
Gitlab 11.8 Released - bjoko
https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/22/gitlab-11-8-released/
======
StevePerkins
You know, there was a thread the other day about a new release announcement
for some IDE. It was quickly removed, on grounds that the Hacker News FAQ says
you shouldn't repost something " _If a story has had significant attention in
the last year or so_ ".

I remember thinking that it was a real stretch to interpret different release
announcements, separated by months, as "duplicate" posts. But this was coming
from dang himself, so I guess that's the authoritative view.

Just pointing out that Gitlab operates on a more or less monthly release
cadence. Pretty much every release gets an announcement thread on HN's front-
page for the full day. And usually there's a separate front-page thread or two
in between, to announce stuff in upcoming releases. I've never once seen any
of this removed, or even questioned.

~~~
yutghgh
(Note: obviously my opinion, not the actual rules)

I do think the rule should be based on the content of the release rather than
the timing. If the software contains major new features every month that could
be relevant to the HN audience I see no reason to remove the post, it's _new_
information being posted on Hacker _News_. (I haven't seen the referenced IDE
update post so I don't have an opinion on it either way.)

~~~
markdog12
Yeah, I think GitLab in particular is a really interesting product that
competes in a crucial space for devs. In addition, they've committed and stuck
with monthly releases, with new features/improvements, so that's why it's
posted so much. I love the monthly releases though.

------
sytse
Overview of the three main improvements in this release:

1\. JavaScript coverage in SAST

GitLab Static Application Security Testing (SAST) scans source code and helps
to detect potential security vulnerabilities early in the pipeline. In 11.8,
we've added SAST support for JavaScript, building on top of our existing
node.js support. Now any JavaScript file can be scanned, like static scripts
and HTML. A vital practice in DevSecOps is to scan code changes with each
commit, and with this change, we're covering one of the most popular web
languages, helping you to find JavaScript risks as early as possible.

2\. GitLab Pages for subgroups and templates

GitLab Pages got a whole lot better this release, with two key improvements.
First, we have introduced GitLab Pages support for projects in subgroups,
enabling these projects to easily publish content to the web. GitLab 11.8 also
bundles our most popular templates for Pages, so users can get started with
just a single click.

3\. Error Tracking with Sentry

Application errors provide important insight into the health of your
application, and can help detect problems without waiting for users to report
them. GitLab 11.8 can now display the most recent errors directly within the
project, making them easier and quicker to find and take action on.

------
Jnr
Gitlab is great and I have used it for years but I recently switched to Gogs
for self hosted repositories because it is much faster, easier to set up and
walk in a park to maintain. It doesn't have all the features (bloat) that
Gitlab has but it can probably satisfy >95% of git users.

~~~
Suri_GitLab
Hello! Since GitLab is a single application that covers the entire software
development lifecycle, we're a bit "bigger" than Gogs, which only tackles SCM.
We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources, including forming a team to
specialize in this area, and we're really grateful for your feedback. :)

~~~
chmln
> We have a plan to make GitLab use less resources

I used to use gitlab at work daily and releases would mention how performance
is being tackled consistently. However, I have not seen any large improvements
at all, suggesting that there is an impenetrable wall made of the underlying
technologies.

Gitlab is based primarily on Ruby-on-Rails, which doesn't particularly shine
with neither memory usage nor performance. What sort of effort would even
reduce the use of resources significantly, short of a rewrite?

~~~
sytse
A big thing we're looking at to reduce memory is making the ruby code multi-
threaded. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/3592](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3592)

~~~
aidos
Where is the bottleneck? I’m not massively familar with Ruby, but I’m assuming
the underlying language isn’t the problem and it’s more to do with the general
architecture?

~~~
sytse
We already have it working in development. We're cautious because last time we
enabled it in production we got a lot of memory usage and runtime errors. I
think the problems are that the native extensions from some dependencies are
not multi-threading safe but I might be wrong.

------
bbeausej
I really like the update pace of Gitlab. Our teams are all based on an on-prem
EE (low tier) and it's been a pleasure to receive a steady stream of valuable
updates.

Passing on all the good things that Gitlab does for us already; I _really_
wish gitlab would push to make more of the Project Management features
accessible to the lower tiers (maybe even CE). Epics and Roadmaps linked to
Gitlab's SCM and DevOps features would be a _real_ contender to
JIRA/Confluence in the market but it's currently hidden behind a very steep
~100$/m "ultimate" plan.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for your comment. Glad to hear you like the update pace. Regarding
epics we're considering moving them to a more affordable plan while keeping
the roadmap in Ultimate. But we're not close to a decision.

~~~
bbeausej
Thanks for the update! I really think there's a huge opportunity of growth
there that goes beyond SCM/DevOps for medium sized teams.

------
laktak
I like and use Gitlab, I just wish they would call it PR instead of merge
request.

~~~
williamchia
Funny thing, when I joined the team at GitLab over a year ago I was really
annoyed by this since I'd been using PR for the better part of a decade. Now
I'm so used to saying MR that PR sounds very strange. All in all, "merge
request" is a more accurate term and no one ever gets confused about it like
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-
pu...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21657430/why-is-a-git-pull-request-
not-called-a-push-request) I think it would be great if other tools just
called it an MR as that seems to be the term that is easier to understand.

~~~
chappi42
After joining you got brainwashed of course ;-)) It's a minor detail but it's
still irritating for me that it doesn't have the same name as in Github. More
accurate or not, but Github was first.

~~~
chinhodado
MR is much easier to explain to people who are not familiar with git than PR.
Everyone who has used at least one version control system knows what merge is,
whereas pull is a much less clear term.

------
orware
Congrats on the new release!

Since GitLab for Education was announced I've been trying to get our college
signed up for it, but it's been difficult so I was hoping I might be able to
share some GitLab for Education Requests:

Working in a community college it's been really tricky to get the agreement
signed for us to take advantage of this at all (that's more of an issue with
the way we work in particular, but I just wanted to throw it out there that it
would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online without
needing to wait and get an agreement signed because for example our president
doesn't want to do an esignature so that means sending it over to their office
for signature, waiting a long while, getting it back, and then finding out our
deadline passed and haven't to try it all over again so if that process could
be changed, or better yet removed, that would be great).

Related to the GitLab for Education license limitations...I originally though
the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT Department staff as well,
but it definitely seems to be limited to just Faculty/Staff type usage which
ends up being a bummer for us since now I can't promote it anymore internally
with us a free option we can sign up for anymore and other ideas I was
potentially thinking of (the Group Issue Boards seemed like it could
potentially be a nice way to organize Kanban Boards across the college and
make it so that staff from other areas outside of IT could make use of Kanban
Boards too...we've been using Kanboard inside of IT for a few years now, but
haven't made a strong push to have other departments use it). In terms of
affordability, that would limit us to licensing GitLab primarily for IT stuff
only + for 10 users that's already going to be a pretty big cost for our small
college / IT department.

Lastly, I know there's Wiki functionality and GitLab Pages already and that
can be used for documentation to a degree, but is there any work towards
building/including some sort of Confluence alternative into GitLab as well?

Right now we'd like start using some sort of nice, comprehensive documentation
option, but I'm not really sold on Confluence at the moment. Admittedly, right
now with the info about us needing to license GitLab for our IT department
staff as well being fairly new to me that's thrown the whole idea of using
GitLab out the window (almost), but the lack of a Confluence option built-in
to GitLab would be another potential blocker for us (I do like the idea of
having everything all under one system if possible to simplify usage for us).

tldr: If you can make edu licensing completely free (for staff too) and simple
to use/signup for (without an agreement needing to be signed), plus add a
Confluence alternative that would be awesome!

~~~
btasovac
Thank you for the detailed feedback! We love to hear that we're doing
something well, but also like to discuss if there is something that can be
improved.

> It would be nice if we could sign up for the licenses completely online
> without needing to wait and get an agreement signed

That sounds reasonable, and it doesn't seem to be an issue only with your
institution. We already have an issue for automating the application process
for the educational license. [1] The proposed solution would resolve all
concerns described here.

> I originally though the Education licensing would cover usage for our IT
> Department staff as well

The primary goal of this program is to help students catch up with the latest
technology in software development as early as possible, and we think that we
managed to do this with the current setup. However, we would love to discuss
other options regarding this program's limitations. Please open an issue [2] -
we would love to hear your suggestions.

> Is there any work towards building/including some sort of Confluence
> alternative

Can you please tell us more about what part of Confluence do you think is
missing in GitLab? You can use this page as a reference - there are all stages
of development that are covered by GitLab. [3]

Thank you again on your feedback, it is greatly appreciated.

[1] - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-
relations/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-
relations/education-program/general/issues/3)

[2] - [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-
relations/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/community-
relations/education-program/general/issues/)

[3] - [https://about.gitlab.com/product/](https://about.gitlab.com/product/)

~~~
orware
Thanks for the reply, I'll look into putting in an official issue request for
it in [2] you shared but just to add on a bit...on our end we're really not
developer oriented at all (I've put up a VisualSVN server quite a few years
back and then put up a Gogs server about 3 years ago) and I'm pretty much the
only person that uses it.

Our CS offerings are pretty minimal so even though I would love to see usage
expanded there as well (teaching/using Git for instruction) the reality is it
would be lucky if 50 students made use of Git during a given schoolyear since
the offerings are that limited right now (and we don't generally get a lot of
signups for those classes). It'd be awesome to expand our program and also
create some sort of tie-in with Silicon Valley companies somehow (we're a
community college in Southern California in a rural community so job
opportunities for tech locally are really slim...so unless we built some sort
of partnership for remote opportunities where people could stay local and have
a good remote job people basically have to leave to other communities in
different parts of the state to get work).

So going back to the staff side...I'm just trying to get our own IT staff
onboard with using Git and hopefully start integrating more DevOps type things
into our workflow, but it's difficult when you don't have the right tools
available (or there's a pretty big cost to them). For example, I love the idea
of us starting to create private containers but we need a container registry
to do that and that's something GitLab could help us out with. The other main
thing is the issue boards which I think we'd be able to make good use out of
as well, but can't really test out those ideas at the present moment easily.

For Confluence, I don't have a ton of experience with it...the main thing is
that at least one of the other community colleges that's a bit of a tech
leader in the state is using it for their documentation stuff and the state's
CCC Tech Center is using it too so that makes folks think it's the best
solution to try out. To be honest right now though we're not doing a great job
on documentation currently, even though we have a lot of other "low-hanging
fruit" type options to be able to try out and just document things currently
if we really wanted to do so (so what I'm saying here is that I don't think
getting/implementing Confluence would actually solve our documentation issues
here...but it would be nice if GitLab had a piece that you could point at as
equivalent to Confluence that way people could be more comfortable with using
it as a whole solution, rather than looking at that one capability as
"missing" and discarding the entire solution because of it).

A response shared by the other college using it mentioned the following use
cases that they used Confluence for:

\- Team Project Sites District-wide (new and ongoing software implementations)
\- “Bookshelf” Searchable district-wide software documentation library
(Banner, Onbase, DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) \- Technology “Knowledge Base” –
district-wide searchable problem/resolution, FAQ \- District IT Policies and
Documentation \- Development Team Private Documentation (Banner, Onbase,
DegreeWorks, Argos, etc.) \- Operations IT Team Private Documentation \- And
more!

In terms of web application development, I'm the only staff member really
doing that currently...pretty much all the rest of our "development" work
consists of our analysts writing database queries, with the occasional
database view/procedure being written, but that's the team that I'd like to
have to start using version control a bit.

Our Ops side of the house still needs a lot of work to get into the "DevOps"
mindset, and I've been limited in the stuff that I can try out and experiment
with as well (e.g. I've wanted to experiment more with Docker, but since we're
a Hyper-V shop primarily understanding Microsoft's support of Docker has taken
some time...plus moving into production is another stage, etc. and I basically
have to sort out those new approaches on my own).

