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Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

about.gitlab.com

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181–190 of 325 posts

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

#181

Post by nevi-me »

At least with Gitlab I can open an issue somewhere and follow it, like with open source projects. It doesn't disappear into the abyss with no feedback on what's happening.

I've implemented two self-hosted Gitlab instances at work, for one of the instances on our private network, I'm still fighting with IT to allow us to use LDAP. Gitlab EE is still off our 'pockets' as management aren't too keen to pay for it, at least yet, but I hope that we'll get there.

Our self-hosted instance is also a bit slow, not as slow as Gitlab.com, and if it was written in a language that I'm familiar with, perhaps I and some of my team could contribute to 'making it faster'. Pity I don't have enough time left in the day to learn Ruby. I've read up a bit on the work going on around Unicorn and workers, but maybe some of these things could be better written in other more 'performant' languages?

For personal projects I still use Bitbucket + JIRA. I got to the point where I decided to stop looking for freebies and pay. JIRA has been awesome, totally worth the price.

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

#182

Post by jobvandervoort »

georgefrick wrote: post #112

I've been using GitLab myself and suggesting it to any clients with the proper infrastructure. When I found GitLab I tried it out, and finally ended up moving my SVN to Git (private projects). It's a great piece of software and I love the web hooks.

That's great to hear. Any way we can improve web hooks for you?

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

#183

Post by mdw »

I've recently made an iOS App that integrates with GitLab. The people at GitLab have been incredible, they respond to my issues, improve the API with every release, I didn't expect this level of awesomeness when I started the project.

What's great about GitLab, there's a release on the 22nd of each month, so you can depend on pretty much continual improvement. Even if you don't think GitLab is suitable for your Open Source project, talk to the team on their issue tracker, things get solved pretty quickly!

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

#184

Post by chousuke »

rcarmo wrote: post #33

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 j…

Nowadays, the omnibus package makes gitlab pretty easy to maintain.

I had to do an upgrade from Gitlab 6.9 (source-based on ubuntu 12.04) to 8.3 (omnibus rpm on rhel7, managed via puppet) recently, and it was surprisingly smooth.

The package-based installer bundles all the needed software, which is quite okay for software like gitlab that often depends on specific versions of auxiliary software. It uses a built-in chef to configure its components.

I performed the upgrade in two steps, first to 7.14 (on the source-based install), then did a backup/restore to the new server with omnibus and upgraded it to 8.3.3 with yum.

Gitlab migrated the database mostly correctly (there were some issues with the LDAP provider; some users had the wrong provider in the database, but that was easy to fix manually. I'm not sure what caused it) which was quite a surprise considering I went up 2 major versions in two steps. Even upgrading the source-based installation went very smoothly even though it had to download a couple dozen ruby gems from the internet.

The upgrade also affected CI functionality for one of our users but I think that was because it relied on pre 8.0 non-builtin CI, and simply needed reconfiguration for the new system.

Afterwards, a point-release upgrade took a whopping 5 minutes (most of which was downloading and extracting the new RPM).

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

#185

Post by DouweM »

mdw wrote: post #183

I've recently made an iOS App that integrates with GitLab. The people at GitLab have been incredible, they respond to my issues, improve the API with every release, I didn't expect this level of awesomeness when I started the project. What's great about GitLab, there's a release on the 22nd of each month, so you can depend on pretty much continual improvement. Even if you don't think GitLab is suitable for your Open…

Because Matt is too nice to plug his own app, I will do it for him. Check out Trident: http://www.somerobots.com/trident.html It's a really nice app and we are happy to make improvements on our side to make it even more capable with every release :)

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

#186

Post by masida »

DouweM wrote: post #138
Afforess wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitlab EE is actually open source. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee

The GitLab EE source is publicly viewable, but its license is not open source. See https://about.gitlab.com/2015/05/22/gitlab-7-11-released/ .

This is really a problem I think. Maybe GitLab could reconsider to adopt a licensing model[1] for the Enterprise Edition that would make it more Free Software friendly?

[1] I.e. a licensing model based on GPL and selling services that Red Hat uses for RHEL, instead of a licensing model like they, and a minority of the "open source" companies, use.

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

#187

Post by mdw »

pmilot wrote: post #70

This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me. By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In…

I think GitLab is a reaction to the problems GitHub has, to me it IS the response to the letter, though maybe not the one you'd first expect!

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

#188

Post by mdw »

jorisw wrote: post #55

Before you think of switching to GitLab, look at their status Twitter account over the past few months. They've had a lot of down times. They run on Microsoft Azure.

GitLab can be self hosted, you don't need to depend on the Cloud.

The downtime of GitLab.com is something the team are committed (see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ - 'Disadvantages') to improve this year.

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

#189

Post by fwegrt »

pmilot wrote: post #70

This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me. By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In…

I think, that GitLab staff wrote respectfully, in an open manner.

> I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months.

I agree, IMO it's already better then github - I know people will disagree on that, but I find the UI way better - Easier to find things and navigate for someone who doesn't work in github very often (milestones for instance).

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

#190

Post by whorleater »

jazoom wrote: post #60
sqldba wrote: post #45

Because the thread has turned into a "why I like/dislike GitLab over GitHub", I'll say one thing that keeps sending me back to GitHub is the neat-o desktop client. I use a command line for everything else in life; but with Git I'm hopeless.

The GutHub GUI (GutHub Desktop) is pretty bad. Try GitKraken or Sourcetree. You can even use GitHub Desktop with Gitlab if you really want.

Is GitKraken out now? Last time I checked it was still in beta, so I've been using Tower in the meantime.
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