
GitLab sees huge spike in project imports - AgentK20
https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgId=1
======
yogthos
For people wondering what makes GitLab any different, the answer is that
GitLab is an open source product at its core. This means that anybody can run
their own instance. If the company ends up moving in a direction that the
community isn’t comfortable with, then it’s always possible to fork it.

There’s also a proposal [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/4517](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517) to
support federation between GitLab instances. With this approach there wouldn’t
even be a need for a single central hub. One of the main advantages of Git is
that it’s a decentralized system, and it’s somewhat ironic that GitHub
constitutes a single point of failure.

In theory this could work similarly to the way Mastodon works currently.
Individuals and organizations could setup GitLab servers that would federate
between each other. This could allow searching for repos across the
federation, tagging issues across projects on different instances, and
potentially fail over if instances mirror content. With this approach you
wouldn’t be relying on a single provider to host everybody’s projects in one
place.

~~~
veidr
GitLab is a lot like Firefox, or "Linux on the desktop" in that way. It's what
a lot of us _want_ to use, but the less-open but more-polished option has
always seemed the more pragmatic choice.

But that can change.

Recently (just as most of the world has apparently moved on from desktop
computing, haha) Linux is pretty much fine for the traditional desktop
computing. I have current Mac, Windows, and Ubuttnu on my desk, and they are
essentially interchangeable except for a few special-case purposes (say, Final
Cut video editing, or opening one of those weird wonky Excel sheets that only
open on Windows).

Firefox, too, is suddenly performant and I've switched to it as my main
browser (for default website use) — something absolutely, utterly unimaginable
two years ago.

I hope that GitLab is reaching the same kind of transition point. I've heard
horror stories from people that used it 2-3 years ago and are happy to be back
on GitHub. But I don't hear much recent grumbling. I moved a toy project to it
and it seems nice. As fast as GitHub for me (though I am in Japan, and GitHub
is slow in Japan). More features. A nice, sort of adult/professional
aesthetic. And — _yay!_ — the open source core it's always had.

I might be wrong, since I haven't used it _for reals_ , but it looks like they
might have hit that critical usability threshold?

 _Open source and worse_ isn't a very compelling sales pitch. But an open
source tool that is broadly equivalent to a closed source one is generally
more attractive, especially when you're talking about services that will be
used as part of your core infrastructure.

~~~
fireattack
As a faithful Fx user since 1.5, I'm not sure about Firefox analogy.

Its market share was actually much higher in the past and only went down (the
introduction of Quantum didn't really help market share wise).

And in term of polishness.. Firefox was MILES ahead of any browser for a very
long time. When Chrome launched, it was as horrible as you can think in term
of functionality, and Firefox at that time was already as solid as today. But
Chrome advances very fast. People often attribute Chrome's success (merely) to
Google's push, but Chrome's technological development plays a bigger role IMO.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I'd argue Firefox was easily far more fleshed out, but Chrome was simply
faster when it first came out, and I made the switch. It turned out all those
features didn't mean jack when a faster option was out there. Of course,
Chrome has added a lot of features now... and Firefox has gotten vastly faster
than it used to be.

When I left Chrome a few years back, the sluggishness of Firefox was quite
palpable. I eventually moved to Edge, which, while crashier, overall performed
better. But after both the Electrolysis project, and Quantum, Firefox won me
back quite solidly.

Long story short: Speed > features when it comes to web browsers.

~~~
harrygeez
I share the same thought. I use Edge on Windows when it came out simply
because it feels so much faster and smoother. However, it has such a high
tendency to glitch out and freeze sometimes I wonder how can Microsoft release
such a glitchy browser and expect users to use it as their main browser.

~~~
code_duck
In 1998 I purchased a Windows computer for the first time in 14 years. My
thoughts were "They've had 10 years. Surely they've worked their bugs out". As
it turned out, Windows 98 and Internet Explorer 4 actually did have some
stability problems, to put it mildly. So I would say that releasing very buggy
software without blinking is not a new concept to Microsoft.

~~~
mgkimsal
> "They've had 10 years. Surely they've worked their bugs out".

That's quite a weird thing to think in 1998 with respect to a browser, given
that they'd only had any sort of a browser for less than 3 years at that
point.

~~~
code_duck
The question was posed "I wonder how can Microsoft release such a glitchy
browser and expect users to use it as their main browser."

To which I gave a related anecdote and responded

"So I would say that releasing very buggy software without blinking is not a
new concept to Microsoft."

Since they released an entire OS that was massively unstable (win98), while
claiming their browser was an integral part of it, it doesn't surprise me that
they would release a buggy browser at a later date and expect people to use
it.

I wasn't only addressing browsers, but rather my perception of the general
quality history of Microsoft products at that time. It affected my perception
of Internet Explorer, which at that time was not as popular as Netscape
Navigator.

------
adrinavarro
GitLab's recent performance has been abysmal. We recently moved from a self-
hosted git solution to GitLab, and while the CI, 'namespacing' and issue
tracking are truly great and well thought of, we've had entire days where the
team was unable to deploy because the CI workers did not run (even though we
host the workers), and therefore the artifacts for deployment were never
generated. And nearly every day, pushes take minutes to complete, as opposed
to a few seconds with GitHub.

If anything, I hope that Microsoft's acquisiton of GitHub means that GitHub is
going to keep growing in features for varied enterprise uses, and that we're
going to see even more competition in this area.

~~~
sytse
I'm sorry that you had a bad experience with GitLab.com self-hosted runners
and pushes. I can't place the CI runners not working entire days. Pushes to
GitLab.com should not take minutes. They do take longer then to GitHub.com and
we're working on performance improvements, including deprecating NFS for
Gitaly and more performant size checks that just got merged.

~~~
uponbe
Sorry to say it like this but you’ve been working on your performance problems
for years now and you’re still at the same place. I think your problems run
much deeper than that.

~~~
philliphaydon
Their gitlab website is much faster than a year ago. A year ago I moved all my
repos from GitHub to gitlab because I had to cut some personal costs. I
remember it took a while to load pages when navigating around the site. A week
or so ago I logged in for the first time in a Long Long time to setup a
project to share with someone to test some ideas. I was surprised that I
wasn’t waiting for pages to load. It was much faster than it used to be. Still
room for improvement but I did notice it was much faster.

So while they still have improvements to make it would be a lie to say they
haven’t improved at all.

~~~
jazoom
Can confirm. The website is much faster and much nicer than it was a year ago.

Also, I don't think GitLab has had a long downtime recently. At least not for
any of my projects.

~~~
Vinnl
> Also, I don't think GitLab has had a long downtime recently.

That mostly depends on whether you're using CI/CD I'd think, that's had some
day-long outages/problems lately. Of course, GitHub doesn't even have it's own
CI/CD, and GitLab's is amazingly flexible, so it's still the better product.
But it'd be nice if it were more stable.

(Note: all this is on GitLab.com. If you self-host, it's presumably much
better.)

~~~
jazoom
I use GitLab.com's CI/CD extensively. I guess the downtime was when I was
asleep or something because I've never seen a day-long outage.

~~~
Vinnl
I don't encounter all of them myself - it depends on what I'm working on and
perhaps also the timezone. That said, April 26th was the most recent
occurrence for me where I was _very_ happy I wasn't in the middle of a
production deployment that I would have had to roll back. See the status
updates on that day on
[https://twitter.com/GitLabStatus](https://twitter.com/GitLabStatus)

(I am using the free tier though, so this is more informative than that I'm
complaining.)

------
scriptsmith
A lot of this traffic is probably due to the opportunistic advertisement on
GitLab's home page for non signed-in users:
[https://i.imgur.com/ZNikKcJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZNikKcJ.png)

~~~
alexcroox
The irony of this whole thing being that GitLab is hosted on Azure...

~~~
VexorLoophole
I think that the topic 'privacy' isn't the main factor in this case. Most
stuff on platforms like GitHub and GitLab are public anyway and shouldn't
include any private stuff.

In my case i simply want to move since i really dislike microsoft and their
business decisions. I simply don't want to be involved in any "direct" way
with this company. Microsoft doesn't have much control over GitLab, just
because they use their servers. But Microsoft will have a lot of control over
GitHub.

~~~
arcticfox
That's fine, although IMO anyone that doesn't like Microsoft's decisions over
the past few years is living in the past.

Meanwhile Google is GitLab's largest investor, and I've been burned more times
to count. Google Wave? Google Wave?

~~~
TheCabin
One move from Microsoft that really disappointed me recently was to prioritize
advertisement over user privacy, for example in Windows 10. I read big chunks
of the terms and conditions myself and was horrified.

There are many articles covering this, for instance:
[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-b...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/08/windows-10-microsoft-
blatantly-disregards-user-choice-and-privacy-deep-dive)

------
wand3r
GitLab is awesome as a broke amateur dev with 0 way to really give back to
GitLab the team was cool enough to send me a tshirt and stickers. Its come a
long way since then but they seem to be awesome. I dont know if the msft acq
is generally even a bad thing, but its great there are options either at
GitLab.com or as a self-run service for people to change over to if they want.
Congrats!

~~~
dblessing
Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you like the swag and enjoy using GitLab.

------
krob
I highly recommend people consider self-hosting with phabricator. It's php-
based, and if you have a ESXi or proxmox or digital ocean / linode instance,
it's a very simple system to install & update, uses all the same LAMP stack
everyone is used to, supports ssh/http based push/pull workflows,
git,svn,mecurial repos, same type of authentication as
github/gitlab/bitbucket, but biggest part of all, its PHP based, written to a
very high standard through & through. Has the ability to scale insane amount
of workers & cluster configurations. I've never had it once hiccup on me. Yes,
if you import a project with hundred thousand+ commits, it will take a while
to import, because it builds records for the entire commit history of the
repo, it doesn't generate them the moment you view. So this will take time to
back populate into the phabricator system, but once you have an imported repo,
it has event system that is unlike any you may have ever used. It takes some
time to get used to it, but organizations like CircleCI have a tutorial on how
to integrate simple CI workflow using Harbomaster.
[https://circleci.com/docs/1.0/phabricator/](https://circleci.com/docs/1.0/phabricator/)
Also as of php7.x phabricator runs even faster than ever before. It also has
it's own Trello Board style system, and it has a much more powerful issue
system than gitlab/github. Tickets can have parent/children, and repos never
specifically belong to any one project, but rather projects can have many
repos. It also has integration with 2FA. It has a Question & Answers section,
wiki, pre-code-commit audits. Lot of really big open source communities use
it. A fairly large list of big companies using it are shown on:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator)

~~~
utku_karatas2
> but biggest part of all, its PHP based, written to a very high standard
> through & through

What?! Holy shit. Is that considered a positive thing these days?! I must be
quite out of the damn loop.

~~~
NightlyDev
Well, there's nothing wrong with using PHP, and the performance is often
better than with other comparable options. Personally I really enjoy PHP 7.

If you're way out of the loop then all you need to know is that PHP 7 is quite
awesome.

~~~
djsumdog
You can write clean code in any language, and I've written some nice PHP, but
the language itself has many fundamental design problems. For example, printf
shouldn't have side-effects on a datetime object:

[https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=75232](https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=75232)

I run some OSS stuff on PHP, but in containers to keep it all isolated.
Although things have gotten better with PHP7, knowing what I know about the
language makes me hesitant to use it on any new project for anything except
the most trivial systems.

~~~
NightlyDev
That should definetly be fixed, but it's not something people will ever
experience unless they try to write broken code by using undocumented
features/sideeffects.

What exactly is it you know about the language that makes you hesitant to use
it?

~~~
djsumdog
It's type system and automatic casting/comparing is a nightmare.

Although there are namespaces now, the idea of everything being in the global
scope was insane (and still even with namespaces, much is still in the global
scope).

mysql_real_escape_string

There are no type-safe comparisons for greater or less then (You have ===, but
no <== or >==).

This article: [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-
design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

This subreddit: [https://reddit.com/r/lolphp](https://reddit.com/r/lolphp)

The number of bugs that are closed as not-a-bug/wontfix.

I'm not sure how much of this has been fixed, but I've moved on to different
languages and career choices and don't really want to look back that way.

------
knownothing
I'd like to point out that GitLab is not independent. They are owned by
investors, including Google Ventures. So anyone who thinks they're giving
GitHub/MS the finger by migrating their repos, please be ready to move
everything again when GitLab disappoints you.

~~~
naiveai
Google has done a lot of shit before, but I sure as hell trust them more than
Microsoft at the moment when it comes to acquisitions.

~~~
nojvek
Care to explain what? Satya Microsoft is day/night different between Ballmer
MIcrosoft.

Meanwhile Sundar Pichai Google hasn’t been the friendliest.

~~~
mort96
Windows is still doing a lot of bullshit with ads in the start menu and forced
updates. A bunch of their open source stuff which has included spyware has
been less than upfront about including spyware.

------
thosakwe
I'm just wondering what the atmosphere will be like on Gitlab compared to
Github.

Github in general to me seems very bubbly and emoji-filled, or to put it into
a word - _fun_. For better or worse, it won't be the same. This is not to say
that Gitlab would be bad, just that it would be different.

I'm just incredibly curious to see what it ends up looking like.

------
NightlyDev
I'm not surprised.

You know that feeling when someone makes a service you really enjoy and you
know you can trust? GitLab is definetly one of those services.

Self hosted? Check! Open source? Check! Community Edition that include the
features small-medium teams need? Check!

I'm a huge fan of GitLab, and with the current business model and how
community editions work I'll definetly continue promoting GitLab every chance
I get.

Keep up the good work! :)

------
parvenu74
That's the trend for today. In two weeks the sentiment will be "Oh screw it --
this is more involved than we though... we'll stay on GitHub for now and wait
and see."

In short: it's the developers' version of #DeleteFacebook

~~~
YCode
I just assumed devs were testing it out; most devs love testing alternatives
and even occasionally retesting them to see if the alternative has caught up
to the de facto answer.

~~~
marpstar
This seems like the most likely case. Who's really taking the time to move
their production repos to GitLab over the weekend based on a Friday rumor?

------
aylmao
Getting a 502. I feel sorry for the Gitlab on-call right now; the rumors came
in a day too early to fully enjoy the weekend.

~~~
dblessing
Thanks for your concern :) Many from our team are indeed on high alert.

~~~
aylmao
Keep up the good work! The next few weeks could get interesting (:

------
franga2000
Slightly off-topic, but I just love the fact that GitLab has a publicly-
accessible Grafana dashboard. Really speaks to the openness of the company.

~~~
Qwertie
Gitlab is a 100% remote company so everything they do is communicated online
and a huge chunk of the time they publish their communications and decision
making. You can read all the things the considered while working out if they
should remove the CLA for example and see live feeds of what is going on when
they are trying to fix an issue.

------
sytse
I hope our public monitoring will stay up. If not the same graph can be viewed
in
[https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200](https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1003409836170547200)

~~~
matteeyah
We're currently rescaling the monitoring box to accommodate for all the extra
traffic. We ran out of RAM which caused prometheus to crash.

~~~
sytse
GitLabStatus tweet
[https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/1003439258814877697](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus/status/1003439258814877697)

------
markmark
The "huge spike" is currently at about 3k repos imported. Github had 67
million repos last year.

~~~
gkya
I wonder if there are statistics on how much of that number is forks (which
people use like clones) and how much of it totally abandoned or README only or
empty repositories. And also _which_ 3k repos are those is _veeery_ important.
Just a handful high-profile repos migrating can cause a much bigger wave.

------
alexozer
Admit it. If Google bought them instead, there'd be far less freakout. Google
is pretty scary, but you have to admit that we still distrust MS with our free
software even less.

~~~
rubidium
No there would be more. Especially from enterprise users. Microsoft
understands enterprise. Google doesnt.

~~~
leetrout
This is very true. Paid consumers as well... if I have a problem with a
Microsoft product I can call an 800 number and talk to a human and generally
get a resolution in a matter of hours at the max. Can't really do that with
Google.

~~~
foxylad
You certainly can get responsive support from Google - if you pay for it. we
have a silver support contract with Google for Appengine and get good support
when we need it.

I think the "if you pay for it" is the differentiator. And because Google
supplies far more free services than Microsoft, they get a lot more complaints
about non-existent support.

~~~
nojvek
Google is a one shot wonder with search engine and ads as their 90+ revenue
engine. Microsoft has been doing Enterprise and Devtools for decades. Google
also has a habit of abandoning things without any warning. I can’t trust them
with my life’s worth of code.

~~~
foxylad
The "Google abandons everything" meme is getting very tired. Microsoft (and
every other tech company) abandon things all the time. For example, Microsoft
pulled the plug on an entire eco-system (Windows Phone) after promising
developers it would be there for ever (and before that Silverlight). But for
some reason Google shuttering a free online service (Reader) causes all the
outrage.

Also your comment that Google abandons things without warning is so wide of
the mark as to be plain wrong. We've used Appengine for over ten years, and
while they do deprecate features, they give you three years warning (and
usually a simple migration path to a superior service). They gave over a
year's notice that they were shutting down Google Reader.

I would agree with your last point about trusting your code to Google... or
anyone else for that matter. As the mass migration from GitHub to GitLab
shows, it is easy to keep your code in multiple repositories. To rely on any
single provider (even if that provider is yourself) is irresponsible.

------
jph
IMHO it's wise to distribute repos to GitLab and also to other hosting
solutions beyond just GitHub.

One reason is because acquisitions can sometimes be tumultuous, such as
because of employee changes, security changes, alerting changes, etc. A backup
git host is prudent.

~~~
beager
The nature of git itself obviates your case. If Github gets tumultuous, your
redundancy is on your local machine and on every machine of your org.

Replication of issues, wiki, etc to other hosting providers just sounds like a
PITA.

If the concern is about Microsoft buying Github and someone gets flighty, I
think it’s a little dramatic.

Microsoft isn’t about to rock the boat here, neither is Github.

Expect marginal, fleeting downtime, marginal pricing changes, and generally
higher confidence in GH surviving in the long run.

~~~
jph
> The nature of git itself obviates your case.

My typical case involves more areas.

I value having a way for developers to push/pull changes to a well-known
agreed-upon place, as well as to read/post/comment on pull requests,
tag/branch/integrate for releases, and always-on always-updating availability.

Orgs that are my clients do not have default employee machines that are
automatically ready to push/pull to each other.

This can be because of a range of technical areas e.g. employee machine
firewalls, continuous integration server configurations, disk space storage
size for large files, etc.

This can be because of a range of process areas e.g. a dev team wants to do a
git flow that uses pull requests and code review comments, or a legal team
wants an audit trail, or a management group wants a dashboard to do updates,
etc.

------
chis
It’s cool that there are alternatives, but github is still the only one
providing a search engine over billions of lines of modern code. It’s an
irreplaceable software development tool and I hope Microsoft treats it well.

~~~
ojkelly
There is [https://searchcode.com](https://searchcode.com) which searches over
public repos from all the big providers.

------
ageofwant
Migrating repos are straightforward.

[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOXuOg9tQI)

    
    
          At its current state, GitHub importer can import:
          the repository description (GitLab 7.7+)
          the Git repository data (GitLab 7.7+)
          the issues (GitLab 7.7+)
          the pull requests (GitLab 8.4+)
          the wiki pages (GitLab 8.4+)
          the milestones (GitLab 8.7+)
          the labels (GitLab 8.7+)
          the release note descriptions (GitLab 8.12+)
          the pull request review comments (GitLab 10.2+)
          the regular issue and pull request comments
          References to pull requests and issues are preserved (GitLab 8.7+)
          Repository public access is retained. If a repository is private in GitHub it will be created as private in GitLab as well.

------
burlesona
Meanwhile GitLab is crashing... but Bitbucket is up. If you haven't used it in
a while, probably worth another look. It's gotten a lot nicer in the last few
years, and the code review and CI features are especially good.

~~~
Qwertie
Source on gitlab crashing? I'm using it right now and it's fine other than the
monitoring page getting resized right now due to very unusual load.

~~~
Operyl
I'm having pages take 15-20 seconds to load for me, personally.

------
rightos
I seriously wonder if Fossil's model of keeping all issues in the clone isn't
the way to go - set up a public "FossilHub" or some such thing if it doesn't
already exist and then you get a local copy of everything, no worries about
providers at all.

~~~
fundamental
Fossil's model is pretty nice in my book, though since it's a much smaller
community compared to other SCM options it has received far less polish
overall. So, it has some awesome core ideas, but the implementation needs work
to be competitive for most users.

------
canada_dry
No doubt the recent Microsoft takeover news has fueled the spike.

At MS heart is simply money. Nothing else.

When push-comes-to-shove and a decision in the future is between doing the
right thing for the open source community, and making an extra buck you can
count on MS to go with the latter every time.

------
parvenu74
Had GitHub ever lost data?

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2017/02/01/gitlab_data_loss/)

~~~
pritambaral
[https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-
outage/](https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/)

------
dfischer
I’ve been using the keybase.io git repos. It’s cool that it adds encryption.
Unfortunately there’s no pull request system so it falls short on teams that
depend on that.

------
__sr__
Wow! Did not realise people hate/distrust Microsoft so much! Balmer’s
Microsoft - sure, but I thought that under the current administration, they
were seen as a lot more friendly company.

~~~
blackbrokkoli
As long as I'm still greeted by Candy Crush im my start menu after every
forced update, I will not consider their products tools for serious workflow!

~~~
mortehu
For those who haven't tried MS Windows recently, it now comes with tons of ads
you have to opt out of. The settings to opt out are scattered around and
unclear ("pipe up thoughts", "show suggestions", "show me what's new"):

[https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-
windo...](https://www.howtogeek.com/269331/how-to-disable-all-of-
windows-10s-built-in-advertising/)

~~~
__sr__
They should be opt-in, not opt out. And opting-in should come with some
benefits. For example, you can get Kindle cheaper if you can live with ads. I
can, kind of, understand ads if the OS were free. But someone who bought the
OS for full price shouldn't have to deal with them.

------
chj
I recommend gogs for its much smaller footprint.

~~~
cosmojg
Have you tried Gitea? I found it to be much nicer, and the community around it
has been very helpful by comparison.

~~~
rambojazz
Gitea community is what Gogs community should have been in the first place.
Gitea looks nice but there are no public instances. I only wish
[https://notabug.org](https://notabug.org) would move to Gitea instead of
sticking to Gogs...

------
ejcx
Seems like a knee-jerk reaction. In reality it will probably be more than a
year before anyone even notices any change to GitHub associated with the
acquisition.

------
Animats
GitLab is so overloaded right now that the ngnix server is returning 503 Bad
Gateway. Do they have the capacity to handle all the projects being moved over
from Github?

We've had to do this before. Remember when Sourceforge tried putting adware
into open source downloads? Many projects left Sourceforge then. That was
tougher. Github to Gitlab is easy.

Microsoft has put adware and spyware in their operating system. We have to
expect that they may try something like that with Github. They may say they
won't, but that's non-binding and meaningless.

~~~
dblessing
Sorry about that. Was the 503 on GitLab.com (main application) or on the link
in this discussion (monitor.gitlab.net)? The latter is to a public monitoring
dashboard. It has been offline a couple of times today due to influx of
traffic. We're closely monitoring it and attempting to keep it online. At the
moment, GitLab.com itself has been absorbing the additional load, though. Let
us know if you're seeing other issues.

~~~
ishaanbahal
I really like how the devs from gitlab are active on the HN thread and
replying to people facing problems! Hardly see that with mature products
anymore! Great going guys!

------
Keyframe
I've been using this in a VM since forever:
[https://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab](https://www.turnkeylinux.org/gitlab)

~~~
dblessing
Turnkey is a great way to get GitLab up and running. However, please note that
the latest version of Turnkey is based on GitLab version 8.3
([https://www.turnkeylinux.org/updates/gitlab](https://www.turnkeylinux.org/updates/gitlab))
which is nearly 2.5 years old. Check out
[http://about.gitlab.com/downloads](http://about.gitlab.com/downloads) for
information on various installation methods which make it easy to install and
keep GitLab updated.

------
labster
I'd like to move over to Gitlab, but someone else has been sitting on my nick,
"labster", for over two years with an empty group. I'm labster on HN, Github,
IRC, forums, etc. but have no way of even contacting the other person to ask
for the name. So for now, it looks like I'm stuck on Github.

~~~
chrisseaton
That other person has just as much right to that nick as you do.

~~~
labster
I'm not debating rights here, I'm saying I don't know how to contact another
user with zero activity on the platform.

~~~
chrisseaton
You said they were sitting on ‘your’ name. It’s not yours any more than
theirs, and it’s not sitting on it unless someone else rightfully owns it.

And why would you ask them for it? It’s theirs - they got it first.

~~~
labster
I remember when I used to go to thefacebook.com. Why did Zuck even ask for
facebook.com? They got there first.

------
marenkay
... until the day arrives when a huge company buys out GitLab.

Hosting your precious code is always an issue, and doing it yourself with
something like [https://gitea.io/](https://gitea.io/) is cheaper than Github
etc. on a small VPS or even a RPI at home.

------
markdog12
I really like GitLab and are rooting for them, but if my experience the last
couple of weeks of exporting/importing projects is any indication, a ton of
these imports will fail, or even worse, appear to succeed, but partly fail.

One of the most disheartening things is seeing issues like this:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/43270#note_75...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/43270#note_75044208)

> Pushing this back to 11.1 since 11.0 is full with major release
> requirements.

If there's one way to lose new users, a good way to go about it is have their
imports fail. My case was Gitlab -> Gitlab, hopefully their Github -> Gitlab
is more resilient.

~~~
jdowner
I have always wanted gitlab to become a viable alternative to github, but
every time I have used their product I have come away disappointed. Currently
trying to import a repo from github to try out their hosting ... 3hrs in and
the import is still in progress.

~~~
dblessing
Sorry for the delay. Due to the spike in imports things are a bit backed up.
Your import should be in the queue and will run eventually. As someone else
mentioned it can take a lot of time to import, in general, depending on the
number of issues, PRs, etc. Contact @movingtogitlab if you continue to have
trouble.

------
burlesona
Looks like Gitlab needs statuspage.io

------
ehudemanuel
Just watch as the crappy small scale hosted stuff moves to Gitlab while MSFT
kills 50% of their on prem business migrating over to the new GitHub... MSFT
have the channel, the customer base, the Azure Stack story (kinda), it's a no
brainer for them.

------
notheguyouthink
Federated GitLab would be a cool leap for me to trust it, and a strong counter
to what I'm about to say...

But man, I wish there was just an accepted, good UX federated system for
hosting issues/etc. The solutions exploiting git metadata seem to be the most
interesting to me, but then there's an issue of easily getting a single source
of truth for a project, etc.

Git blockchain anyone? .. I cringe at the thought, but it sounds like I'm
basically describing that lol.

------
adtac
Did you guys also mean to make all the other Grafana dashboards public? Just
wanted to let you guys know in case there's something sensitive in there.

~~~
dblessing
Thanks for your concern. Everything on
[https://monitor.gitlab.net](https://monitor.gitlab.net) is for public
consumption. We're very transparent :)

------
jobvandervoort
If you're moving from GitHub to GitLab, create an issue if one doesn't already
exist [0] and send me a message (here, @JobV on GitLab.com, Twitter). I will
make sure it ends up in the product.

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

------
nottorp
So what's the equivalent of github's unlimited users and private repos for a
flat price? I don't care about any of the advanced features, I just want
remote private repos (browseable from the web for convenience) and I'm willing
to pay a bit so I don't have to maintain them. We don't even use the issue
tracker, that one we self host.

~~~
blauditore
What do you mean? GitHub won't stop existing anytime soon. And assmuming
everything will now be worse under MS would be quite hyperbolic.

Anyway, an (even free) alternative is Bitbucket, but there's also a large
commercial company behind it - just as Microsoft - just as GitHub.

~~~
nottorp
It's not hyperbolic, I've been through Linkedin and Skype...

------
brianzelip
Wow, GitLab.com offers users insight into and customization of the cookies
they set! Checkout `div#CybotCookiebotDialog` on
[https://about.gitlab.com/](https://about.gitlab.com/). Never saw a website
disclose and enable that before!

Think i'll start git pushing there more and more.

------
sporkland
I really liked gitlab's forward looking ci/cd and devops:
[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-
strategy/](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/04/devops-strategy/)

------
mhartl
My first thought when the MSFT/GitHub news broke was, "This is great news for
GitLab."

------
bdcravens
This is great and all, but I suspect in a year most modules, gems, etc will
still be hosted on Github. So shake your fist and proclaim your distrust for
Microsoft, but most developers will still have Github as a core dependency of
their livelihood.

------
jfdev
If you want to compare the FOSS git hosting solutions, check out this
comparison: [https://docs.gitea.io/en-
us/comparison/](https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/)

------
mandeepj
This is analogous to spike in Canadian citizenship requests after DT became
president :-)

------
elango
Gitlab is not ready for prime time, we tried setting up 2 weeks ago and were
welcomed by several 500 errors. Our team was frustrated by the time we could
on-board 4 members and ditched it.

------
yani
I am very happy with the constant innovation that GitLab is offering. They
have data centers avross the globe and were the first to run a DC in Asia. FYI
GitHub still does not have a DC in Asia and UP/DOWN speeds are terrible. GH
refuses to add DC in Asia for unknown reasons despite my many requests. One
will think that we are in a cold war or something where most companies support
only US and many years later try to expand. Remember this next time when you
travel abroad and see how polite and welcoming other nations are. Software
service must be the same way. Thank you for being politically correct GitLab
and shame on you GitHub for being racist

~~~
Dylan16807
Most of that is a valid complaint. The last sentence is nonsense. Github is
not doing this for racial reasons, and I can't even picture how political
correctness could possibly be involved for gitlab. (And when political
correctness is a motivation to do something, that's a bad thing, because it
means it's not a genuine action.)

~~~
yani
You are right, racial is not what I was trying to say.

------
miguelrochefort
\- GitLab is hosted on Azure

\- Google will acquire GitLab within a year

~~~
akerro
GitLab is hosted on K8s, azure probably worked out to be the cheapest
solution. If azure of any competitor change their prices, you just move k8s
config to another provider withing a few hours. In one company I worked in
this process was configured as jenkins job, just click on new job and it was
migrating between azure, gcp, aws and ibm.

~~~
miguelrochefort
They've been trying to move to Google Cloud for months.

------
maverick74
hey... GitLab does not have a "Releases" page like github, for example!!!

but you can vote for it here: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/41766](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41766)

I find this one of the most missing pieces of GitLab

------
zaqokm321
I am wondering how many people are willing to rip their octocat stickers off
their shiny new mac books ...

------
campee
Their Grafana data source seems to be overloaded/not working. None of the
graphs will render.

------
antocv
Let us move to git-ssb a truly decentralized git repo on a decentralized
network.

------
pmontra
Did any big FOSS project move to GitLab from GitHub today or is planning to
move?

~~~
cosmojg
GNOME made the move a few days ago.

~~~
elygre
GNOME did not migrate From Github, but from a bunch of other tools.

Also, they are not using the GitLab.com instance, but have set up their own.

------
mirekrusin
Let’s wait for the Europe to wake up, the spike may be 2x if this.

------
sbmthakur
I am getting a 502.

~~~
dblessing
Sorry about that. We had to scale our monitoring dashboard due to increase in
traffic.

~~~
auslander
No autoscaling in place? I can help :)

------
wand3r
given some high profile imports i wonder if some people got some insider news
ahead of the (still seemingly unofficial) announcements.

------
thelastidiot
Hi everyone, I am joining GitLab today!

------
maverick74
hey... GitLab does not have a releases page like GitHub!!! Vote for it here:
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/41766](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/41766)

------
adammenges
Getting a 502 currently :(

~~~
dblessing
Sorry about that. We had to scale our monitoring dashboard a bit. It's back up
at the moment.

------
LyalinDotCom
seems this thread has taken them down with 502 error :(

~~~
dblessing
Sorry about that. We had to scale our monitoring dashboard a bit. It's back up
at the moment. GitLab.com is separate infrastructure, though, and we hope it
remains online despite the added traffic :)

------
21stio
does it count scheduled imports or completed ones?

------
thegayngler
The MSFT GitHub transaction needs to be blocked by the FTC.

~~~
detaro
On what grounds?

~~~
thegayngler
They can now gain access to competitors' code or block open source innovations
before they can be fully realized.

~~~
detaro
By that same measure, neither Google nor Microsoft can be allowed to operate
cloud businesses, where they run their customers code?

------
lameiam
as in being slashdotted

------
lameiam
as in slashdotted.

------
21
Next week we might learn that Oracle bought GitLab.

There is no escape with such huge centralization...

~~~
mrmondo
While I highly doubt that, GitLab is Open Source - Github is not Open Source.

~~~
rambojazz
It's only partially open source. They let you smell the freedom, but you can't
really have it.

~~~
mrmondo
Complete and utter FUD, this is not the way GitLab operates - more importantly
they are from the core an open source and transparent organisation that values
both equally.

~~~
rambojazz
Yeah Yeah FUD you say... the same company that killed Gitorious.

------
jacksmith21006
Has there been any word yet from the big tech companies like Google, Facebook,
and the others on where they will move to?

I just hope they do not just do it themselves now. It was so nice basically
having one site.

The entire software development culture had change and MS just had to try to
be part of the fun with being about as tone death as you can be. Or they just
do not care.

But either way the idea is a neutral site.

------
skepticmoron
Microsoft and I’m out of it.

------
Teeer
I love GitLab, and I use a private instance at work, but I won't use it to
store my public projects for one sole reason: you can't hide your email
address shown in commits.

~~~
rleigh
You can't hide it on github either. You can just look at the commits directly,
and I've used this to contact people in the past due to the "UI" hiding it.
It's nothing more than the thinnest bit of obfuscation, and easily overcome.

~~~
_mhp_
You don't have to use your personal email address in commits if you wish to
keep it private on GitHub:

[https://help.github.com/articles/about-commit-email-
addresse...](https://help.github.com/articles/about-commit-email-addresses/)

------
jacksmith21006
Barely even started. Would expect the big guys to move their projects.

Finally a single and neutral site and MS messes it up.

~~~
miguelrochefort
How has Microsoft messed it up?

~~~
jacksmith21006
By buying GitHub. Now the big tech companies will have to move to something
else and we will have fragmentation.

It does look like most will move to GitLab so if it just becomes the new
GitHub that would be fine.

Just hope we do not end up with each just hosting their code on their own
site. Which this might cause.

------
a1exus
because m$ wanna buy it?

~~~
dang
Could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
anon696969
A point that nobody mentioned yet is the evolution of Electron with this
purchase. I would not be surprised if they were to put their own trackers in
the core lib so that they can access the data that they do not have from all
other platforms and products (seeing that many popular apps like Atom Slack
etc. are built with it and are not Microsoft products). Maybe this is their
next effort towards the personal info/Big brother business model seeing as
almost all other efforts failed (no matter how good win10 are they always have
the stench from win8/Candy Crash and will always be too slow and insecure for
business purposes - no useful data).

Either way, hello Qt5 and Gitlab! By the end of the week I hope that Gitlab
will be our new home.

~~~
k__
While the whole thing doesn't make me happy, this sounds like the worst FUD I
read in a long time.

------
shawnfratis
>If you want nice things, you have to pay for them.

Why the hell do I have to pay for something that has already been offered for
free? That's called bait and switch. And maybe this is a stretch, but I think
that should not even be legal. In my mind it it is a form of false
advertising. If you don't think it will sustain itself as a free service in
the future then don't offer it as a free service in the first place.

