
GitLab 8.9 released - pointnova
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/22/gitlab-8-9-released/
======
juandazapata
It's fantastic for us that Gitlab keeps putting pressure on Github. I hope
they keep this strike for a long time. Having said that, they really must
improve the performance. I tried to make the switch from Github to Gitlab a
couple of months ago, but the general speed and responsiveness is just below
the line.

Keep up the good work.

~~~
connorshea
Try again in a few months and it should be a lot better, lots of work has been
going into improving performance across the board, e.g. this week we've had
two pretty big changes: [https://www.scribd.com/doc/316471059/GitLab-
Infrastructure-2...](https://www.scribd.com/doc/316471059/GitLab-
Infrastructure-20160621) and [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/4802](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/merge_requests/4802) :)

~~~
nisa
Just want to say thanks for your work! Looking at these slides I really
appreciate the openness and the effort you put into gitlab. I'm running a
small instance and it's been a total hassle-free experience so far, every
issue I had was documented or had a ticket with details to figure it out!

Your education pricing is also stellar, once I got more users I'll look into
migrating to EE (at the moment CE+CI is more than fine).

Was happy to see 8.9 downloading on apt upgrade today, not a lot of project
updates induce such a reaction, it's usually fear ;) but gitlab never broke on
me!

Okay, this comment starts to sound like some paid troll comment for cherishing
you but I'm really happy.

Well one nitpick though: I'd love to see some love for the Wiki - it's usable
but not up to scratch - asciidoc doesn't really work well and I'm missing
something like recent changes and some page tree. I guess it's gollums fault
but either better documentation for the workflows or improvements there would
be very welcome! Having a great usable Wiki would set gitlab apart in a
positive way IMHO.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for your kind words Nina. I'm glad you appreciate the openness, effort,
education pricing and packaging.

The wiki is something we don't but enough effort in ourselves, it is not
Gollum's fault. There are a lot of open issues for it
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues?scope=all&sor...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues?scope=all&sort=id_desc&state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name%5B%5D=wiki&label-
name=)

We've been using static websites a lot ourselves instead of wiki's
pages.gitlab.io

I would love for people to contribute wiki improvements. If you have questions
on how to do this you can always ask Remy, our merge request coach.

I would like to promise more efforts from our side for the wiki but right now
we don't have any plans, so I don't want to give false expectations.

~~~
nisa
> We've been using static websites a lot ourselves instead of wiki's
> pages.gitlab.io

Sure I can understand that it's not a priority but I don't think wiki and
static pages have to exclusive - we have a lot of non-technical users and e.g.
pushing a static version of the wiki to gitlab pages would ease creation of
documentation, so users can use the editor and markdown and the preview to
write the wiki and everything gets rendered into some nice static content.

It's basically what you can do now with a regular repository but sometimes
it's nice to have docs and code separated.

I'll look into contributing, thanks for the link!

~~~
sytse
I agree that wiki's have their place and a valuable. Just wanted to explain
where our efforts have been. Thanks for looking into contributing
[https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/16/fearless-
contribution-a-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/16/fearless-contribution-
a-guide-for-first-timers/)

------
ech
gitlab is gearing up to be the one-stop-shop from development to production. i
really like that. unifying the toolset developers and ops have to understand
is really a boon for everybody involved.

merge restriction as a feature may sound silly, but in my experience, when
driving organizations toward CI/CD, especially with "mature" organizations,
having the computer say no instead of a human is a major facilitator in
adoption of good practices. now we just need to protect tests in tree.
(currently, i tend to favor tests as a git submodule, so we can prevent
chronic offenders from altering/commenting tests that _should_ pass)

plus U2F integration, so now i won't hear anymore how "terribly slow" it is to
have to whip out a phone to grab a TOTP code...

~~~
darklajid
Isn't U2F a Chrome only feature at the moment?

Are you using that seriously already?

~~~
connorshea
Firefox added it ~3 weeks ago under a flag in Nightly, should be in stable a
few months from now.

------
Jack5500
I really like GitLab, but again like with the last release there is no
Raspberry Pi 2 package. Even though it's officially supported platform it
lacks behind over 2 minor versions by now (8.7.7).

~~~
sytse
The Raspberry Pi 2 package sometimes takes longer to build. But that doesn't
explain that the previous minor version didn't ship. I created
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-
gitlab/issues/1366](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/1366)
to look into this.

------
intsunny
Will repo deploy tokens ever be a thing? I would like read-only deploy tokens
associated to a repo, and not a user. I just don't like having to create dummy
users with repo access to generate deploy tokens.

~~~
reipahb
Isn't that what deploy keys are for? See:
[http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ssh/README.html#deploy-
keys](http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ssh/README.html#deploy-keys)

Deploy keys give read-only access to clone a repository, and they are
associated directly with the repository.

~~~
intsunny
That depends on having an SSH keypair. I just want a token for internal only
projects.

~~~
vamega
I don't understand how your token is different from an SSH keypair. Would you
explain?

------
jwcrux
How often is File Locking needed? I thought that was one of the beautiful
things about Git - merging de-conflicting is not only a thing, but easy to
do...

~~~
iBotPeaches
It looks like its more intended for asset files like PSDs and more where Git
conflict management isn't as helpful.

~~~
sytse
Exactly, it is for files that can't be merged because they are binary instead
of text based.

------
allan_s
Really interesting new features

A little feature I'm missing is to have the code coverage percentage in the
slack message

A bigger one is the fact that the comment text area in code review is terribly
slow on my very recent desktop in firefox, and unusable on my cellphone (it
used to be ok one years ago)

I can't wait to deploy this release (we always wait one week after each
release official date, just to let one or two bugfix release).

~~~
sytse
Thanks. It should be possible to have the code coverage in the slack message.
Consider opening an issue or contributing the code.

The comments text area slowness sounds bad. I've hear people complaining about
slowness in Firefox before. I'm not sure how to proceed.

Not a bad idea to wait a week after the official release, we expect to have at
least one patch release in this timeframe.

~~~
allan_s
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/19011](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19011)
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/19010](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19010)

here you are :)

Yes I think for most software waiting for the .1 release is mostly safe.

Thanks a lot once again for the deployement process of gitlab, just having to
do apt-get update/upgrade is such a wonderful things, most of project should
learn from you, as too often in companies you start to freeze at one version,
because the upgrade process is too much mind taking and soon nobody remember
how exactly one can upgrade it.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for creating the issues!

And you're welcome for the apt-get upgrades, glad they are a good experience
for you.

------
MandieD
I discovered GitLab on Azure Marketplace (of all places...) and have fallen in
love with it for managing PowerShell and other Windows automation projects
done in Visual Studio Code (of all things...). To _really_ use it though, I
have to get it installed on-prem, and our Unix server guys do not like the
default user and group names they saw on the VM: they insist that they have to
be max eight characters, no dashes. I'm not going to argue that it's sensible,
just that it is :)

It looks like I can use the manual install process - any of you guys done that
lately, using user/group names different from the defaults?

Also, they want the stuff installed on an NFS share, not the OS partition.
Reasonable, or unreasonable for GitLab?

~~~
dblessing
I'm glad you love using GitLab to manage your automation projects. Luckily,
you can still use the Omnibus install but change the default usernames :) In
`/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb` we have the following configuration options:

registry['username'] = "registry" registry['group'] = "registry"
user['username'] = "git" user['group'] = "git" postgresql['username'] =
"gitlab-psql" redis['username'] = "gitlab-redis" web_server['username'] =
'gitlab-www' web_server['group'] = 'gitlab-www' mattermost['username'] =
'mattermost' mattermost['group'] = 'mattermost'

Change these to acceptable values and it should work well for you. If there
are any other blockers in the Omnibus package, please create an issue at
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-
gitlab/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues) and we'll
do our best to accommodate them.

------
doughj3
I know this really isn't the place for this, but since sytse and other
Gitlabbers frequent these threads it'd be nice to get a response. I've had an
open issue on Gitlab for four months now that basically makes it unusable for
me:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-
forum/issues/548](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/548)

~~~
sytse
Sorry about this. I see that GitLab team members worked on the issue and
considered it closed but that the problem persists. I've asked our support
lead Jose to look into it.

------
d33
Thanks for yet another very smooth upgrade! I even forgot to back up the
server and I have nothing to regret. I just hope that you'll fix this one tiny
UI problem I noticed:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/19004](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/19004)

Other than that, I'm perfectly happy. I love the progress!

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear your upgrade was smooth. I see your issue was already labeled by
our team, so I hope it will receive more attention soon.

------
StavrosK
U2F support, finally! Although, there's no way to remove a device if I lose
it, that sounds like quite the security risk...

~~~
sytse
Mmm, that makes sense to me, consider creating an issue for this.

------
lhecker
Can someone explain me why workers where only alive for 6 seconds? Even now:
Why are they only alive for 20 minutes and why is that even acceptable? Is it
due to memory leaks?

I'd probably instantly lose my job if any of my systems would crash that often
without me fixing it, regardless of the reason...

~~~
sytse
The unicorn workers are leaking memory. Any worker going above a limit will be
restarted. Obviously it would be better to reduce the memory leaks further and
we welcome help with that. To be clear, it is not a crash, all requests are
handled without error to the end user.

------
bigdrum
My most wanted feature is manually (from a gitlab ui, not api) triggered build
for deployment. Is it just me, or am i missing some good practice that people
can live without it?

~~~
grzesiekb
Recently we added a feature that makes it possible to trigger a new pipeline
from UI. It can solve your problem. We are also working on extending our
support for environments, so if you need a more flexible solution, stay tuned!

------
rajathagasthya
Interesting features. My GitHub student discount with free private repos
expires tomorrow, so I'll be finally migrating all my private repos to GitLab
tonight.

~~~
sytse
Yay! Our importer will import not only your repo but also your issues, PR's
and wiki.

------
Keats
Is there a .travis.yml -> .gitlab-ci.yml conversion tool in the work? It's the
only thing preventing me from switching to gitlab really

~~~
sytse
We're not working on that as far as I know. But you'll find the format pretty
familiar. See
[http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html](http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/quick_start/README.html)
and
[http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html](http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/yaml/README.html)

------
vsviridov
Really like the docker registry. Having private NPM repository as well would
really make my day...

~~~
sytse
In general we don't do features that are specific to a certain programming
language. But I see the appeal of a npm/gem/apt/yum/jar server. Maybe someone
will contribute it.

