6 ms·

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

by sytse 12y ago

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.

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

by 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.