
GitLab 8.13 Released with Multiple Issue Boards and Merge Conflict Editor - Smibu
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/22/gitlab-8-13-released/
======
sslalready
Speaking of UX, would you consider improving the look of Markdown rendered
text (usually _README.md_ ) in the repo browser? On GitHub they look great and
it's a pleasure reading Markdown formatted text there. In GitLab it's however
not very appealing. Headers, spacing between them and paragraphs doesn't look
very good IMO.

Coming from a previous job where we used GitHub and TeamCity, something I miss
with GitLab is the ability to create a pipeline that's not connected to a
specific Git branch. I'd like to be able to create a pipeline that can be
triggered manually, without first having to create a dummy branch to put a
_.gitlab-ci.yml_ there. Is that something that's on your roadmap?

~~~
foepys
I find the whole design of GitLab not appealing to my eye. The recent redesign
was a step in the right direction but I am still missing visible separators
(e.g. boxes, lines, colored background) between/around areas for example on
the page of an issue.

~~~
aeharding
I have to agree. When I first started using Gitlab, it was quite jarring.

I'm much more happy with Gitlab's UI now that I've spent a lot of time with
it. At least I don't fight with the interface after becoming familiar with it
(it's no iTunes).

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jobvandervoort
Another release we're very proud of. Much of the work this release we spent on
improving our idea to production flow and demos [0], things that'll trickly in
over the coming releases.

We're also focusing on some longer-term improvements in UX [1], and are happy
to ship some nice iterations with issue boards and merge conflict resolution.

Lastly, we're slowly building up review apps, which allow you to see/play
with/test your changes running in a live environment. A very powerful concept
and one we hope we can bring to everyone.

As always, we're here for any questions.

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/05/continuous-
integration-d...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/05/continuous-integration-
delivery-and-deployment-with-gitlab/#from-idea-to-production-with-gitlab)

[1]: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/19/gitlab-ux-
update/](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/10/19/gitlab-ux-update/)

~~~
travisby
review apps are super exciting! That's the exact kind of interface I've been
hoping for. I really hope it's available like the commit status api is (we use
that for posting our custom CI builds). We currently have our own review app
system at our company (and no hopes of switching to gitlab ci in the future -
unfortunately :( ), but it'd be amazing if we could tie into it the same way
we do for CI -- just "here's the link, it built succesfully!" would be a huge
improvement to our workflow. Currently we treat it as a separate build
(posting to status, with the url being the review app). Then because the URL
didn't seem very visible on gitlab, we post it in the merge request too. Not
nearly as nice as this would be!

~~~
sytse
Review apps are 'just another GitLab CI job'. But you can now set an external
url in every environment. Every review app will have an environment create for
it and you can add the URL there. I'm not sure the external url is in the API
yet, but if not it is a question of time.

~~~
travisby
Thank you so much! That's amazing to hear. I think that will work for us. And
as always, thank you for being one of the most outward communicating CEOs!

~~~
sytse
My pleasure!

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notsrg
I am continuously blown away how quickly Gitlab is pushing out releases. It's
been amazing to see the product grow over the years.

~~~
sytse
Thanks, glad to hear that! To see where we're going the rest of the year
please see our vision demo [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/vision-
demo/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/vision-demo/)

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vikeri
Having a lot of issues with our merge requests never merging and just spinning
forever.[1] Would like Gitlab to put a little more focus on those kinds of
dealbreaker issues. Would hate to give up such a great product because of
things like that.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/2995](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2995)

~~~
sytse
Thanks for posting, I mentioned one of our issue triage specialists in the
issue.

~~~
vikeri
Great! Responses like these really make me like you guys :)

~~~
mattl
I followed up with you on the issue :)

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sotojuan
Since the GitLab folks hang around here... any chance you'll let us force a
redirect to HTTPS for GitLab pages with custom domains? Loving GitLab so far
though!

~~~
sytse
Our documentation is on [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/11/tutorial-
securing-your-g...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/11/tutorial-securing-
your-gitlab-pages-with-tls-and-letsencrypt/) but if I understand correctly we
allow https but don't enforce it? That sounds like a great idea, I created an
issue in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/1147](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/1147)

------
antarrah
Please fix the speed. Even your gifs are slow.

~~~
jobvandervoort
We're working hard on making GitLab.com faster (where I also made the gifs)
[0]. If you're running your own instance, it should be fast.

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues/59](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues/59)

~~~
antarrah
Yeah, a few folks mentioned the hosted version is fine. However, I am not
interested in hosting my own instance. That's said, I don't mind paying a
small monthly fee if it means getting a faster cloud service on less crowded
servers.

~~~
haynes
In that case [https://githost.io/](https://githost.io/) might be interesting
for you. private managed instance of gitlab.

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kkdevenda
We deployed GitLab just a few weeks ago in our setup and we can already see
its impact on our development process.

Sometimes GitLab becomes extremely slow. A few days ago it became so slow that
we had to check what was wrong and we found that a process named "bundle"
taking up too mach memory and CPU. As we do not have a lot of experience with
GitLab we could not figure out the reason behind "bundle" process eating up
memory and CPU and therefore we tried restarting GitLab and everything was
fine again.

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po1nter
If only they could include sub-tasks it would be perfect for our team.

------
ieatkittens
> New Issue from the Issue Board

Finally. I missed this so much. Loving the work GitLab is putting in to their
product.

Now, if only I could rearrange backlog items.

~~~
jobvandervoort
I'm thinking we're going to do this as the next change to the issue boards,
before anything else [0]. I'm aware everyone wants this and it makes total
sense.

[0]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/21264](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21264)

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hcrisp
Does this release also support rendering Jupyter notebooks like github does?

~~~
jobvandervoort
I'm actually not sure if we do. Can you share me a link to an example? Seems
like something very GitLab-esque to support.

~~~
hcrisp
Looks like the issue [0] had a milestone of 8.13 but it is still open. So, it
didn't make the release?

[0] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/2508](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2508)

~~~
sytse
It didn't make it, I've asked our VP of Product to assign a new milestone.

------
BaconJuice
Would it be possible to make the Board view default view when going into
issues via some option?

~~~
sytse
We already have some default views that you can set, feel free to create a
feature proposal to add one for this.

------
rasz_pl
not impressed with Merge Conflict Editor, would be a lot better as visual diff
with two versions next to each other (ala meld), not to mention arrow buttons
to quickly pick version without touching text.

------
kevinsd
And squash merge is still an ee-only (paid-only) feature ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
liquidise
I do not understand the appeal of squashed merges. The only pro i know of is
the ease of reverting a merge. On the cons side: you obfuscate an entire
branch into a single commit, effectively making git-bisect useless.
Furthermore, if multiple people collaborate on a branch, all code blames to
one person, quite literally rewriting the code history.

~~~
nhumrich
Its designed more for people who do master-based development and do a PR per
commit. (But might add a couple commits fixing the PR)

