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Maturity

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Re: Maturity

#51

Post by joshlambert »

flocial wrote: post #34

Gitlab is a great product for self-hosting a GitHub-like service and I'm grateful for its existence. Having said that, I'm not a big fan of their bait and switch approach to feature creep. Every time I try to update our GL I end up in a world of hurt. No straight upgrade path when you skip major-ish releases. I end up wasting a day sifting through cryptic issues and docs from vague error messages. Suddenly can't comm…

Hi, I'm a PM for our linux packages. I'd love to learn more about the cryptic issues and vague errors mention.

We've put a lot of effort towards making the upgrades as painless as possible, with few surprises. One way we've achieved this is by requiring users to update to the last minor version, before making the jump to the next major version, as you note. The reason for doing this, is that we add a lot of validation to that last minor package which checks for any deprecated features/configuration.

This way if you try to upgrade with a configuration that would result in GitLab no longer functioning, we abort the upgrade and tell you exactly why, leaving you with a functional instance in the interim.

Re: Maturity

#52

Post by ori_b »

ori_b wrote: post #27
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #8

I was sucked in by Gitlab's feature list and marketing. But holy shit so many things are half assed and so many features are buggy and broken. Like their wikis would sometimes just straight up delete text and their webhooks would break images. I started a bunch of issues but they really have no chance of getting fixed anytime soon. Just shows how different your impression of something is after actually using it.

I don't really use gitlab, but I wrote my own git implementation recently ( https://github.com/oridb/git9 ), and I've had bug reports when people tried to use it on gitlab. Apparently it can deadlock processes on the server, stopping the clone -- and they never get cleaned up. While they don't prevent anyone else from using the machine, they do sit around wasting resources, and potentially causing a denial of service…

("figured out bugs" should read as "figured out workarounds")

Re: Maturity

#53

Post by enraged_camel »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #8

I was sucked in by Gitlab's feature list and marketing. But holy shit so many things are half assed and so many features are buggy and broken. Like their wikis would sometimes just straight up delete text and their webhooks would break images. I started a bunch of issues but they really have no chance of getting fixed anytime soon. Just shows how different your impression of something is after actually using it.

My impression is the opposite. Compared to Github, Gitlab is simply phenomenal, especially the UX. It's honestly one of the few pieces of software that I truly enjoy using every day.

Re: Maturity

#54

Post by flocial »

joshlambert wrote: post #51
flocial wrote: post #34

Gitlab is a great product for self-hosting a GitHub-like service and I'm grateful for its existence. Having said that, I'm not a big fan of their bait and switch approach to feature creep. Every time I try to update our GL I end up in a world of hurt. No straight upgrade path when you skip major-ish releases. I end up wasting a day sifting through cryptic issues and docs from vague error messages. Suddenly can't comm…

Hi, I'm a PM for our linux packages. I'd love to learn more about the cryptic issues and vague errors mention. We've put a lot of effort towards making the upgrades as painless as possible, with few surprises. One way we've achieved this is by requiring users to update to the last minor version, before making the jump to the next major version, as you note. The reason for doing this, is that we add a lot of validatio…

It was a while ago but the upgrade was from 9 to 11. The first problem was the error message didn't give me a simple command to go step wise through the upgrade like:

---- Please upgrade to the next GitLab version before trying to upgrade to the latest. The command for upgrading to a previous version is as follows:

sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce=10.8.7-ce.0 -V

See the url below for available releases:

----

Going from 10 to 11 was even more difficult because the gitlab.rb file format changed and I was missing required information that was not apparent from the error messages after running "gitlab-ctl reconfigure" (I think the error was Chef related but my memory is hazy, below are the GitLab issues that finally provided a hint). This wouldn't be so bad if my GitLab 10 instance was working but after going from 9 to 10, all I got was a blank page so at this point I had no choice but to go all the way.

After finally replacing the gitlab.rb file with the template and adding back info from the old file, I was able to finally run reconfigure and update as needed. Of course, I was soon alerted by coworkers that their commits were suddenly being blocked for failing a commit pipeline. Overall it was not a fun experience and I'd rather not upgrade GL unless I have to but I also don't want to skip versions if I have to repeat the hellish upgrade process by manually babying the upgrade.

Issues referenced: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/3610 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/46219 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/2153

Re: Maturity

#55

Post by waltera »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #8

I was sucked in by Gitlab's feature list and marketing. But holy shit so many things are half assed and so many features are buggy and broken. Like their wikis would sometimes just straight up delete text and their webhooks would break images. I started a bunch of issues but they really have no chance of getting fixed anytime soon. Just shows how different your impression of something is after actually using it.

We had a very similar experience with Gitlab too.

Our teams evaluated Gitlab for a year before completely migrating away from it (to Github Enterprise for SCM, Confluence for wiki, YouTrack for issues and TeamCity for CI).

Not a single team (out of 20) was happy with the overall performance (and especially the performance of code search).

As far as wiki is concerned, Confluence's UI has its own share of issues, even after their recent overhaul, but all in all it is much better product. YouTrack and TeamCity are simply much more polished & stable products and are (in our experience) easier to administer than the competing offerings from Gitlab.

Re: Maturity

#56

Post by pritianka »

colechristensen wrote: post #46
pritianka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there! I hear what you are saying especially if you are considering recommending the full single application. As our maturity model shares, we are better at some stages than others. So I would share parts of the product that really work for you all the time and let people experience for themselves.

If I could have GitLab Mature Edition that was restricted to the high quality more complete parts, it would go a long way. Otherwise shipping a product where I have to sell the good parts and hand-wave the rest as incomplete -- it makes the product much less appealing.

Hah, I love the "GitLab Mature Edition" idea!

Re: Maturity

#57

Post by sooheon »

sytse wrote: post #32
Operyl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As seen in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/4029 , a few people did show frustration, and why. And then began the never ending push back after push back.

I agree this issue hasn't been prioritized as high as it should. I meant to indicate that with "This bug took too long to fix." but I should have said it took to long to schedule. We concluded the same internally recently and hence the focus on bugs and wider community contributions in 12.4. We overly focussed on getting the DAG https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/ and Merge Trains https://docs.gitla…

Not a GitLab user, but I'm deeply impressed with your openness in handling issues on this thread.

Re: Maturity

#58

Post by Operyl »

sooheon wrote: post #57
sytse wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this issue hasn't been prioritized as high as it should. I meant to indicate that with "This bug took too long to fix." but I should have said it took to long to schedule. We concluded the same internally recently and hence the focus on bugs and wider community contributions in 12.4. We overly focussed on getting the DAG https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/directed_acyclic_graph/ and Merge Trains https://docs.gitla…

Not a GitLab user, but I'm deeply impressed with your openness in handling issues on this thread.

I've always appreciated how open he is, I just wish it never came down to having to flag him down on Hacker News to get something properly fixed (although, I appreciate that is still something I can do).

Re: Maturity

#59

Post by CameronNemo »

colechristensen wrote: post #46
pritianka wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there! I hear what you are saying especially if you are considering recommending the full single application. As our maturity model shares, we are better at some stages than others. So I would share parts of the product that really work for you all the time and let people experience for themselves.

If I could have GitLab Mature Edition that was restricted to the high quality more complete parts, it would go a long way. Otherwise shipping a product where I have to sell the good parts and hand-wave the rest as incomplete -- it makes the product much less appealing.

Or perhaps mask certain immature and confusing features behind an admin setting. Allow the instance admin to be more granular about how they work.

Re: Maturity

#60

Post by Aeolun »

mikepurvis wrote: post #29
sytse wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wiki is GitLab should not delete text, please file a bug if you had dataloss. The current state of the wiki isn't great but we're also not seeing a lot of people care about it. Many people are switching to static websites. Therefore we're not investing to get the wiki better than the current state of a half circle. BTW We've recently measured experience baselines in GitLab and we agree we still have a lot of work…

Perhaps an argument for focusing on doing a few things well? I work for a GitLab shop, but we don't use the bugtracker (Jira) or wiki (Confluence), we mostly don't use the CI (Jenkins is just more flexible), and we definitely don't use the container stuff. We currently do use the review workflow but at various points have considered moving to a different tool for that as well. So yeah, we would have been fine with a…

> supplying first class integration points and supported plugins for other best-in-class tools

If they did this I wouldn’t want to use it any more. The whole point of Gitlab is that it does everything. To prevent the need for any integrations.

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