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Comment by Perihelion | Hacker News Reader

I'm really sorry to hear about the crappy experience you've had with GitLab. If you'd like to detail some more complaints, I'd love to hear them and open some issues about these things. Feel free to shoot me an email (located in my profile) or reply here. Either way, thanks for the feedback you've provided here.

As far as the frequent upgrades go, we've been using .com as a way of dogfooding GitLab at scale. Sometimes this goes well and other times it doesn't. We're actively working to improve this process so that downtime and breaking changes are less frequent. The end goal is to eradicate both issues so that upgrades are seamless.

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So much hate in this thread!

@Perihelion: Allow me to be the one who says "thanks for your efforts" and "keep up the good work".

My team are using GitLab to manage development and we're happy with how it's going so far.

Thanks so much for your kind words! We're always trying to improve, so even though some of the comments are negative, it's still good to hear about pain points so we can fix them.

One issue I encounter often-ish is that when I'm on a gitlab page then hit the back button in the browser - I get a bunch of JSON spit onto the page instead of an actual HTML document.

Whats up with that?

I've actually experienced this exact thing. Usually a refresh fixes it for me so I never gave it too much thought. I'm not sure what causes it exactly but I'll follow up with the team about it. It usually happens to me on merge requests -- do you notice it on specific pages at all?

I think this is due to Rails Turbolinks. Since we're deprecating Turbolinks https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ I think this problem should go away.

It seems to be caused by and fixed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/28909

> Usually a refresh fixes it for me so I never gave it too much thought.

As someone who hacks on a SaaS with a sprawling feature set which ships often, I understand where you're coming from. But I would recommend giving things like that some thought.

> Whats up with that?

A sign of the future. As browser march headlong into being app platforms instead of browsers expect the back button to disappear entirely.

What? I suppose you saw what Android looks like?

I'm still not really sure, when I press the back button in Android, whether I'm going to stay in the same app, go to a different app, or close the app; all three behaviours are common.

I think they've all been standard behaviors at various times too. There's a fourth option too, will it close the slide out menu or not?

People have been saying that since like 2005. Web apps may not be your personal preference, but they're not the apocalypse either.

In 2005 SaaS companies weren't behind the leading browsers.

Most likely needs a Vary header (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Va...) set to "X-Requested-With"; otherwise the browser will use whatever it has cached for the last request when you hit the back button (and if it was an Ajax request, that's probably going to mean a bunch of JSON).

Huh? Do XHR requests go on the navigation history stack? WTF? Why? And why would any site use the same URIs for API endpoints and frontend/view navigation places? And in that case should the Content-Type (or Accepts) be the main factor?

No, I think the OP is suggesting that the same URL will have been requested in both JSON and HTML formats, and the browser cache is not differentiating between them.

Yes, I understand that, but that seems crazy on multiple levels.

Why the X-Requested-With should be in Vary when the same client did the request? (Yes, I see, Ajax libs populate this field, whereas usual browser navigation doesn't. Makes no sense.)

Why is that resource in cache anyhow, when it should be Cache-Control: no-cache (or at least must-revalidate, but it probably is, but of course that again means that the cache returns the JSON after getting the 304 from the backend, because it doesn't differentiate between responses with different Content-Type)?

It seems to me that the X-Requested-With is again a hack on top of "representational state transfer", because it was easier than trying to use Content-Type.

> Why would any site use the same URIs for API endpoints and frontend/view navigation places?

Simplicity. Ruby on Rails facilitates that approach, for example.

> And in that case should the Content-Type (or Accepts) be the main factor?

Content-Type, yup! Unfortunately Chrome and IE 10 (not sure about Edge) disagree on that.

Without the Vary header, the back button leads to rendering what the server last returned, without taking the Content-Type into account - which is completely nonsensical in my opinion.

Chromium bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=94369

Repo and page that demonstrate the issue: https://github.com/guilhermesimoes/chrome-bug

This has been going on since at least 2011 so it seems nobody cares.

I honestly do not understand why that Vary header is necessary.

Firefox doesn't seem to need it to render pages from its cache correctly.

Ironically, the section of the HTTP spec they initially referenced in that Chrome bug as justification for closing it as WontFix is precisely the part which explains why Chrome's current behavior is incorrect. Specifically:

> History mechanisms and caches are different. In particular history mechanisms SHOULD NOT try to show a semantically transparent view of the current state of a resource. Rather, a history mechanism is meant to show exactly what the user saw at the time when the resource was retrieved.

Doesn't matter whether a Vary header is sent or not; when a user clicks the back button they should see exactly what they saw when they previously viewed that page; regardless of whether that content is cached or not.

> And why would any site use the same URIs for API endpoints and frontend/view navigation places?

Because they are the same underlying thing...

Yes, of course, but not exactly.

I mean, I know RoR likes magic very much, but it's not totally surprising to separate the backend from the frontend.

And then use a SPA framework and use Ajax to communicate with the backend via a "REST API", because that simplifies the backend. A lot. You don't have to have views, templates, and so on implemented.

So either the REST API is not a REST API, but a lot of interesting endpoints for the frontend dynamic JS magic, or the frontend is not a frontend, just a lot of glitter thrown up on a REST API.

(I quickly tried to get something in JSON from a GitLab URL, but I just get a HTTP 406. :( )

>shoot me an email (located in my profile)

no it isn't?

I tried to find her email on her keybase page but it isn't there. Ironically her Github page is listed, but her Gitlab page isn't.

Hmm, not sure what happened. It was there, now it's not. It's amanda@gitlab.com -- sorry about that.

The email address field in your user form isn't public. you need to add it to text in your description.

Yeah, it was there (along with a note on how to get free stickers) but now it's gone. Keybase stuff is still there though. Random.

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