Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

about.gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 325 posts

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#31

Post by technomancy »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #24
jbk wrote: post #9

With VideoLAN, we're not on github, but I believe we fit the 'large open source project' description. We host VLC, FFmpeg, x264 and quite a few related libraries. For VLC and all related VideoLAN projects, we're moving to our own instance of GitLab hosted on our infrastructure. And to be honest, it's quite good, but a few stuffs are ridiculously limited, to the point that some people in the community are resisting th…

> Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). Isn't this use-case covered by Gitlab's issue labels?

If you have to create a label for every platform you support and every existing priority and module, the labels list will become really cluttered, making it hard to find things.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#32

Post by pmontra »

levlaz wrote: post #22
arihant wrote: post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

Have you tried using BitBucket?

I did. Some customers of mine use it (free tier if possible) for their private projects. My assesment:

* issue management is better than GitHub's one but for very simple needs (90% of the repositories?) GitHub is enough and BitBucket is needlessly complicated (don't even talk about Jira).

* repository navigation is worse (finding the repositories themselves can be difficult if you land on the wrong page)

* wiki/pages are probably the same

* access control and general management is better

* pull request... I don't know. Our teams are small and normal communication plus git merge are enough.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#33

Post by rcarmo »

I chose Gitlab for my former company over GitHub Enterprise because we wanted an on-prem solution, and it worked well enough for ~200 folk. We did have to tweak (and occasionally break) a few things, since quite a few people suffered from NIH syndrome and wanted things done "the right way".

In general, I liked it, but it always irked me that its Ruby underpinnings made it hard to upgrade/migrate stuff (we basically just swapped LXC containers at one point, not sure how it was handled during the last upgrade). If anyone ever manages to do a credible alternative that does _not_ use Ruby in any way but keeps the overall GitHub-like workflow, a lot of operations folks will switch _instantly_.

(Like https://try.gogs.io/explore, for instance)

Also, like some commenters already pointed out, the CE edition was ridiculously limited in some regards - we mostly skipped the bits we didn't like and did product-level ticketing outside it (using Trac), with Gitlab issues used only for "techie" stuff, tracking fixes, etc.

But today I'd probably just sign us all up for GitHub and be done with it, or fire up a VM image from some marketplace - there's hardly any point in maintaining our own infrastructure or doing a lot of customization.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#35

Post by levlaz »

bigbugbag wrote: post #21

The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the r…

I think called the community edition crippled is a stretch. I have a small team (4-5 devs) that has been using the CE for a few years now and we have been more than happy with it for all of our needs.

The EE edition features make a lot of sense for much larger organizations I suppose.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#36

Post by DouweM »

bigbugbag wrote: post #21

The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the r…

GitLab CE is not crippled in any way, it is used every single day by hundreds of thousands of companies and millions upon millions of developers. It is and has always been our (GitLab, the company) main focus, we only decide to make new features EE-only when we think that they are mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees. Besides the company's efforts, contributions from the 1000+ community contributors always go into CE, unless the contributor submits it to the EE repository specifically.

As evidence, just look at our Direction page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, or compare the CE and EE changelogs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO... vs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELO....

Note that our free, hosted GitLab.com runs EE, which means that EE features like GitLab Pages ("Hosting static pages straight from GitLab") are available to everyone.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#37

Post by orf »

bigbugbag wrote: post #21

The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the r…

There is nothing crippled about GitLab CE. There are a few features that are clearly useful to large enterprise users, and if you're using GitLab with 50+ employees I'm sure $39 per year year per seat isn't going to break the bank.

We've been using GitLab CE for a while internally and it's fantastic. Don't dismiss it because of some narrow-minded ideology.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#38

Post by vincentkriek »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #14

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…

I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspect of GitLab and I think they should keep focussing on that however their instance of GitLab [1] is notoriously slow and unreliable. A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub

[1] http://gitlab.com

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#39

Post by DouweM »

vincentkriek wrote: post #38
nathan_f77 wrote: post #14

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…

I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspe…

> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub

Believe me, we would too and we are sorry about the current state of GitLab.com. We are working on improving performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues

Post reply on HN