My only request would be to focus more on stability. We run it for 1 year now and there were many problems with upgrades and various changing issues with the different versions.
So for us less new features but a better tested Gitlab would be great. Maybe some kind of "stable" release? Not sure...
I think Gitlab kind of suffers from the Ubuntu syndrome when they were still pushing the non-LTS release as default. Many things were not tested long enough and would cause issues for many people while they were using it.
For example after one upgrade browsing the repos didn't work because apparently the Git version hat to be a specific version. I think this was neither tested nor is the Git version mentioned anywhere as a requisite.
Or with v5.3 the Git satellites would get into an unclean state sometimes and had to be cleaned out manually.
I took quite some time to find this out too.
So my suggestion: more polish and testing and less new features.
I've a forked version of their startup script that doesn't use sudo for the init script (honestly wtf why is this so common redis does the same). sudo the init script don't sudo in init scripts. Meh, its not too bad I'm at the point of 15 minutes to upgrade between releases so its not too bad but yeah it isn't a trivial install.
https://gist.github.com/mitchty/6b9bc8c7dd41cd925b82#file-gi...
Thats basically it, nothing overly special, just switched sudo for su mainly. I could test to see if i'm root and then su or then sudo but don't see a point.
Gitorious _had_ (haven't looked at it recently, I guess they spent a lot of time addressing this) the worst install I have ever seen (any package, ever, 15+ year in the industry) ... it seemed built for complexity just to generate them consulting / professional support hours. Gitlab in comparison was blissfully simple.
As for the bloat... we have nearly 180 projects and 10+ user accounts, and while the baseline setup has a lot of bloat (I blame choice of language / framework) -- it generally works fairl well -- sometimes you have to kick Ruby.
Since I have seen this 'upgrade' problem repeatedly mentioned here, I think it would be a good problem to attack to help people feel more comfortable about using your product.
I recently set up gitolite internally and this thread interests me because GitLab looks like something that could be considered for Git hosting. However, someone in my place may not be so comfortable with the idea when I get the general feeling that "upgrades are a pain".
I only mean this as feedback to help you make your product more palatable (because I want to see a lot of good Git hosting solutions!)
I have their VM iso running in a VBox Headless process and it idles at 44Mb. Mind you, it only get's minimal use.
Now I use cgit, and discovered it a while before the Linux kernel did. [0] It is crazy fast (CGI written in C! Can you believe the nads on those guys?) and will be portable anywhere C is.
If only I could get git's smart HTTP working, but I could not find much on the internet to clue me in. Still pretty cool.
I love the software, but the installation / upgrade docs are always hell compared to your average `git pull && bin/rake db:migrate && foreman export`.
Having said all that, I'm running it on an old box with 512MB of ran and it's tolerable.
It was great once it finally was up and running but I'd only recommend it if you have a legitimate intellectual property concern and can't use github enterprise.
It is a great product and 'my' users love it (finally convinced them to move on from svn). One can copy-paste the instructions, it's rather lengthy but never had problems.
It's wonderful what GitLab gives, thanks a lot!!