
Xfce switches to GitLab - reddotX
https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2020/04/30/xfce-switches-to-gitlab/
======
scrollaway
Great news :) We switched to Gitlab at Arch Linux recently as well:
[https://gitlab.archlinux.org/](https://gitlab.archlinux.org/) (well, we're
still migrating projects and users, it's a long process)

~~~
smitty1e
Arch and Xfce are a peanut-butter-and-chocolate combination of rock solid
performance, flexibility, and minimal fuss.

~~~
varbhat
.

~~~
rxhernandez
This past year, on my Thinkpad P50, I've switched between Ubuntu, Fedora, and
Arch; Arch has by far been the least buggy. With Ubuntu, things would go
haywire when docking/undocking. With Fedora, putting it to sleep was always a
risk because after putting it to sleep I would sometimes I would open up my
laptop to a black screen that I couldn't recover from. I was fine with that
and just wouldn't put my laptop to sleep but eventually I started using Zoom
and Fedora would crash within an hour and a half of using it. This pushed me
over the edge to wipe my laptop and install Arch; I'm really glad I did.

I still have an issue where the system is not detecting when my laptop lid
closing but at least it's not crashing every day or two.

~~~
carlhjerpe
This fragmentation between what works on what dists makes me sad.
Philosophically I've always admired BSD for the consistency, considering how
there's just 3-ish of them, realistically I'm a Manjaro user as I don't have
enough Linux-fu to set Arch up.

~~~
Talanes
Honestly you don't need any particular skills to install Arch. Just time and
access to the instructions. It's a neat way to spend an afternoon once, but I
just switched to Manjaro too on future installations,

~~~
ta17711771
I loved Arch until I figured out their security patch intervals are like a
week behind upstream..

~~~
Foxboron
That is sadly what you get with an non-commercial all-volunteer distribution.
We only have so much time on our hands and Security Team members are
productive members of the community holding several roles.

More contributors are always needed and welcome.

------
pcx
Great to see GitLab gain momentum in FOSS. It's a great fit for small teams
too, it's easy to setup and keep updated. It's more important than ever to
help GitLab gain adoption with GitHub making it free for private repos. I love
GitHub as much as any developer, but I believe having a free, open alternative
to it is important.

I wish GitLab would improve their free-version of Merge Request reviews
though, Github's is much much better right now.

~~~
mumblemumble
I'd love to hear more about what you dislike about merge request reviews. At
work we've been talking about migrating looking for alternatives to GitHub
over dissatisfaction with its code review interface, and, of course, GitLab is
on the list of ones to check out.

~~~
tardyp
Ability to review diff between two versions of PR is a great missing feature
in GitHub. When dealing with large changes, GitLab review flow is IMHO easier
for reviewer. Gitlab store each push of a MR branch as different version (as
hidden refs), which make the feature possible. In GH, you force push a branch,
you loose the old code for good, so reviewer has to remember why he did that
comment before to see if it is still relevant.

~~~
tobylane
They added this (reference and comparison to old heads of a PR) at about the
start of the year.

~~~
tardyp
Couldn't find the feature today when doing a large review. Do you have to
enable it somewhere?

~~~
mumblemumble
In the top left, there should be a "changes from..." drop down menu that will
let you choose which commits you want to view. The default is "changes from
all commits".

If you're on GitHub Enterprise, availability will depend on the last time your
company has installed updates.

~~~
tardyp
That is not the same feature. It requires you to always add your fix in a new
commit add opposed to amending the commits and maintain a clear purposed
commit list.

~~~
mumblemumble
I think the more official Git way of doing it would be to collect all the
changes in separate commits, and then squash merge them at the end of the code
review.

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fermienrico
I find Gitlab UI quite a bit bloated and slow compared to Github. They have
some amazing features but I can't get past how many (2-5 seconds) to load a
page and sometimes upto 10 seconds (analytics). I hope that's being addressed
in future. Usually, I spend at least 2 hours on Github in a given day - and
probably access the website about 50 times a day or more. These UI issues add
up tremendously.

~~~
emilycook
We do have a performance team who is working on continuously improving the
speed, so hopefully that is improved in the future!
[https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/performance/)

~~~
fermienrico
Hi Emily, can you guys do an upper limit, say maximum 1.5 seconds load time
for any page? Ruthelessly disapprove features unless it meets this spec time.

When a website or service becomes too slow, it is on its way to an impending
death. Then people wonder why some service fell apart? Put users and usability
first and foremost before features.

------
rvz
Fantastic news for Xfce and for Gitlab self-hosted software. While already
being self-hosted using cgit, this sounds like a sensible move for Xfce
instead of using GitHub. They recently migrated their CI to Gitlab CI with
fosshost [0].

Great news for open source software hosting.

[0] [https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2020/05/10/gitlab-ci-is-
up-...](https://simon.shimmerproject.org/2020/05/10/gitlab-ci-is-up-and-
running/)

------
KarlKemp
I'll be forever grateful for what GitHub has done for the OSS community.
People today don't remember what they replaced, namely Sourceforge and various
home-grown tools of various levels of dysfunction.

Would anyone doubt that open source contributions, and individual contributers
even more so, have grown by an order of magnitude or more in the last decade
or so? And that GitHub's process improvements and standardisation were the
major factor in this?

It used to be, you had to mail patches to some mailing list, with each
projects having their own set of arcane rules, sometimes written and sometimes
informal, but always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale
organisations devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole
remaining source of the old timer's power differential.

Or at least that's how it seemed to me, for I never felt courageous enough to
try.

These days, I fire off smaller contributions several times a week, and
contribute some medium-sized feature once or twice a year.

Meanwhile, the most impressive thing about GitLab keeps being this strange
quirk of them, that among all the companies I know, they are closest to being
a total clone of an existing product. Or at least they were in the beginning,
when their CSS still had ".gh-wide-3" class names.

Yet despite this, or maybe because of it, they are also the only company that
_repeatedly_ lorded it over their competitor when they came late to
implementing some minor feature. Seriously: I noticed it the first time
because it's a level of pettiness not usually seen. And since then, there have
been three or four more instances.

~~~
astrobe_
> [...] always enforced with that very special enthusiasm stale organisations
> devote to policing arbitrary norms because that's the sole remaining source
> of the old timer's power differential. Or at least that's how it seemed to
> me, for I never felt courageous enough to try.

Why the same people that seem afraid of email, can however gratuitously accuse
others of being on an ego trip on a public forum, I wonder.

------
x32n23nr
Not strictly related, but every time I see projects moving to Gitlab it makes
me happy. GitHub certainly has been adding some very sweet features, a lot of
great integrations - but with each one you lock yourself in. We cannot afford
another monopoly.

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new_realist
I wish GitLab had a static site component. Even browsing simple files in a
repository is way too slow. Everything is dynamic and laggy.

~~~
mcintyre1994
If you mean an equivalent of Github pages - they do :)
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/)

~~~
andai
I think GP means the UI is slow.

~~~
techntoke
Gitea seems much faster. There are plenty of CI platforms that integrate
nicely into Git as well without all the bloat.

------
rakoo
Is there any resource somewhere explaining why they migrated away from
gitolite ? Not trying to sound negative, I'm just interested in the reasoning
behind and see what really differentiates the two in this kind of usage.

~~~
bsdubernerd
My first hot guess would be: "issues".

Gitolite is just managing raw git repositories. I'm using gitolite for
personal (read: non-public) projects, and I wouldn't want to use anything
else. I love how minimal it is, and the way it works.

However, how do you manage issues? Bugzilla is, IMHO, horrible. You can
replace it with something much more lean, such as Mantis, but you still lack
true integration with the repository (ie: knowing when a bug has been closed
and which versions/branches it was dealt with).

This is something I struggle with even when working alone on a simple project.
I've used both sd (simple defects) and bugs-everywhere, however it seems that
development on these has pretty much stalled, which is A Great Shame. I keep
using "be" in these cases.

However as soon as you have 2-3 devs, it's easier to fire up something like
gitlab and have all features such as reviews/CI in a single shot than having
to setup these separately.

~~~
buovjaga
Bugzilla is still superior to GitLab/-Hub style issues, at least for bigger
projects. Especially regarding search queries. Saying this from experience
working in LibreOffice QA. Sadly upstream Bugzilla has been deprived of all
the Mozilla-developed goodness for years, but finally the harmonisation is
being wrapped up: [https://dylan.hardison.net/2020/02/09/bugzilla-project-
updat...](https://dylan.hardison.net/2020/02/09/bugzilla-project-
updates-2020/)

~~~
bsdubernerd
I'm pretty fond of Mantis, as mentioned, but I've seen effective usage of both
github/lab issues with good usage of labels and a little bit automation. Since
_much_ more automation is required to integrate even a lean bugtracker into
your source, I cannot recommend using a separate bugtracker unless you have an
extremely good reason for it.

Factor in that ease of reporting both for you and for your users should be in
the top #3 reasons for using a specific bug tracker.

Bugzilla IMHO only works as an internal-only tracker for developers or testers
directly involved with the code and decent overview/discipline of the triaging
process.

------
judge2020
> Please poke us on IRC or the mailinglist if you’re lacking repository access
> or ownership. (By default new users cannot fork before being manually
> approved. Yes. We are afraid of the spambots.)

Do forks introduce potential PR spam or something of that sort on GitLab?

~~~
mgbmtl
I help manage a Gitlab instance for a FOSS project with around 800 users, and
we had spammers post spam on personal repos 3-4 times in the past 2 years. It
can be hard to catch (I keep an eye on the latest new projects).

------
efiecho
Urgh, sad to see one more FOSS project move there. No browsing of code or
issues without Javascript. If the Javascript actually enhanced something and
made the experience better, then it could probably be tolerable, but it
doesn't, GitLab feels slower and more bloated than any other Git repository
manager I know of.

I had not been surprised if Microsoft had ruined GitHub by "enhancing" the
site with loads of Javascript and other things that would make the site worse,
but this hasn't happened. GitHub has actually improved steadily since the
acquisition. Ironically, it's the FOSS alternative that is slow and bloated
this time.

~~~
dan_can_code
Maybe xfce can see past the trivial issues with javascript for more benefits
elsewhere within Gitlab for managing their project(s).

------
factorialboy
Good luck and hope this leads to better productivity for Xfce developers. You
are doing an amazing job, has been my go to desktop env for the last 9-10
years.

------
noahdesu
Migrating away from a development model based on attaching patches to bugzilla
tickets is sure to improve the development experience, especially for new
contributes. Good move switching.

------
eeZah7Ux
I'd be happier to see SourceHut taking over.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
I'd not. SourceHut adds far more friction to reporting issues than gitlab. A
project like this would benefit from more users reporting issues.

------
arminiusreturns
Microsoft buying github just felt so wrong on so many levels to me. While I
find it wierd gitlab hosts their servers in azure, or at least used to, I
really like the ci/cd integration in GL and hope this works out for them.

XFCE is awesome, and is my second most used desktop after, well, Awesome.

~~~
imadethis
FYI gitlab moved from Azure to GCP last year:
[https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-
from...](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2019/05/02/gitlab-journey-from-azure-
to-gcp/)

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Seems pretty damning of Azure. Are these issues general to Azure or particular
to how they were using it?

------
p1mrx
I should probably move [https://github.com/pmarks-
net/ipvfoo](https://github.com/pmarks-net/ipvfoo) to GitLab at some point,
because its source repository hasn't supported IPv6 since Google Code shut
down.

------
kerng
Not sure of I missed it, but what product did they use before?

~~~
tinodotim
First line of the article ;)

> Starting today, May 1, we’re switching from our _cgit/gitolite_ setup to
> GitLab.

~~~
kerng
Oh, man.. I start doubting my senses. Thanks.

------
unsungNovelty
This is a great news for FOSS & XFCE! GitLab is a great company with great
services to provide for the FOSS community. We should embrace an open
alternative and not a closed garden ecosystem. Can't wait to see more
collaboration in XFCE project due to this change!

It's also high time we look at the motivation and principles when it comes to
products and services from a company, not just their technical superiority.

------
liquidify
My biggest problem with gitlab is that the review system is pretty terrible.

------
AlleUndKalle
Noice

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user00012-ab
Remember back in the day when we had that one consistent place to find code.
[https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png)

~~~
wdutch
No I don't remember this ever being the case. Most projects I care about host
their repos on their own servers.

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techboyg5
I think that that is interesting!

