GitLab 8.14 Released with Time Tracking Beta and Chat Commands – GitLab | Hacker News Reader

GitLab 8.14 Released with Time Tracking Beta and Chat Commands – GitLab

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106 pointsseanclayton43 comments

Got the mattermost integration working with one of our repos today and it seems pretty great. Probably going to move over from Slack to it as I try to consolidate services. I just need them to release the ability to have issue boards that cover multiple repos and it'll be perfect for us.

Glad to hear you're enjoying Mattermost. Group level issue boards are being worked on in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/928 for GitLab EE and .com

Congrats again guys / gals, we're really loving using GitLab at Infoxchange!

Thanks for using GitLab. Reading this as the first thing about the release from the beach in Maui. Mahalo!

Don't you feel this might come of as a bit elitist, Sytse?

He's worked so hard, trust me - that man deserves a beer!

Please watch memory usage.

Interestingly, we're quite heavy users of GL (EE) and I'm probably the main person to log into the servers to do upgrades / check on things etc... and I haven't noticed any memory issues, not saying that they don't exist like I know that workers have to be reaped every so often to prevent memory leaks etc... which while isn't great is very very common and is just a delivery decision as a trade off between development time vs a bandaid approach.

Those time tacking features are really great. Is there a way to aggregate the spent hours over a day or week?

Not at this point. I've added it to the list of things to consider for the reports though (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1271)

This reminds me I should give https://wakatime.com/ another try ...

Wakatime is great and they have GitLab support https://wakatime.com/blog/19-connect-your-wakatime-to-gitlab

I think they are considering adding support for GitLab time tracking but I can't find the issue.

Actually that's least exciting release I saw for some time. Is it just me or are the changes rather minor for non-EE users this month?

There are still a couple of nice CE changes there:

* Review apps being complete - https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/22/introducing-review-apps/

* Prevent merge until Review is done - https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/merge_requests/merge...

I guess it does seem less exciting considering the huge changes they've made this year. 8.15 will be interesting considering it is meant to close off their "Idea to Production" workflow.

edit: changed the merge request URL from the EE one to the CE one even though the content is basically the same.

> Review apps being complete

Thats amazing. I was just thinking this morning on the bus that I needed to build something like this myself for our setup.

Awesome! Glad we got the timing right for you. Once you have them set up it is hard to go back to living without them.

A lot of people don't need review apps. My company is too damn small to have a Kubernetes/Openshift Cluster/Machines running just idling and waiting till a review app needs to spun up.

Also we are using staging pretty heavily and do version based deployments/installers, where it's really not necessary. We actually release more often than Gitlab tough, one non bug fix version every two weeks.

For me review apps would've been the EE feature and time tracking the non EE one, especially since time tracking is also the one that many smaller companies might use.

I Also think that they should add a way to have -no-ff merges for CE (not all options but -no-ff would be helpful), but actually that's a EE only feature.

Well we switched from Stash/BitBucket to it and are still happy since we screwed JIRA also and it's way easier to maintain. I mean JIRA/Bitbucket still have no apt/rpm repository?! Still wondering what happens if gitlab upgrades PostgreSQL, if that will happen automatically...

When GitLab upgrades PostgreSQL, it will require a manual step (typing a command through the `gitlab-ctl`) as it involves downtime and can take quite some time depending on how big the database is.

At some point (now? before?) they'll start to hit feature parity with the market leader (github, presumably) and the releases are bound to be significantly less exciting.

We don't plan to stop at feature parity. I think a good example of our vision is shown in https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/14/idea-to-production/

I have found few things to be bad about gitlab, and I am serious, not trolling:

1. When I am already logged in gitlab and I go to gitlab.com, it shows me the landing page and doesn't automatically show me the dashboard.

2. I do not get notifications from the projects that I follow, I get only the "todos". Either this, or I haven't figured out the notification part.

3.The UI is good, but it can have some improvements. I can not put my finger on it, but Github's UI/UX feels more approachable than Gitlab's.

Also, on the landing page itself if you can have a login form like Facebook does, it'll be a small but great change.

Thanks for the concrete feedback.

1. This shouldn't happen. Can you please create an issue?

2. What things would you like to see? We have an email on push that we can maybe extend.

3. We just hired a UX researcher but we're open to suggestions.

4. Should be solved with 1

1. where to raise issue?

2. I want to get notifications as in Facebook/Quora notifications or even github's would be fine

3.If you give me your email, I'll use gitlab and email you about concrete things, I can't yet put a finger to my abstract thoughts.

4. I want a login page in the home page itself, I do not want to be redirected to /login. This is not related to #1

1. I just went to GitLab.com and it showed me the app. What URL did you use?

3. Please email sarah@ company domain with a link to this comment. Thanks for helping

1. Probably I went to gitlab.org, I did not enter it, firefox cached it. Because now it redirected me to http://about.gitlab.com and it asked me to sign in.

3. I will send you the email later, one or two days. I am currently writing an intro book to VueJS. As soon as I finish it, I'll shoot you an email. (https://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ only one chapter is written yet)

Does Gitlab conduct accessibility audits as part of releases?

I'm pretty happy with gitlab too, but if i had to compare it with github i would go: - gitlab.com is neat but often has 5XX or is often pretty slow - doc is somewhat messy i rarely find what i'm looking for. - UI/UX get better but still confusing. - notifications are not clear and i often get what i don't want (my own things) and not what i want (what other did)

Actually, I think feature parity was reached last year and they are now ahead (if you consider pure github, without its ecosystem). You can probably find as much things in github missing from gitlab than the reserve.

It was quite clear it was github's turn to play catch up earlier this year when gitlab published its issue board and github made one a few months later.

Gitlab is the first real competitor that make me really thinking in a migration, i just have to convince everybody here in my company.

Time tracking?

Time to move off gitlab.

Is there a reason this feature offends you so?

Programmers hate when management forces to track their spent time. It's very annoying and unhelpful to anybody

It's helpful. when you have to quote estimates to your customer, this estimate is what is going to be really billed and then you want to know, how much you were off, whether you actually have some margin. By comparing estimates to actuals, you can get better at your estimates.

It can be annoying, but for example, redmine-style time tracking in checkin comments are quite unobtrusive.

Do you use this feature with Redmine? (time spent in commit messages)

Yes, although some colleagues prefer logging their time separately. The commit message allows only for specifying hours, the separate time-sheet entry also date and activity (i.e. designing, testing, documenting, and other non-strictly programming activities). It also allows to specify the same task several times, without having multiple commits :)

The concept of "activity" is interesting. I've created an issue to talk about it, thank you. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1304

It's extraordinarily helpful and is the sign of a mature, professional developer.

Well I work at a company that has requirements and wants them done on deadlines. It's not evil. Tracking time against estimates is helpful so we can know if estimates are correct.

One would assume that if a company wants to track the employee's spent time, they already found a way of doing this. GitLab is only providing a different, and perhaps easier, way of doing it.

It is an optional feature and it doesn't add much cruft in the UI if you don't use it.

There is no such thing as an optional feature once middle management gets hold of it.

As a developer forced to use a very crappy web-based 1990 time tracking tool, this is simply awesome. We track times to bill clients in service requests

With GitLab you can time track like it's 1999! (sing it like the Prince song)

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