Hacker News Reader

Comment by O5vYtytb | Hacker News Reader

I think my productivity would 2x or 3x if gitlab would work on fixing issues with core features such as task planning. There's a lot of minimum viable features that never got improved, especially for those of us on the premium tier.

AI sound cool but at this point I'm just expecting another half baked feature that checks boxes for executives to justify purchasing it.

View on HN

I fear this is going to be the cause of the slow death of gitlab. They over-promised on far too many features and have underdelivered with many half baked products and MVPs that have been left to rot. I like the product and the company but they clearly tried to do too much in order to gain market share. GitHub needs competition so it would be great for GitLab to thrive, but the state of the product worries me.

The recent Shopify memo re "Main Quests" and "Side Quests" applies.

I'm hopeful GitLab can turn it around, but at this point it feels like GitLab might be going the way of Jira.

Since this comment intrigued me, this is the other HN post that the above memo refers to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35813763 which links to the Shopify blogpost: https://news.shopify.com/important-team-and-business-changes

Cheers for highlighting it!

I understand your frustration. I recently switched from gitlab to gitea[1] because the feature set is pretty damn close to github and has much more sane UI in comparison to gitlab

[1] https://gitea.io

I ran a Gitea instance for myself for a while in the past. But I never tried to set up CI with it. Does Gitea support having CI pipelines run for MRs and merges etc, like GitHub and GitLab does? Didn’t see any mention of CI from a very cursory glance at current docs.

Anyone here have set up CI pipelines with Gitea? What was your experience like? Did you make any CI pipelines for Rust code doing things like checking cargo audit, and running cargo clippy, cargo fmt, etc? As well as CI pipelines to automate building and deployment?

Yup, it's "funny" that even basic functionality doesn't work as expected: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/350662

I encounter this issue pretty often and it makes code review experience miserable. It's not blocking any work, but it is frustrating enough that for any new project I would try to avoid using Gitlab

And what a typical issue that is. Opened a year ago, initially some requests for internal clarification that went nowhere, plans to be fixed by an upcoming release, then loads of metadata and bot comments with minimal actual work happening, followed by pushing back the release they want to fix it in, followed by reducing its priority, deciding that actually they don't need to fix it and can just throw it on the backlog, more comments about users being affected, and then today a comment that it got brought up in a discussion here:)

Hey - I'm the PM for our Code Review group. Sorry to see you're running in to that issue, it's been a real challenge for us. If you're running in to it pretty often, it'd be great if you could provide some details on what steps you're taking (maybe even record a video) to help us figure out what's going on. For lots of bugs, the hardest thing for us to do is reproduce them... so if you've got a reliable way to do that, it really helps us prioritize things to fix.

> it'd be great if you could provide some details on what steps you're taking (maybe even record a video) to help us figure out what's going on

The comment you're replying to has a link to an issue which includes a video and a test project.

The user you are replying to has stated that the problem has not yet been made reproducible in the issue you are referring to.

That's the opposite of my reading?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/350662#note_10...

> However, I can still reproduce it under certain conditions:

Separately, that's not much of a defense; inconsistent errors are still problems for users. Although, I suppose gitlab only fixing bugs that are 100% reproducible would explain a lot about their product.

Maybe you should read the comments on the issue first.

GitLab task planning is so terrible we had to give up on it and move to Linear. It's like night and day. I can create ten tickets in Linear in the time it takes me to open the right GitLab board. The good thing is that this has probably saved us money as now fewer people need GitLab licenses.

> core features such as task planning.

Or core features such as actual git reliably working well. Yesterday all my pulls/pushes were slow - I timed one push at over 2 minutes!

> AI sound cool but at this point I'm just expecting another half baked feature that checks boxes for executives to justify purchasing it.

Its unfortunate, but just fixing and making an existing product awesome has lower ROI than implementing good-enough features that your competitor has. It may sound stupid, but works business wise.

Curious what you don't like about task planning? I found it both extensive and flexible to just about anything I could want to do with it.

Task planning doesn't increase shareholder value.

How would you fix it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com