
GitLab 8.11 Released with Issue Boards and Merge Conflict Resolution - AtroxDev
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/22/gitlab-8-11-released/
======
K0nserv
GitLab keeps surprising me with the consistency and quality of their releases.
They are really putting GitHub on the spot at the moment and I for one love
the competition in this space

~~~
jobvandervoort
Great to hear and thanks for the work you're putting in to support GitLab for
Danger. The other day a colleague said "DANGER IS AWESOME".

------
dak1
I've recently moved to pushing all my open source code to both GitLab and
GitHub, but using GitLab for actual issue tracking, continuous integration,
build tests, etc. I've found GitLab's integrated toolset to be superior to
what GitHub currently offers, and in truth there isn't really anything I feel
like I've been missing (some tools like Code Climate are only free for GitHub
accounts, but it's easily resolved by just using both).

Plus the GitLab team has just been killing it with each release, and it just
feels good to use open source (and be able to open issues, vote on
improvements, track changes for the upcoming release...). Free private repos
is just icing.

Setting up a project for both just takes a few initial commands to configure
git:

    
    
      git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:account/repo.git
      git remote set-url --add --push origin git@gitlab.com:account/repo.git
    

Then pushing to origin will always push to both. I also add a github and
gitlab remote in case I only want to push to one as well.

~~~
tedmiston
> some tools like Code Climate are only free for GitHub accounts, but it's
> easily resolved by just using both

Are you doing a read only mirror to GitHub for this?

~~~
dak1
Effectively. My project still gets pushed to GitHub and lives there, but I've
disabled every feature I could (you can't disable PRs, but it's easy enough to
redirect PRs over to GitLab).

Code Climate can still happily read from the GitHub project and I can add the
badge to the README if desired, which is visible on both GitLab and GitHub.

And since origin pushes to both, they are rarely if ever out of sync.

And by using GitLab I get GitLab CI instead of Travis (which is quite nice),
GitLab's amazing Issue tracker and board, which blows GitHub away, more fine
grained control over merging (no more forced --no-ff merges if you don't
want), Issue and MR templates, an activity stream, far more control over your
project's settings... really I can't say enough good things about my
experience with GitLab over the last ~6 months.

~~~
DouweM
GitLab can actually keep your GitLab and GitHub repos in sync automatically!
Check out the "Mirror Repository > Push to a remote repository" option in your
project's settings.

------
kolanos
Congrats on the release. Haven't tested this version, but have tried recent
versions and if there's one thing that I think GitHub still runs circles
around GitLab it's accessibility. If you don't believe me, try firing up a
screen reader and see which you find easier to navigate with your eyes closed.
In some cases you'll run smack into a brick wall with GitLab. So if there's
one area where massive improvement is needed (and would be appreciated) it's
accessibility. Happy to help on this front, but I know for a fact there's
already several open issues relating to accessibility for GitLab.

~~~
foepys
This is one of the few points I have to criticize as well. GitLab's design is
a bit too chaotic for me. It's missing visual dividers in a lot of places,
especially in the issue tracker. Also GitHub feels better on horizontally
smaller screens.

~~~
luibelgo
Also having that big header plus tabs just grabs most of the vertical space in
the screen, very bad decision now that most of the screens have way more
horizontal space.

------
jobvandervoort
We're super proud of this release. As always, we're here for any questions or
comments.

~~~
alexwebb2
The issue boards are a big deal, so congrats on getting that out!

I've said this before, but one huge thing you guys could do that would draw in
a lot of companies to Gitlab EE is if you supported custom issue fields [1][2]
with various field types. That feels like a pretty logical place to go from
here, so I hope you guys are strongly considering it.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/8988](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988) [2]
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/14884](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14884)

~~~
sytse
Thanks! Let's continue the conversation about custom issues in
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/8988#note_141...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/8988#note_14175765)

------
nrclark
The "Gitlab doesn't handle big commits" bug is still a thing, and the two
issues open for it are still open (and have been for months).

8.11 overhauled the diff backend, which works great! But the front-end still
chokes up and freezes because the default appears to be 1000 files worth of
diffs. This still pegs my CPU and hangs my browser when the page tries to
render.

The second time loading the page is always fast (maybe something caches
somewhere), but the first time is slow and chews the heck out of my poor PC.
:(

Any chance we could get some sensible limits on the amount of information
shown in a diff? Nobody is going to wade through 1000 files of diff in a web
browser, so there's no reason to jam things up trying to render it.

[https://gitlab.com/nrclark/dummy_project/commit/81ebdea5df2f...](https://gitlab.com/nrclark/dummy_project/commit/81ebdea5df2fb42e59257cb3eaad671a5c53ca36)

edit: also, clicking the "Plain Diff" button breaks Gitlab

------
johnnydoebk
Is it a matter of taste or Github's UI indeed looks more professional than
Gitlab's one? I've tried to switch from GH to GL hosted for my personal
projects multiple times and no luck. I like the fact that Gitlab is open-
source and it has a lot of features but I still don't feel comfortable using
it. Any opinions and preferences on GH's UI vs. GL's UI?

~~~
quadrangle
GitHub has a better container in their CSS. GitLab defaults to letting text
lines be overly long and this just makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable
even if you think you don't mind it. Otherwise, I think GitLab is largely
alright UI.

~~~
jakecodes
Hey thanks for the feedback. We are certainly working on it. Feel free to
contribute to the issue. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/13680](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13680)

------
mi100hael
I migrated to using GitLab.com from GitHub for all of my publicly-hosted repos
and use a self-hosted instance for some other projects as well. I love that I
don't have to compromise features or usability when opting for the free
software alternative.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
I was considering going self-hosted too, but then gitlab.com got a _lot_
faster (thanks!!)

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear you're noticing the speed. We still have a lot of improvements in
the pipeline. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues/59](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues/59) We now host 2 repo's on Ceph, we'll move GitLab
CE shortly and transition all the rest after that. [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&state=opened&utf8=%E2%9C%93&label_name%5B%5D=ceph)

------
nickysielicki
With both GitHub and gitlab, I wish there was more work in making it easy to
create pull requests without having to click around on a website.

I'll often check out software, notice something small that I can easily fix,
and spend 5 minutes fixing and testing it. But then I have to spend another 5
minutes going on GitHub, forking the repository to my profile, going back into
my shell, changing the URL for origin, pushing the change, going back to
GitHub, creating the pull request on the project, and then going back to my
profile and deleting the fork that I have no interest in maintaining. This
should be so much easier.

That being said, I run Gitlab under a small docker box and I couldn't be
happier with it. It's so darn easy to setup. Grats to gitlab team.

~~~
DouweM
Depending how small the fix is, you can edit a file in any project right from
the GitLab interface, and a fork and merge request will be created
automatically in the background! The only thing left to do is to remove the
fork after the MR has been accepted.

~~~
carussell
This doesn't really help for anything except for content editing (e.g.,
markdown). Consider the above example: the original poster now has all these
files they've changed on disk. The best case scenario now involves opening all
those files up one by one and pasting them into the browser's textarea. (Can
you change multiple files this way and wrap it up into a single atomic commit?
Whatever the case, this actually results in a lot more pointy-clicky, not
less.)

A patch is a unit of change. Historically, that's the type of unit that the
open source world has operated with. The only reason we're having this
conversation right now is because GitHub decided to build on top of pull
requests instead of patches for lock-in reasons. GitLab has no such
motivations, so it's silly to continue following them, especially since Git
has had native support for patches from the beginning.

Just support patches already.

------
hardwaresofton
Another excellent Gitlab release -- I'm super excited to hear about the
addition of issue boards. Please replace Jira and github at the same time.

I <3 Gitlab

~~~
tedmiston
I hope this is the intention. I'd love to migrate off Jira. Presumably like
others, it's the reporting and accounting features for management purposes
that have kept us tied to it.

------
ma138
Congrats to the Gitlab team for pushing this out the door so quickly!

Back when we built one of ZenHub’s [1] first features — task boards inside
GitHub — we believed strongly that development teams needed a single source of
truth in order to move faster and communicate better. That belief has
underscored everything we’ve built since. It’s awesome to see further
validation for this philosophy here with Gitlab!

[1] [https://www.zenhub.com/](https://www.zenhub.com/)

~~~
sytse
Totally agree with the single source of truth. I think ZenHub is very well
done.

------
mikewhy
What's the reasoning behind the different characters in slash commands?

    
    
        # Why
        /milestone %milestone
        /label ~foo
    
        # Instead of
        /milestone milestone
        /label foo

~~~
DouweM
Both of those formats also work in comments outside of slash commands, are
automatically linked to the respective entity, and label references are
rendered as pretty labels, with their color and description tooltip.

Using those characters also enables autocomplete in the Markdown textarea.

In the web interface, they are very convenient, but they are not required, so
when using slash commands with reply-by-email, you can leave them out and
write exactly what you have under "Instead of"

------
superice
A tiny question: does this mean a workflow in which only one user would be
able to merge a specific branch (say: master) is only available in the
enterprise edition? I imagine this is quite a common workflow, even at smaller
companies or non-profits. This essentially forces you to use an entire repo
per user to do code review, even though oftentimes you wouldn't need this when
you can restrict branch access to a specific (set of) users.

For example, I'm active at a small non-profit computer shop at the campus of
my university, and we develop our own stock managementsystem inhouse. This
would be a very interesting feature even for non-enterprise users like us,
because that'd allow for easy code reviews without having to fork the repo.

~~~
DouweM
CE does support restricting branches to specific roles: Master and Developer.
In your case, I would suggest giving this single maintainer the Master role
(which they already have if they're the owner of the project), making everyone
else a Developer and configuring the master branch to only allow pushes (and
merges) from Masters.

------
jkot
GitLab looks very tempting, congrats to their team.

Question: I would like to migrate from Github to Gitlab, but can not really
move. Is there some bridge, which would mirror Github repos (with Issue
tracker and pull requests) on Gitlab?

~~~
YorickPeterse
While you _can_ import data such as issues we do not have any automatic
mirroring system for this in place. We do however have repository mirroring,
but this _only_ mirrors the repository data.

~~~
sytse
We're discussing a full sync in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/904](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/904)

------
qznc
I have yet to understand where this kanban board stuff makes sense.
Apparently, the Agile philosophy [0] introduced this to the software
development world. Most implementations (Gitlab, Wekan) seem to miss central
features (limits, cycle time stats).

I guess those boards serve as a issue tracker extension for short term
development? How does that improve the process? Why do you need that on top of
an issue tracker? Replacing the issue tracker is probably not idea?

[0]
[https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban](https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban)

~~~
unethical_ban
The visualization and instant-modification of kanban boards is really
appealing from a task/issue management perspective. It shouldn't replace issue
tracking, it can serve as a frontend to portions of it.

~~~
flukus
And prioritization, Cards get ordered by priority instead of 100 items all
market "urgent, fix yesterday".

------
ocdtrekkie
Merge conflict resolution seems like something incredibly obvious to have,
that yet is a pretty unique feature for the web UI. I've done a lot of stuff
with GitHub's web UI, and I pretty much hit a wall any time I do something
that's going to create a merge conflict, since I never really bothered to
learn Git CLI. I saw GitBook did something similar to this a while ago, but
that's for books, not code.

------
neuromute
I just migrated our companies repos away from Bitbucket to GitLab. The whole
process was super-easy. Really happy so far!

~~~
KamiNuvini
What made you pick Gitlab over Bitbucket? Both can be self-hosted, but I'm not
sure yet which one to choose myself. We do use Jira/Confluence internally so
we might want to stick within that ecosystem but I hear very good things about
Gitlab. I believe both integrate well with Jira as well and support
smartcommits. What were the advantages for you?

~~~
jschumacher
Great to hear you're already using JIRA and Confluence. Adding Bitbucket to
the mix will give you access to a bunch of great integration features.

We've been working on making it easier for the entire development team to
collaborate and give them the right information at the right time. Here is a
selection of features that I think you will find useful:

JIRA's Release Hub, to let you know if you're ready to release or not:
[http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/04/jira-6-4-release-
confiden...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/04/jira-6-4-release-confidence-
sanity)

The development panel, to turn every issue into a dashboard for it's
development work: [http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/visualize-development-
jir...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/visualize-development-jira-6-2/)

Automated issue transitioning, because it's easy to forget to move that issue
to "In Review": [http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/08/jira-6-3-untangle-
develop...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/08/jira-6-3-untangle-development/)

Hope this helps. For a good overview, you can also take a look at the
documentation that outlines the above integrations:
[https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/JIR...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/JIRA+integration)

------
rawfan
Gitlab has a really great set of features and I appreciate the open and
professional development style very much. It's very resource-hungry, though.
At one point I just gave up and switched to Gogs. Less features, sure, but
very fast, even with many users.

~~~
sytse
Yeah, if you want to use less resources Gogs is a great option. Did you know
out team member Kim works on Gogs fulltime?
[https://about.gitlab.com/gogs/](https://about.gitlab.com/gogs/)

~~~
Flimm
Fascinating. I'd understand why GitLab and Gogs might not be competing with
each other, but why invest in Gogs? How does that benefit GitLabs the company?

~~~
stp-ip
Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

Joking aside. Most likely to get a foot in the door on competition and on git
related features written in Go, which might supplement or replace parts of the
infrastructure within Gitlab. They already use Go for the CI runner part and
as a smart, Gitlab aware proxy.

~~~
sytse
We want to prevent a not invented here mindset. And we'll work on import
export functionality. By the way, GitLab already uses GitLab Workhorse written
in Go to do much of the heavy lifting. I would say it is more then a proxy.
This project is unrelated to Gogs.

------
benjaminpv
My job would _never_ cotton to putting stuff on Github, so GitLab existing and
being of such high quality has been fantastic. Really been impressed with it.

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear that!

------
akerro
This is great
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsJ8tkHAa8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsJ8tkHAa8)

------
sofaofthedamned
I'm seeing this as Gitlab working towards their Jira killer. With Mattermost
also in the omnibus edition this is rather ace. Congratulations to the team!

~~~
sytse
Thank you!

------
allan_s
congrats for the new release, here my critic (don't take me wrong, I use and
love gitlab for so long, and the other features of 8.11 are really awesome)

* merge conflict resolution: It definitely looks cool and make conflict resolution _BY MERGING_ easier than any other way i know BUT most of the time I want my co-worker to resolve conflict BY REBASING (i.e as if they had branched just right now) , following the principle that you merge from specific to generic. So though I definitely agree most of people don't care, but for larger team/project where you often need to make archeology and dig inside the commit history , the "master merged into feature branch" makes the commits tree look weird

Outside of this, it's maybe only me, but most of the team I've worker with
where using a scrum-like taskboard (like [http://taiga.io](http://taiga.io) )
instead of a kanban-like, is it planned to be added/provide the option or
(which I perfectly understand) do you plan on focusing on kanban and letting
third-party project for those who prefer scrum ?

~~~
sytse
Hugo already mentioned the rebasing option in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339492](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339492)

As for the Kanban board, as far as I can read in
[https://www.cprime.com/2015/02/3-differences-between-
scrum-a...](https://www.cprime.com/2015/02/3-differences-between-scrum-and-
kanban-you-need-to-know/) the only difference with a scrum board is that you
can set a maximum number per list. Feel free to create a feature proposal for
that, I've already heard that request before today.

~~~
allan_s
hmm yes you're right, I was mislead by the name of each list on the blog post,
it's true that nothing prevent me from naming each column "new" , "in
progress" , "ready for qa", and "done" , my bad. this + burn down charts (like
proposed in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/91](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/91) ) would
really start for us to make gitlab embrassing the full life-cycle of our
products.

As for resolving conflict by merging, thanks I didn't know EEhad this feature.

~~~
sytse
Cool, thanks for asking and glad to learn we're on the right path.

------
balabaster
Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into
ideas", not the other way around?

We're always trying to promote this idea of "don't sell the product, sell the
problem you're solving" and your opening statement completely tips that on its
head.

Not knocking GitLab in any way, I love your product and have used it for a
while. Amazing work. Just me being a pedant ;)

~~~
RandomBK
> Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into
> ideas", not the other way around?

They're using "issue" as in "issue tracking", not "issue with how the world
works". In this sense, you take an idea and write it down as an issue, which
can then be discussed and implemented.

~~~
balabaster
Fair enough, though ambiguity doesn't help their narrative. If I questioned
it, I can't believe I am the only one.

------
shandor
I'm glad there's starting to be a good amount of choice in this realm of
tools!

I've actually just lately been looking into a new all-in-one package like this
for our company. Git hosting, code reviews, issue tracking, wiki, and nice
project management features all in one place. My current systems-under-test
are Phabricator and Jira.

Anyone have an opinion on how GitLab compares to those two?

~~~
DouweM
We compare GitLab with a bunch of other tools on our website:
[https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/](https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/).
We don't have a section on Phabricator yet, but if you end up trying both
GitLab and Phrabicator, please consider writing down some of your
observations!

Like all of our website (and our product, as a matter of fact), we accept
merge requests to improve that page: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-
gitlab-com/blob/master/sou...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/blob/master/source/comparison/index.html.md)

~~~
shandor
Thanks for the reply!

I'll see if I have time to evaluate yet more tools very thoroughly , but if I
look into GitLab I'll definitely hit you with something for that page :)

one thing that jumps at me from those comparisons is that mostly all of them
are against other tools that are mainly for repository hosting. Is it
intentional, and similarly the main idea of GitLab itself?

~~~
sytse
We are mostly compared to those tools, that is why we added those sections. I
think it might get unwieldy if we added non repository hosting tools too.

------
alfg
So excited for this release! These guys are killing it on features!

Also noticed the speed/performance improvements lately.

Great job, GitLab!

~~~
sytse
Thanks Alfred!

------
steve371
Awesome! Really awesome features. Time to persuade my boss to move to Gitlab
now.

Just need some data on the latency and reliability. so far, I only found
[https://status.gitlab.com/](https://status.gitlab.com/). need some historical
data now.

~~~
sytse
[http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794](http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794)
shows it for the last 7 days. If you want to have higher uptime also consider
[https://githost.io/](https://githost.io/) that we run.

------
stevenringo
This is awesome. Is it possible to have a central set of issues per group?
Many (real-world) projects have issues that span across multiple (GitLab)
projects. I guess one could create an "empty" project for issues, but this is
hacky. Thanks again.

~~~
sytse
Great suggestion. With milestones you can already aggregate issues on a group
level, but it makes sense to have a group level issue board too. I created an
issue in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ee/issues/911](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/911)

------
glitcher
My first impression of the Issue Boards is that it reminds me of Trello quite
a bit! I happen to like Trello, and whether or not this new feature was
Trello-inspired I'm excited to give it a test run.

~~~
jobvandervoort
We were definitely inspired by awesome software such as Trello and Asana.
We've woven it into GitLab and have some iterations to go before it's exactly
what we want, but we believe we've shipped something useful so far.

Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

------
skift
How do we use the mattermost features on gitlab.com ?

~~~
DouweM
Mattermost is not enabled on GitLab.com, in part because it's not prepared for
multi-tenancy, and in part because it is shipped with the GitLab package
specifically for people who want to have a self-hosted development and
collaboration environment. If you're fine with using hosted tools, there are
plenty of great hosted chat tools out there!

~~~
zegerjan
DouweM, it is possible though to do this. Although a good seamless integration
would require some extra work from our end. I've proposed this in an issue[1].
It is not planned though, at this time.

[1][https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/21251](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21251)

------
kirtant
An awesome release! Waiting for Koding to be enabled on gitlab.com ..

------
aban
GitLab's been going at it for quite a while now, congrats for another awesome
release! And keep up the great work guys, it's much appreciated!

~~~
jobvandervoort
Thanks aban! Any feedback?

~~~
aban
You guys are awesome!

For my 2¢, it would be really great to see some "official" love for Haskell at
GitLab :) E.g. having Haskell tools installed on shared runners would be
pretty nice!

I'm also curious to know the state of functional programming at GitLab. I know
you guys mostly do Ruby, but would you be open to employees using functional
languages or frameworks for work? (e.g. Elm, Elixir, Haskell and other
exciting functional stuff)

~~~
sytse
We used Haskell for a dependency of our Omnibus packages before but it turned
out to be very hard to install on many platforms.

Anyway, we don't install any tools on shared runner, we recommend you use a
docker image and/or the scripts to do that.

We mostly do Ruby for the web app and Go for the heavy lifting
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-workhorse/](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab-workhorse/)

Now that we plan to ship with Cog we need Elixir for the first time. Help with
[https://forum.mattermost.org/t/help-wanted-cog-
integration-f...](https://forum.mattermost.org/t/help-wanted-cog-integration-
for-mattermost-in-elixer/2099) is appreciated.

------
iamleppert
Anyone notice that Github is getting dog slow lately? When browsing source
trees it used to be lightning fast. They're trippin'.

