Comment by dnsmichi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dnsmichi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

GitLab team member here. Thanks for your feedback.

> Request: The new UI has "Admin" link hidden which is hard to find. I liked the old UI better (explicit is better than implicit).

This was reported in the new navigation feedback issue [0] and is being worked on in [1]. Suggest adding your comment/upvote there too.

> Question: Is the open source code the same as the Enterprise versions of the code? (how do you implement feature differences?)

The source code for GitLab is located in a single repository. The change was proposed and introduced in 2019 for efficiency reasons [2] [3] [4]

You can learn more about the stewardship of GitLab, and the promises in [5] - point 11) links to the enterprise code location, and the free open source location.

This workflow also ensures that everyone can contribute to GitLab [6] - free users, and customers [7], using the same code base.

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005#what-we...

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/415854

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/02/21/merging-ce-and-ee-c...

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/08/23/a-single-codebase-f...

[4] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/10/02/contributor-after-s...

[5] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/stewardship/#pr...

[6] https://about.gitlab.com/community/contribute/

[7] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/development/contributing/#contrib...

It boggles my mind that you direct customers to your issue tracker. With over 50,000 open issue, it is where requests go to die. It is not a place of honor.

This comment boggles my mind. There are hundreds of developers just employed by gitlab, and likely many thousands of contributors and a multiple of active users voicing their (probably often contradictory) wishes. You want to track this in a system, and their core product includes exactly such a tool that allows people to have precisely this kind of input and transparency. You can add an issue, add a me-too thumbs up (vote), emoticons, comments etc. You will get updated via mails on the progress of the issue, etc.

The customer got a nice reply saying that the exact concern is being worked on, how and where to signal interest, track progress, etc. What did you expect, what more can you do? What would honor mean?

Have you ever worked in software? Do you know have many issues production code has? 50,000 open issues is nothing for a project of this size. Do you have any idea how much issues are closed daily? Gitlab is very actively using their issuetracker and sharing their progress with the world. Try finding a company with as much transparacy as Gitlab.

In practice, customers can also make requests via private support tickets. I’ve seen GitLab determine priority of an issue based partially on demand from paying customers.

GitLab team member here.

> In practice, customers can also make requests via private support tickets.

Yep. Sometimes, it can also be helpful to ask publicly in a forum topic or issue and link that in the support ticket, asking for prioritized support.

> I’ve seen GitLab determine priority of an issue based partially on demand from paying customers.

Correct. You might have seen team members commenting with customer requests into issues and epics. While we at GitLab cannot share customer names and other confidential data, the feature request itself is public and increases transparency.

The process is documented in the product handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-processes/...

Thanks for your feedback.

Requests are triaged using automation and AI, and responsible teams include the reviews in their planning. [0]

Issues (and related MRs) are targeting milestones. Since we at GitLab work in iterations and smaller changes to release features faster, epics help plan and group the issues. Roadmaps and boards are used by product managers, too. [1] [2] Example roadmap filtered by the CI section [3]

Every stage, group, feature has labels applied, which allows the creation of specific filters. For example, "Category:Code Suggestions" as label filter [4]

Additional helpers are available in the handbook, for example the "Features by group" overview [5] which shows the feature maintainers in the section, stage, group, product and engineering managers, etc.

Customers can open support tickets, too. [6] Opening a public issue is encouraged so other community members can engage and collaborate. Often, a workaround or fast solution is unveiled because of collaboration and transparency.

When in doubt whether it is a bug or feature, or asking for (troubleshooting) help, you are welcome to join our community forum or Discord. [7] I'm mostly active on the forum myself. [8]

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/quality/issue-...

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#how-we-plan-releases

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/product-processes/...

[3] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/roadmap?state=opened&...

[4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/?label_name%5B...

[5] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/feature...

[6] https://about.gitlab.com/support/

[7] https://about.gitlab.com/community/

[8] https://forum.gitlab.com/u/dnsmichi/summary

What would you prefer?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com