Gitlab 13.1 | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab 13.1

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190 pointsbjoko84 comments

It's great and impressive how quick Gitlab moves in adding new features.

But if I have a Graphic Design repo it emphasises Kubernetes, Packages and Security features that have zero relevance. And there is no way to disable them.

And that on every single repo it places these Add License/Contributors etc buttons front and centre even though for 99% of internal projects they serve no purpose.

Every release Gitlab seriously needs to step back and think about how to simplify the interface. Because it's starting to get a bit ridiculous.

> It's great and impressive how quick Gitlab moves in adding new features.

Don't trust their feature list, they often "forget" to use it themselves. Many of those features are there to tick the box and daze executives, but are barely usable in practice.

It took them a year to start supporting Kubernetes clusters with RBAC, they didn't use autodevops for their own releases, even for simple components, nor any kubernetes integration, monitoring, feature flags, Geo, backup procedure. Who in the right mind is going to enable Web Application Firewall feature, when rules exceptions cannot be configured?

Somewhere in comments here will be reply from Gitlab employee, saying that dogfooding is something they are constantly working on, it doesn't matter. What they should be doing is to update documentation pages with feature maturity level and have a block of links to most popular bugs related to the feature, so that poor devops engineers don't have to rediscover all the pain and come prepared.

Just to be clear, Gitlab is an awesome tool, it is just not as awesome as their marketing wants us to believe.

"Somewhere in comments here will be reply from Gitlab employee, saying that dogfooding is something they are constantly working on"

To ensure we meet your expectations I want to state that we're continuously working on dogfooding, you can track our progress in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues?label_name=Dog...

"What they should be doing is to update documentation pages with feature maturity level and have a block of links to most popular bugs related to the feature"

That is a great idea and I wonder if https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/ meets your expectations. We recently update the criteria for viable and complete to incorporate dogfooding:

- Viable: Significant use at GitLab the company.

- Complete: GitLab the company dogfoods it exclusively.

And thanks for calling us an awesome tool. Hope you don't mind the tongue-in-cheek response at the top of my comment :)

While not the above commenter, I found the reply enjoyable. Thank you.

GitLab had been great for us, though we've had issues around their educational institutions license.. so we can't use a lot of the fancy features... But I've enjoyed ops work more on GitLab than GitHub or Jenkins.

Great to hear you are enjoying GitLab and we value you as an Education Program member. We'd love to hear your constructive feedback on any issue's you've had. In the GitLab spirit, we started the Education Program as a MVProgram and are working hard to mature it. We have an open epic - please feel free to provide input. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/marketing/community-rel...

I feel a bit the opposite. I've been totally spoiled by gitlab to the point where contributing to libre github projects has started becoming difficult.

We use gitlab at work and it has been great, though we have really great sysadmins so maybe my perception is a bit skewed.

That being said Gitlab's UI is still commits a lot of UI complications that makes it inferior to github for managing libre projects.

I really wish gitlab would have a stronger push to contests the open-source space but it seems that they have pretty much given up already and focus for enterprise instead. :|

GitHub is an established player in the technology space and has done a really great job at fostering its open source community.

You're right that GitLab is trying to differentiate itself as the best place to scale software, and so it feels like its focus is on enterprises. That's where the open source strategy also currently aligns. GitLab is making the best platform to help open source projects thrive at scale.

I'm the new Sr. Open Source Program Manager at GitLab and was recently hired to build out our GitLab for Open Source program (https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/). This program allows open source projects to use GitLab's top tiers for free, and it provides assistance to large open source organizations throughout their migrations. We are providing open source projects with GitLab’s top-of-the-line features, that enterprises are using, to help them along their own journey.

As I mentioned, GitHub is doing a lot of great things, and I think that GitLab used to be perceived as merely playing a game of catch up. This is no longer where we are today. We're fast at iterating on our product and are blazing ahead on creating a platform that enables cross-functional team collaboration, and industry-standard features for the full software development lifecycle. We're working on a similar strategy with our open source offering -- so that we're not playing catch up, but are instead defining a new standard.

As an open-core company, we have an open roadmap for our product and for everything else we do. If you have ideas for our community relations team (I'm part of this team), we welcome your feedback! You can reach us via our forum: forum.gitlab.com, and via community@gitlab.com. You can also read all about what we do and how we work here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...

> Who in the right mind is going to enable Web Application Firewall feature, when rules exceptions cannot be configured?

Currently we are using ModSecurity for our Web Application Firewall and rather than duplicating their documentation, we refer our users to ModSecurity's documentation for rule configuration. Rule exceptions with GitLab's WAF are possible as documented on the ModSecurity website: https://www.modsecurity.org/CRS/Documentation/exceptions.htm...

It is also worth noting that we are in the process of designing a more refined, UI-based policy management experience. While this policy management experience is starting with support for Cilium Network Policies only, we plan to eventually add support for WAF rules as well. We would love to get input or feedback you have on the direction we are headed with our policy management interface at https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3403

We've actually been using feature flags for quite a while for some release tooling related projects. Geo has been used in the past when we migrated to Google Cloud if I remember correctly.

This comment makes a lot of good points.

I think we can stop recommending License and Contributors since GitLab is mostly used for closed source software. The templates will still be there but just not suggested until you started to create a new file.

And you should be able to disable everything but the repo if you want to. And of course you can disable the repo as well if you just want the planning features for example.

Also please put in place this simple UI rule: "If it doesn't need attention don't make it coloured or bold"

e.g. thumbs up/down, report abuse etc.

Thanks for the examples.

BYW There is also a reply in this thread from a GitLab UX team-member who responds to a comment about the thumbs up/down and report abuse buttons https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23606854

>Graphic Design repo it emphasises Kubernetes, Packages and Security features that have zero relevance. And there is no way to disable them.

You can do it in Settings > General > "Visibility, project features, permissions"

Not for everything you can't.

I am using Gitlab Next and Kubernetes, Security & Compliance, Operations, Analytics, Members are not removable options.

Thanks, I will raise this with our product team.

+1 At my last place, we deployed via Nomad and not Kubernetes, yet we had "AutoDevops" on every repository page and developers trying to use it/ask questions about it.

Being able to wholesale disable features across the install would be a good first step.

It feels very cluttered these days. I really wish I could disable features on a group/project basis and have those things just disappear from the interface. Ideally by a simple list of toggles.

Mostly I only use the Git, CI, Readme rendering, Docker registry and that's about it. Everything else just gets in the way and makes the interface harder to navigate.

Yes agree completely. I'd love to whittle down the noise.

A graphic design repo...that's fascinating. UI design? Print?

I've never seen designers use full-on version control, so this is super interesting to me. Do you consider yourself more of a technical person?

"This month's Most Valuable Person (MVP) is Jacopo Beschi "

What a cool company culture. telling people they are doing good in person is nice, telling it to them and also sharing it with the world is great

GitLab employee here:

The MVPs are not employees, but community contributors as outlined here: https://about.gitlab.com/community/mvp/

But yes, I agree: it is very nice to share the achievements of our OSS contributors with the world :)

TIL! That is awesome and as a customer/user I'd love to see internal recognition, too! Maybe this would detract from the actual efforts of the other employees but it doesn't necessarily have to be employee of the month - could just be Kudos to X and Y for knocking out this lingering bug or adding this most wanted feature.

I agree recognition is important. We have an internal #thanks channel that got 20+ posts today of people being thanked. Also more than 10% of the company gets a $1000 discretionary bonus every month. We're doing an experiment of making videos for some of these bonuses that optionally can be made public.

If anyone from GitLab is reading this, these pages are locked in a refresh loop. I can't read the content because it is scrolling/moving slightly with every refresh which is happening constantly.

Latest version of Chrome stable, uBlock Origin in default config, HTTPS Everywhere, React/Redux devtools are the extensions I have installed.

I let the page run for 30 seconds and:

* CPU usage on two cores was at 100%

* 2,943 requests were made for 319 MB of resources over 30.06 seconds

A staggering rate of 100 requests per second that persists indefinitely - I have no reason to believe the refresh loop is broken at any point.

Thanks for reporting this. I created an issue to report this to the Gitlab website team. You can follow along and anything I might have missed here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/8052

GitLab technical evangelist here.

I can't seem to reproduce this - maybe it's uBlock Origin? Are you sure it's the default configuration? What were the requests to - just to the main HTML page?

Same issue here as the original post and similar extensions. I followed the suggestion of clearing cookies for about.gitlab.com and it doesn't help.

We're working on this issue here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/8052. Hardest part - like much of software engineering - is trying to figure out how to reproduce it.

Yes, the page infinitely navigates back to itself resulting in a whole page refresh.

@AaronFriel try deleting your cookies for the website and see if that resolves it. I recall someone at GitLab having that problem the other day and think I recall that clearing their cookies fixed the issue for them. Either way I'll notify our marketing website team to have a look at this.

One thing to look at is that the page does at least one whole page refresh by default, even an incognito window.

If I open up the page in incognito, I see two requests in the network tab for https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/06/22/gitlab-13-1-rel...

Same problem as you on Chrome. I thought it was just me. I see requests happening to many different sites.

It is not in the blog post probably because it is still in Alpha, but Gitlab now has a Dark Theme <3

Settings -> Preferences: there is a new theme called "Dark Mode (Alpha). Indeed still in Alpha, but I love they are working on this!

Before you file an issue, double check if an issue for the problems you experience with the Dark Mode already exists in this epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2902

And of course: have fun on the dark side (as they are the ones with the cookies)

Welp, this is confirmation that I haven't been keeping up on everything going on; when I learn about my most desired feature on my company's software from a Hacker News post :S

Yay! Tbh I like what it looks like with Dark Reader better: the background is still to bright to my eyes. Any word on when the dark mode will be ready for HN? I saw there was a thread a month or two ago about this.

I somehow had a feeling Gitlab would be bought this year, but the list dramatically falls apart upon closer inspection:

- Google: will never work, completely different mindset and engineering culture. Gitlab feels way too unrefined (in a good sense).

- AWS: Gitlab is already too different from their tech, and will never be that tightly coupled with the rest of AWS.

- IBM: :') they wish

- MS: already has GitHub

Any others?

I think any giant company would have a hard time integrating all-remote Gitlab.

Being all-remote makes it harder to get acquired. Even if the acquirer is forward thinking, there are many complications to be addressed (compliance with existing hr/payroll/etc).

Last I've checked Gitlab was en route to IPO which makes sense given their unique structure.

> Being all-remote makes it harder to get acquired

Do you think this has changed amid the pandemic, though?

Wouldn't having a proven remote workforce actually increase your desirability?

I actually have no idea, but isn't "open core" a turn-off to would-be acquirers as well, since the core can fork out from under them if they try to work too hard against the wishes of the community? Maybe there have been open core acquisitions. I don't follow startup news that closely.

Who would maintain the fork?

I think you're underestimating the power of a boatload of cash. All of the companies you listed could afford to buy gitlab.

Sure they could, but it still needs to make sense from either a growth or a defense play. I don't see that for any of these companies.

> I think any giant company would have a hard time integrating all-remote Gitlab.

Atlassian maybe? (shudder)

I would stop using gitlab immediately if that happened.

If we are thinking less-than-ideal buyers, I could imagine Oracle or SAP could be interested?

Don't they already have Bitbucket?

They bought Trello even they have Jira

They do, along with several other competing products.

Facebook? duck

With every release I wonder why our team is even paying for Gitlab Bronze. It seems to offer no value at all, might as well go for the free tier and save a thousand dollars a year.

Gitlab needs to be able to mix licenses on a single system, its current model requires all accounts in an org to operate at the same level, try selling a 1000 seat ultimate license at 99/user/month to tbe average sme. In all companies there are seats that need different levels of capabilities, gitlab is just way to expensive to use at anything above starter, the premium level works out at 2x more expensive than jira/bb/confluence with considerably less capability. I want to be able to buy 200 starter, 50 premium and 5 ultimate licenses and mix them on the same system.

They explicitly said they don't want to do that, for reasons that really aren't clear. There are a LOT of companies that want to be able to mix developers and reporters, but can't because the price is astronomical for zero benefit. So they live with a lower tier (likely free).

Doesn't make sense.

@apple4ever Thank you very much for your feedback! This is very helpful for us to iterate on our handbook explanation and our pricing strategy.

@thawkins Thank you so much for your inputs on our pricing model!

Our current model do not have multiple plans for one customer https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#multiple-plan... as @apple4ever mentioned.

However, it's extremely important for us to hear from you. We recently clarified our Pricing Philosophy and Collaboration on pricing with you is part of it: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#pricing-philo...

We definitely take your inputs back and consider to build into our next iteration on the pricing strategy.

I'm not saying they should remove any free features, but now and then it'd be nice seeing a Silver feature come to Bronze.

Merge Request Reviews was moved to core as part of this release.

Yes, this update basically reduced the value of Bronze significantly as there were no relevant new features coming to Bronze and those that we were paying for are now in the free tier.

Just a quick search of GitLab issues for "to Starter" and I came across the following:

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/10107

In general our "Why Starter" page has some great rationale for why we encourage small teams to utilize GitLab Starter/Bronze. https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/starter/

Maybe the value is in ensuring the Gitlab team can continue working on the product, because they are paid to do so ?

Same boat, although with GitHub pricing changes it’s more advantageous to switch. The fact that the security and dependency management is locked at gold when they are free on Github is annoying.

Moving breakman into core is nice but not enough

I love GitLab

Better UI than GitHub and was first to provide free private repos

Bitbucket provided free private repos before Gitlab existed

If only Bitbucket wasn't a typical Atlassian disaster it might be more popular. I've never used an Atlassian product that wasn't one of the slowest websites I've ever seen with an over-complicated UX that can only be described as sadistic (have you seen the multiple settings pages?).

Gitlab and GitHub both blow Bitbucket out of the water, it's not even a competition.

Severely limited* free private repos

> Better UI than GitHub

I think that GitHub has a much better UI than GitLab. GitLab is slow and bloated compared to GitHub. Requiring Javascript for browsing the code repository is just bad design.

GitLab employee here. As much as it pains me, I have to agree with you for the most part. Performance is one of the biggest pain points for our frontend team, but is something we're actively working on.

Here's one of our epics to show our progress: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/716

We're in the process of migrating parts of our codebase from haml templates to Vue apps, which does have the unfortunate downside of requiring javascript to run. We're looking into solving this with server side rendering, but it's early days right now.

Here's the issue for that: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/215365

If either of these things are things you could help with, we encourage you to contribute and help us make GitLab a better place.

Well, that's interesting information. I believe it when I see it, but it could be that my criticism of GitLab is no longer valid at some point in the future.

LOVE that Merge Request Reviews have moved to core!!

What makes Gitlab significantly better than the other gitlings?

IMHO, it's integration. znpy was correct, but incomplete: GitLab ships with CI/CD, secrets management via Vault, AWS ECS integration, Kubernetes integration, issue tracking, wiki, an artifact repository for 5 major package types, metrics, alerts, and even a full-blown Slack competitor (optional, of course)

You can absolutely integrate your favorite, and/or best of breed, tools with any git hosting software that you'd like -- but that takes non-zero time to do and upgrading them will also be non-zero time. GitLab ships like a machine every month, and it seems this feature announcement is representative of the caliber of every release

does it make sense to switch to gitlab if one already has most of those things integrated?

the gitlab-ci is the killer app.

also, the fact that you can self-host it and it's very easy to do so.

how is that better than jenkins?

The alert integration looks interesting, but the screenshots for code intelligence look awful. Who decided to use a super light shade of gray on a white background?

Their UI has a lot of these annoying issues and they never seemed to get around to fixing them.

My other favourites:

1) UI is all muted and grey which is great because it allows you to focus on your code, issues etc. Well except for the Thumbs Up/Down buttons which are a bright yellow and the only thing to stand out. And it's a feature that serves no purpose in most cases.

2) Report Abuse button is next to the New Issue button. But it's given the same size and prominence. Is abuse really as common as creating new issues ?

3) Backgrounds. Some are light grey. Some are dark grey. Some buttons background is filled, others solid.

Thanks for adding your thoughts, hopefully I can shed some light in a few places.

1) I’m assuming you’re referring to the emoji buttons. They are useful to determine upvotes and downvotes on issues and merge requests. These counts can be used when sorting for popularity. We leverage system emoji here and in most cases they are a bright yellow (https://emojipedia.org/thumbs-up/). It’d be possible to use our custom icon library (http://gitlab-org.gitlab.io/gitlab-svgs/?q=thumb-) for these buttons, but then they wouldn’t visually align with other award emoji that can be added inline. Here’s more info https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/award_emojis.html.

2) If you don’t have permission to close the issue (or merge request), you will only see the 'Report abuse' button (I’m guessing this is what you’re seeing), otherwise there would be a split button with 'Close issue' as the default option, and 'Report abuse' as the second. I agree that this needs some further consideration, so I opened an issue to start a discussion https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/223775. Feel free to contribute and add your thoughts there too.

3) A few things are at work here. We recently updated our neutral palette to normalize it with the rest of the color palette, and address some accessibility items. We’re working on updating the neutral variables and remap them throughout the product, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ui/-/issues/627 and https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2964. If there’s anything you don’t think would be addressed by those changes, it’d be great if you could open a new issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/new) and cc the UX designers (@gitlab-com/gitlab-ux/designers). Regarding buttons, we are in the process of replacing deprecated buttons in the product with new ones from GitLab UI https://gitlab-org.gitlab.io/gitlab-ui/?path=/story/base-but.... Here are a few issues covering that effort https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues?scope=all&utf8.... Many other issues will be created to do the same in other parts of the product.

I hope this helps, thanks again for your comments!

Version control for GitLab wiki is still not there. Supposedly it will be in 13.2.

For a small shop using GitLab local install versioning of the systems/software/lab protocols documentation is something hard to live without.

Hey GitLab Wiki PM here!

We do have an issue scheduled in 13.2 for Wiki diffing. However this still won't allow you to revert a change but will visually help you see the diffs line by line (just like in MRs):

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15242

(FYI that issue is a community contribution so I can't guarantee it will ship in 13.2, but we'll try!)

I'm sure you're aware, we also have git versions of the wiki in the UI: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/wiki/#viewing-the-hi...

Can you tell me more about your use case for versioning?

Sorry for the late reply.

Few features (apart from be able to view wiki diffs) from my point of view:

1. Wiki edits in activity

2. User wiki edit history (= edits times, pages, size of diffs)

Maybe in a long run it will be good to have Markdown based collaborative document editing. Meaning that each editor can branch the draft doc, introduce changes. Then these branches will need to be reviewed and merged, probably by 1-2 people.

Hope it helps

Looks like WebAuthn is still missing, even though there seem to have been merge requests featuring it forever!

Anyone know which milestone it’ll be merged into?

This relevant MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/26692 is scheduled (not guarateed) for 13.2 (July 22, 2020). Also see this issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22506

Thanks for the update, I’ve looking forward to this feature for around 6 months!

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