.
- Vendan 12y ago
  meh, gogs doesn't inspire confidence. There is some serious issues going on, resulting in the inability to handle more then one request at a time. I brought it up to the dev, and did some explorations that found lots of data race problems, and got this lovely gem back from the dev: "In my point of view, as long as no deadlock..data race is unavoidable."

workingonit 12y ago

Uggg are you kidding me? Why does GitLab have to kill the AGPL instance of Gitorious they aqquired? Most of the people I know who use Gitorious.org did so so we could use an AGPL service to host our repositories. GitLab simply does not do this as it uses a lax permissive license. In addition to this they impose CLAs on any contributors :/ sigh It is really a shame that GitLab feels the need to remove the only AGPL service that fills this need. I do not know where I will be migrating my repositories, but it will not be GitLab unless they wish to offer the community an AGPL instance.

cnst 12y ago

Why is there a setting for Skype on user profile? Why no XMPP, or phone, or physical address?

sytse 12y ago
Skype is probably there because someone added it. Feel free to add XMPP and phone. I don't think a physical address is very practical.

hans4 12y ago

we were experimenting with the use of GitBucket https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket as alternative, and so far seems very good for smaller repos.