GitLab 8.5 released
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
Is there a gradual shift in the FOSS community towards Gitlab (which in all honesty would make more sense), or am I just seeing the enthusiast in this thread?
GitLab is great, but it's kind of a copycat project. Nothing wrong with that, it's just there really isn't a compelling reason to join beyond "less-predatory pricing".
And the people who care about that use private repos, not OSS.
Private repo can be useful for early stage of OSS projects.
Agreed though that it still feels too much like a clone of GitHub. The UI for example is way to close to the original.
The main thing I find extra useful on gitlab is the ability to mark a MR as a WIP.
> The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive
We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body.
> For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar?
Good example. Agree its still non-intuitive in some places. For you particular example we created an issue to fix - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480.
> And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use"
Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria.
> And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it?
You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences.
P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
In GitLab today, we end up deleting and re-creating merge requests, or waiting until <requester> comments "@<reviewer> ready for merge".
Now this would be awesome:
> We’re thinking about more improvements to the Merge Request Approvals, the main improvement being automatic suggestions for reviewers, based on the history of the changed files in the merge request. For instance, if Jane worked a lot on a certain class and you submit a change to that class, Jane gets suggested to approve your merge request.
Today we are using the self-hosted community edition though.
If we start recommending automatic reviewers based on the blame this would likely be an EE feature.
I've always thought GitHub's pricing is awesome and very accessible. Can you explain?
Even though it's not tons of code, GitHub's pricing breaks down horribly in this case. I think that that in the long run many startups will move to embrace GitLab in the early days for price if nothing else.
So, if my company finishes 30 projects per year, we'd be paying $360/year to GitHub for what is essentially "storing a backup". And if we do this every year, that's $1000/year within 3 years. Not to mention that for "Organizations" the prices are doubled. For some reason. So... $2000/year?
Right now the same job is done by a $5/mo linode, with the prospects of upgrading to $10/mo.
The one I have is mostly about analytics, sales, and support tools, and unfortunately repository hosting wasn't a question asked. I also wish they would make this data source public so others could see shifts early -- for example the wave from HipChat to Slack would have been very visible.
Perhaps StackShare might be the closest open source of similar data.
Personally, I hope we can eventually move to a federated system, perhaps one based on ipfs.
It's too early to talk about a shift away from GH, but increased variety in the ecosystem can only be a good thing, compared to the dangers of a GH monoculture... especially considering git migrations are literally just one push to a new origin.
Yeah, I fear Bitbucket will always be shackled to the rest of the Atlassian product line, and never really allowed to innovate much.
Any chance BitBucket has a public roadmap? I'm a user because of your free private repos, I hope to grow into a paid user this year. Thanks for all that you do!
https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/11204/support-git-l...
(Also, can you take the fucking 'remember me on this machine' button away? It's a cruel, cruel tease. It has not worked a single time on 4 different installations I've had accounts on over the years)
A pain point here is that GH issues cannot be migrated easily as a git migration (but GH does have a REST api).
Capture awareness / interest early.
In medium to large sized companies, Atlassian will usually win out when you have a CTO that manages 100+ developers. Enterprises really like to stick with the "safe bet", where there are expensive licenses and dedicated account managers from the service provider.
Jira in particular is extremely popular with the modern addiction to Agile. Once you're on Jira, you just start to fall onto connecting all the related products like Confluence for wiki and Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) for git. I'm not saying it's the best thing to just ignore all other offerings, but in my experience CTOs do exactly that and just go straight to Atlassian for everything.
Basically, if your company is using Exchange... expect to be forced onto Atlassian. Welcome to the enterprise.
BTW, this is not some small startup...
I like the GitLab feature set more than BitBucket but when I went started my own company it was generally cheaper for my team of 5-8 to use hosted JIRA, BitBucket, and Confluence then it would be for me to pay AWS/Rackspace/Azure/Digital Ocean to run the F/OSS equivalents in our cloud environment. BitBucket integrates just fine with Jenkins and the new Project organization was much needed.
We may someday move to GitLab or something else, but there isn't anything wrong with choosing Atlassian in any way. It's not like they're an Oracle/SAP type company that just abuses their customers and has awful products.
JIRA follows the feature branching workflow pretty well, so if you branch from dev/master with the ticket number as the start of the branch name you can click through to that branch straight from JIRA, which is generally pretty nice.
Confluence isn't nearly as tightly integrated with either. There are some reports, widgets, and stuff you can grab out of JIRA and make some dashboard type reports. Nothing special- we use Confluence to document architecture, deployment procedures, etc. We're definitely not Confluence power users.
What I realised is that eventually they're all ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a workflow engine and metadata service. Your choice is mainly of the interface and domain-specific layering violations.
Troll-friendly soundbite: Atlassian is the new Rational.
Let us know anything specific you'd have us improve - love to know what changed over the last 10 years to make you change your mind.
For the last 3 months, Groovy has been officially known as "Apache Groovy".
- Merge requests/code review in Gitlab is much better, whereas with Atlassian they recommend purchasing another product
- Integrated Wiki, whereas Atlassian they recommended Confluence
- The UI is absolutely terrible, even now the Bitbucket front-page where it dumps you when logged in is a disorganised mess and I can never find what I am looking for
- Speed, Gitlab running on my own server is MUCH faster, compared to Stash
- There was no way to easily add code snippets to be shared with the rest of the team, ala Snippets.
- Integration with the rest of the Atlassian toolset was so-so, and left a lot to be desired honestly.
- Statistics and information about the code and who is contributing and everything along those lines, makes for pretty graphs that make higher ups happy.
- Bitbucket doesn't currently have a view within the web interface for how many commits have been made to a project. People like numbers, and watching them grow!
- I have to reiterate, the UI is absolutely terrible in Bitbucket/Stash.
And the real killer is that I can get Gitlab CE and never pay you guys a dime, I've in the past helped out in the Github issues with debugging, and I can be part of the community. The only feature from EE that I need is the ability to use LDAP groups to define what users can and can't access various repositories, and the company I work for can afford to help pay for Gitlab's future to stick around!
I don't think that's true. Some people never get involved in free software even as a hobby. Some people get apprenticeships and learn to program from scratch on the job.
gitlab.com is the public 'demo' version which people compare to github. It's missing a few key items that would make it appealing to open source developers (and that I'd like to see them prioritize.) E.g.:
* Site search. It's been broken for months or possibly years. (Response time > 45 secs., Relevancy is miscalculated: "gitlab" itself does not appear in the search results.)
* Repo / project discovery and social features are extremely primitive.
I don't have any interesting answers for your hiring filters.
The culture you've built is very rare. I realized that if I felt that way, then I should try to help it become the norm.
We take all applications seriously but if you feel you got rejected for a bad reason feel free to contact me directly.
I guess you meant to paste: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
"A note on the technical interview: As part of our interviewing process, you may be asked to pick an issue from the GitLab CE issue tracker, and code ‘live’ with the interviewer there to talk with and collaborate with. We do this because we believe that it is the best way for you to see what the work is really like, and for our interviewer to see how you think, code, and collaborate." Actually, it's the opposite of how to find out how I think and code.
Do you have a profile on GitLab.com, GitHub or Bitbucket?
No.
What (open source) project that you built or contributed to are you particularly proud of / passionate about?
None.
Were you referred by a current GitLab team member?
No.
I once discovered that one of the most effective developers in the world would've had similar answers.
I know it's just an errant downvote, and people can feel however they want. But the information is no longer useful.
Assessing a candidate is as simple (and as hard) as that. Watching someone while they code isn't useful. https://data.triplebyte.com/take-home-interviews-d7f7ea13067...
Just give me something real to work on.
I created an issue at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13239.
* Increase the prominence of gitlab hosted projects on about.gitlab. Project search, trending, curated lists. - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/558
* Trending project data by language (js, ruby etc) - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13475
* Allow projects to flag themselves as looking for contributors - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13502
Give them a +1 maybe they will put resources on making gitlab more oss friendly
1. Free software needs free tools (I did not consider GitHub or Bitbucket at all).
2. Excellent team management and access control.
3. Excellent integration of their CI in the interface, with ability to run own build servers ("runners", in their jargon). This is critical, because setting up the toolchain needed to build takes some time, and I can use the beefy hardware I already have, without having to setup jenkins.
4. Lovely UI.
The only real alternative in this space without setting up custom infrastructure is Savannah.
Or, if willing to compromise on principles, GitHub, which has a lot of incremental downgrades compared to GitLab.
In that respect, if you're looking for a social network to keep in contact with a general group of people, Facebook is the way to go, and not the myriad of smaller sized social networks. If you're only looking for communication with a small group of people who haven't committed to anything, then you could jump ship to Google+ or whatever. Size of community is the salient feature, not the app.
Yes. They didn't just slap an open source licence onto their software, they actually follow an open source development mode, and work out in the open.
The Todos, ability to revert commits and CNAME support for Pages, are things that have been much requested and we're happy to have now.
As always, we're here if anyone has any questions about anything.
Didn't make it in?
I'll discuss if we can ship it in a patch [0], otherwise it'll land in a month in CE.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489#note_38...
otherwise, congrats on another release!
Consensus seems to be we can ship it somewhere this week.
If 512MB is a requirement for you please consider using Gogs.
Glad you like the Todos feature!
1) You can overtake an incumbent if you can offer twice the value at half the price. If you can produce a drill that works two times better than existing drills at half the price, you'll overtake the drill market.
2) You can't compete with "as good as". Winning here is more marketing than anything and this is where companies like Apple and Coco-Cola shine. You can't beat Coke with point one, since it is impossible to produce something that is better than Coke. You can measure the performance differences between drills, but you can't measure the psychological value of Coke and Apple
3) You can't compete by price, unless you are dealing with a commodity product, which brings me to my point for posting.
Turning "Git hosting" into a commodity product is not a bad situation for GitLab and I honestly think this is where it's heading. In a year or two, we'll probably see less tangible/understood things become the main selling point. Such as intelligent code reviews, better code management metrics, defect predictions and so forth.
Edit:
Forgot to mention that point 3 is also where Atlassian deserves a lot of credit. They are leveraging point 3 and trying to parlay it into point 1.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/110 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/112 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13409 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4044
For the rest of our strategy please see https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
* http://gitlab-examples.gitlab.io/pages-plain-html * http://gitlab-examples.gitlab.io/pages-jekyll * http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://gitlab-example...
I'm very happy overall, the interface is great. It's a bit slower than github currently (the web interface) as I'm using the online version rather than self hosted, but apart from that it's really bloody good.
I'll be recommending it to others going forward and using it for all new repos that I want hosted.
We're working hard on making it faster, this release being a major milestone in that work.
Last release, we started shipping a performance monitoring tool [0], to make it easier to see what exactly is slow.
[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/22/gitlab-8-4-released/
Docs here: http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_...
I've had this idea for a while now. I wonder if it would be practical and if anyone has ever tried something like this.
It's one way, though, you can't create a new Issue or PR by just updating repo.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_5/issue_timings.png [2] https://status.github.com/
Do you remember a year or so ago when I was whinging about some regressions after several upgrades? Well I'll tell you what - there hasn't been any that have impacted us in such a long time upgrades - even to a major version - do not worry me one bit and our Devs are always excited to see what's new.
I'm not sure if you remember but we're a non-profit, charitable organisation and GitLab has really helped us immensely over the past year.
A damn fine product from a damn fine team, supported by a damn fine community.
We're proud that GitLab allows everyone to contribute, even organizations without a large budget https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
Thanks for using GitLab and writing about it https://smcleod.net/mirror-gitlab-to-github/
Can you be more specific? Does that mean 1core+512MB? Is 8core+12GB considered medium to you? Is that 100 Programmers or 50 Programmers plus 50 issue commented?
Totally agree on GHEE. I have 4 Programmers+4commenters running on a $200/month recommended hosting partner and it's performance is not up to my expectations (especially when I'm the only one on...)
That said, we're fully aware of the shortcoming of GitLab.com. It has been slow and unresponsive. We're working hard on improving it [0] and this release has been a step in that.
There are a few things that annoy me as a Gitlab user (UX things), apart from the search/responsiveness of the application. Moreover, they improved _a lot_ the installation/upgrade process over these years. I'm expecting big things from you now :)
Anyway I need to say that these guys have been working a lot and deserve much credit. Kudos for you, guys!
One of the things that annoys me most is that the homepage of the repository, where you have the README is not the same where you have a file browser (Perhaps this is Github-biased, but is soooooo much better. Think about it :)
> GitLab no longer loads large Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory when browsing a Git repository. This prevents timeouts and memory leaks.
Nope. Not loading something doesn't prevent memory leaks. It might make existing leaks not as bad (because you're leaking less).
Either you're not leaking at which point it doesn't matter how big the thing you load is, it will get freed once it's not used, or you're leaking at which point, yes, if you only load small things, you get to run for a longer time before you die, but you will still die eventually.
Only loading smaller things doesn't plug leaks.
Aside of that: This looks like a very impressive release. Congratulations!
Thanks!
UPDATE: Technically we're not fixing the leak, but this fix is reducing the impact significantly.
Pretty aggressive stance when you may, in fact, be wrong.
no. Because they are still reading git blobs - just only for the smaller files.
> GitLab no longer loads large Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory [emphasis mine]
So if their handling of Git blobs is leaking memory, then not reading the bigger blobs just gives them more leeway before they crash.
I'm taking this stand because I've had the exact issue we are arguing about: my large file handler had a leak in the memory pool for large blobs. Basically it was shared memory space for multiple processes so large objects could be passed out of band instead of using IO.
Think of it this way: By no longer loading large Git blobs, it prevents known memory leaks and prevents known timeouts.
I am firm believer in FOSS and I am very glad with GitLab embracing it as much as possible without affecting their revenues. I have started creating my new repositories on GitLab from this month
Large commits can't be viewed:
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10785
Users created via LDAP login continue to count towards the user-count even if the LDAP account is deleted:
The second issue seems more like something that could become a feature request than a concrete proposal. Consider leaving a comment in the issue with your proposal.
Branch creation was rejected by Git hook
When trying to create branches via my gitlab instance and it seems to take a lot longer to process the request. Pushing via a command shell seems to work well.
--update I just rolled back my version to the older version and see that all of the branch functionality via the gitlab site works okay.
I'm not sure I like this trend.
While I understand some features GitLab may feel its worth a "second license" fee, it sets a bad precedent.
Similarly, I don't want to give you $390/year for a GitLab instance with 2-3 users which keeps me from paying for the stuff I use for sideprojects. Although, tbh, if you are going the secondary license route for various features it seems I'm better off looking into an alternative and just implementing them myself.
I honestly was just using the post-receive hook, etc. for this sort of thing.
Can you give us details on when this change will happen?
Update: our aim is before Q1 ends.
If you're not interested in GitLab Geo, you won't have to pay for it, while maintaining all other EE features.
I can't find the search feature at gitlab.com. How do I search for users or public repos of interest at gitlab?
Press `s` to search for anything. However we only support search for people in places where you immediately need them, like when adding to a project.
I created a feature proposal to also search through people: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13672
(Note, this is using Firefox/Iceweasel 44.0.)
Redmine+Gitolite has nearly everything I need but Gitlab's code view interface is better. Redmine's backend seems running more efficiently but its interface is not modern enough at this point, especially on how to review git repos.
Without trying to appear as if I'm defending gitlab itself, I've always been of the notion of "Do it right and then do it fast".
This is how postgresql is starting to beat the ever-loving crap out of mysql now, it used to be the slow option, now it's the one that wont eat your baby.
I've made it a bit more clear in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commit/b31c68aa2afbb...
One issue: I'm getting a really weird animation/hover over effect on the Gitlab icon in the upper left corner. Is that meant to happen? Is there a way to disable this.
Other than that, everyone should upgrade to this version.
That animation is our loading indicator introduced in GitLab 8.4. There is no way to disable it. However, it seems to have a lot of fans https://twitter.com/jerbob92/status/692089402030460929
I hope it is less weird now that you know what it is for.
I figured it was for loading, but I still don't like it (and it renders very strangely in Safari -- try mousing over it).
I would really like the option to disable it. I'm sure others like it though, cool option to have.
The merge into CE is happening in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 and hope it will be in one of the 8.5 patch releases.
The instructions also say "(In the future there will be a brew package)"; this is sorely needed!
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/ma...
Simply go to https://gitlab.com/ and click in the top right to sign up for a free account. You can use that instance or set your own up by following the instructions at the download page [0].
tl;dr: apt-get install gitlab-ce failed with "bundler not found". rvm use system; gem install bundler, apt-get install gitlab-ce and it worked fine.
What I see from the result your getting is the actual backup command failing. From my experience this might be do to how its executed through the upgrade process and we can have a closer look at what failed when running the create command.
If bundler is available in the active RVM environment, it works fine.
I created an issue about this so I won't forget: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/568
What do they mean by that?
(I'm Brazilian too)
We wanted to acknowledge some people's frustrations with our chosen way of writing Todos.
todos means all/everything in Spanish and Portuguese.
Todos means "all" in Spanish, so "all important things"
But also Todos as in multiple Todo items.
To upgrade from source to omnibus: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/doc...
To see all our update guides: https://about.gitlab.com/update/
So I had to go back to Source.
Switching away from MySQL might not be an option for you but documentation on how to convert from MySQL to PostgreSQL can be found on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/blob/master/doc...
On a pretty small instance (1.7g ram google cloud) + 1gb disk swap the omninbus update failed with out of memory. Added some more swap space and it finished fine. It's probably not powerful enough to run it though.. Just a heads up.
I'm glad you managed to solve it, though.
Then configure your domain to point to that IP address.
We are currently working on documentation covering that part too.
> To focus on your content
shows a screenshot with extremely long text lines that are far harder to read than than when the sidebar thing helps keep the lines to a still-too-long-but-not-as-bad length. How does nobody at GitLab realize that you need some max-width or a container or something to keep text line length comfortably readable‽
(the same can be said for Hacker News, but everyone seems to know that it's ugly already)