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

111–120 of 325 posts

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

#111

Post by sytse »

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…

We would love to help you to host VideoLAN on a on-premises GitLab instance. Thanks for raising the issues you did.

1. Our EE version has the function share project with other groups http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/share_projects_with_other_... If this is essential for you we'll give you a free lifetime license for GitLab EE.

2. You can add custom labels on issues and the searches can be stored in urls that you can bookmark and use in links. You might have considered this already and need more functionality. Maybe it is best to discuss this in an issue so I created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10712 Please add there what you need in addition to the labels functionality. We addressed the long list of items raised in the original Google Doc letter below the signatures in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8938#improvem... The first item under improvements details our reponse to that question.

3. In GitLab you can give each user a fixed number of new projects. That should prevent people from storing a excessive amount of repo's. But feel free to make a feature request to limit people to only forks. As other replies have indicated that still allows people to work around it but at least the intention will be clear.

4. A custom landing page and logo is an EE feature http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/customization/branded_login_page.ht... We think this is more relevant for larger organizations so we're comfortable for having it as EE only at the moment. As mentioned under 1. we're open to offering you (and other open source projects considering self-hosting) a lifetime EE license.

I'll be in the comments today (just woke up in SF). You and any other open source project can always reach me at sytse@ company domain to get assistance or claim the EE license.

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

#113

Post by castell »

dingo_bat wrote: post #81
shocks wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They run on Microsoft Azure. What does this have to do with anything? Are you suggesting that service run on Microsoft Azure are not stable?

Most people associate a lack of reliability with anything Microsoft-related. Although I do not think that is the cause of Gitlab's problems.

Reading their Twitter status messages. Microsoft sponsored Azure for Gitlab. Between Oct and Dec they were on Azure, and they had major issues with the Azure platform, pretty unreliable for their use case. Gitlab switched to IBM Softlayer because of that experience. Read yourself: https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/17

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

#114

Post by nearlythere »

nik736 wrote: post #49
nearlythere wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wm in wm_web refers to "wordmark" - looks like it's not displaying correctly in your browser! which one?

Safari 9

Thanks! That's helpful. I posted a bug report https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/513

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

#115

Post by sytse »

bad_user wrote: post #89
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…

We've been using GitLab CE internally in our organization for more than a year. We needed an on-premises solution because of the company's policy. The experience has been great thus far. On EE, there's nothing that we miss from the EE version, although we might end up going with EE after the team will grow. We also have dedicated dev-ops, otherwise having support for it would sounds good. And the pricing for EE if yo…

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm happy to hear that in your case the feature tradeoff we made between CE and EE worked out.

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

#116

Post by pekk »

mahouse wrote: post #58
J_Darnley wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Listening to the developers?

A migration to Gitlab. GitHub would have to start fucking the developers asses in a serious and violent way for them to move to another place, the same way that the SourceForge -> GitHub move was done.

Maybe you didn't notice, but this already happened for some projects.

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

#117

Post by georgefrick »

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…

Can you comment more on why a hobbyist should not need their own repo? If I'm doing SaaS for everything, my monthly costs start to go up. I've found it is far cheaper, and far (way!) more educational to take an extra box out of the basement and install Ubuntu/GitLab/Node/Java/Apache/Etc. I have to pay for internet either way, and the electricity cost is nowhere near the cost of having multiple Saas?

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

#118

Post by pekk »

VeilEm wrote: post #99
aaviran wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a quite disappointed user of Gitlab (due to issues raised here, e,g, CE vs EE and the Ruby infrastructure), has anyone had experience with both? I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? I consider this an anti-feature, but this might be highly opinionated.

> I understand that Phabricator is a more "complete" solution, but how do they compare in the core features that they both share? I think GitHub is prettier, but having tasks separate from repos and having tasks be as sophisticated as they are in Phabricator and having such a better pull requests system, it doesn't matter? GitHub has to dumb down the user interface on their product to appeal to the least common denom…

As a user of a self-hosted web service, how it's written affects details about the pain of deployment and administration. How it's written also affects whether it has satisfactory performance and how many nasty security problems are waiting to be discovered.

Not everyone can afford to be completely blase about their source control system going down or getting defaced.

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

#119

Post by drewcrawford »

DouweM wrote: post #98
drewcrawford wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you use webhooks on GitHub? That would actually be pretty easy to implement, Bingo. Full implementation, in Bash: http://faq.sealedabstract.com/gitlab_mirror/ > What are you afraid of? Mostly, that you'll get bought by the likes of Oracle. In spite of my quibbles about CE features, I think you're doing a (mostly) fine job of CE right now. But your acquirer will see CE as a cost center (there's no revenue) and wi…

All right, I see where you're coming from. I think any eventual GitLab acquirer would be mad to screw up _our_ winning open core formula, but I'm not in a position to tell the future or make any promises. I've asked our CEO Sid (you know, the "GitLab CEO here" guy) to chime in.

> I think any eventual GitLab acquirer would be mad to screw up _our_ winning open core formula

Understand, I want to believe. I want to live in a world where open core works at VC scale and over long timeframes. I'd love to run all my own projects that way, if it was possible. And who knows, maybe you will be the people to do it where everybody else failed.

It's just the available evidence suggests I don't live in that world. In my world, you have to pay money for things if you want them to last. I'd like to pay you money, but you don't want it, and that's weird.

Look at it from my POV. GitLab isn't "just" another tool for me, it's my homepage. I'm in there hours every day. I trust it to store my life's work. That's amazing! People literally kill to get that deeply embedded into their customers lives. But it's also a huge responsibility. You and I are in the honeymoon period right now, but when times get tough and we have 3 kids and a mortgage, it's going to get real.

You may not be in a position to speculate that far out, but I have to. I'm still going to need this product in five years. You might not need me.

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

#120

Post by sytse »

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…

I'm sorry to hear you're not satisfied with GitLab and I would love to know more.

1. What things did you have to tweak?

2. Did you try our Omnibus packages for upgrades? It should be just apt-get upgrade https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152

3. What features of EE belong in CE in your opinion?

Post reply on HN