
Gitlab 10.0 released - markdog12
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/22/gitlab-10-0-released/
======
trevoranderson
If you haven't tried Gitlab yet, I would give it a serious look.

You can self host it which is cool and means that if the company's funds dry
up and they stops development (hopefully never), you can continue using the
product. With Google Code shut down and Github losing 66 million in 9 months
in 2016, it's an important question to ask about where you keep your source
code.

Featurewise, I haven't noticed anything that I can't use Gitlab for that I
wanted to do. The interface is still less familiar to me than Github, but that
seems to be a function of it being changed relatively often as well as the
time spent looking at it.

I also like how much Gitlab embraces open source. They recently acquired
Gitter and will open source it. Even though I mainly just use it as an
alternative to the still more popular Github, I'm considering picking up one
of the Enterprise plans to help ensure the development pace continues like
this!

~~~
mrmekon
> Featurewise, I haven't noticed anything that I can't use Gitlab for that I
> wanted to do.

I've only noticed one: the ability to do less. Along with its excellent
improvements over the years, it also gained some staggering RAM usage.

It used to be really nice for self-hosting your own private GitHub alternative
on a little VPS or RasPi, but those days are apparently behind us.

~~~
roblabla
You should look at gitea ! It's much simpler than gitlab, but is also much
more lightweight in terms of resource usage. Used it succesfully to host my
startup's git.

~~~
cvwright
If all you need is a server to host a bunch of git repos, there is also
gitolite. [http://gitolite.com/gitolite/](http://gitolite.com/gitolite/)

It doesn't have a pretty interface, but it works, and its requirements are
minimal. I've had good success using it to host student repos in my classes
for about 4 years.

------
tahaozket
"New, newer, newest User Experience"

[https://about.gitlab.com/2012/01/13/design-
changes/](https://about.gitlab.com/2012/01/13/design-changes/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/17/redesigning-gitlabs-
navi...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/17/redesigning-gitlabs-navigation/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/06/navigation-
redesign/](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/06/navigation-redesign/)

[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/13/unveiling-gitlabs-new-
na...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/13/unveiling-gitlabs-new-navigation/)

~~~
andrewstuart2
There's nothing wrong with iterating user interface design for better UX,
especially when you've made reasoned decisions, based on feedback and user
research, as to why the new designs will be helpful to your user base. Read
through the links you've listed, and you'll notice that the latest changes are
all based on usability testing and direct user feedback.

In my opinion, they're doing everything right here. They're not changing
designs because some designer disliked the color or popup animations. They're
arranging their functional components to align with what they're finding
(experimentally) is most usable for their user base.

~~~
carussell
I followed the issue on iterating for the redesign. I wouldn't say they
followed any experimental methods very closely for this release. It very much
came off as something where they picked a release date ahead of time and
decided that's when they'd ship. New iterations didn't follow a continuous
plan-do-check loop; everything was handled more like do something, get
feedback, figure out something that you feel addresses that feedback, and then
consider it done.

I don't know whether this comes off like I'm complaining. That's not what it's
supposed to be. (I actually liked the [original] redesign announced over the
summer.) I'm just here to explain what I saw.

~~~
svesselov
"New iterations didn't follow a continuous plan-do-check loop; everything was
handled more like do something, get feedback, figure out something that you
feel addresses that feedback, and then consider it done."

We are never done. We will always be iterating and improving. Much of the
feedback we received confirmed assumptions we already had but wanted to test,
such as collapsing the navigation, improving breadcrumbs, etc. Other feedback
was new and we were challenged to solve those. Everything that was added to
this release will undergo a round of user testing and be subject to iteration.

It does not sound like a complaint at all @carussell, thanks for the feedback.

------
zbruhnke
The biggest joke of this is we've all (their loyal users) been clamoring for
months and months on end for Group level issue boards and now we get a slap in
the face because they released it for EEP only meaning thousands of paying
customers apparently are not paying enough to be able to link issues from two
projects to one board like we've been able to do in Jira for months - it
honestly makes me want to just switch to Github Enterprise and Waffle.io out
of spite

~~~
mikewhy
FWIW I am working on a multi-group issue board for CE (I guess it will work
for EE too).

~~~
mdaniel
Are you planning on offering that outside of the Gitlab CE codebase, or are
you trying to get a MR approved into CE?

I've wondered __a lot __about whether they would accept MRs into CE which
implement a feature that they ship in one of the EEs

------
CSDude
Gitlab is great when you self host it, but not so much using their service,
you can take a look at
[https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus) see how
often they have breaking problems. Not to say this cannot happen, but they
have considerably higher compared to others. But, for feature wise they are
also great, but I do not see how this deep integration with Kubernetes will
work out, making the core product more complicated and focused on single
target. Not that you cannot write your own CI, but marketing it Auto DevOps
when it does only K8s does not seem right to me.

~~~
attractivechaos
The most important feature to me is that gitlab allows to setup unlimited
number of private repos.

~~~
favadi
As is bitbucket.

~~~
saintfiends
True. But AFAIK gitlab.com doesn't limit number of members for a project.

~~~
sytse
Correct, our free plans offers unlimited private projects and collaborators
and 2,000 CI pipeline minutes per month on our shared runners
[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

~~~
okaram
Just to let you know, I'm teaching intro programming classes, and using your
service heavily because of this. Thanks !!!

~~~
sytse
Awesome! We're working on a Cloud IDE to make your life your life even easier.
Less setup for your students.

~~~
favadi
Gitlab will include an IDE in the future? Or it will be a separate product?

~~~
sytse
It will be included in all versions of GitLab. In fact it is already as alpha
in the but you need to modify a cookie to activate it. It still needs a ton of
work.

------
sov
I gotta say--I love gitlab. We use a self-hosted version of it and it's
fantastic. I think the best thing about it is the extra features don't bog
down the interfaces. With tools like JIRA, or even github, it seems that to
"use more" of it, you kinda nuke the new user experience by making
interactions unnecessarily complicated. GitLab seems to generally work and
keep simple while adding a whole lot--they balance it well.

Recently, I added a webhook that takes all our GitLab pushes and parses out
JIRA information and automatically handles that sort of business-level logic
(issue handling, visibility, etc.), which means I spend less time boring
myself to death in JIRA. It's just one facet of what I appreciate about
GitLab.

~~~
unspecified
> Recently, I added a webhook that takes all our GitLab pushes and parses out
> JIRA information and automatically handles that sort of business-level logic

Have you found a good solution for auto-linking to JIRA tickets from GitLab
comments/commits/etc _without_ turning on the the included JIRA Integration? I
want to continue using Gitlab's native issues, and the included JIRA
integration replaces the native Gitlab issues with JIRA tickets, which is such
a colossally boneheaded idea.

~~~
victorwu
Thank you for the feedback.

As of GitLab 9.4, you are able to use both JIRA integration together with
native GitLab issues. If JIRA integration is configured inside your GitLab
project, the issues menu item in the navigation still goes to native GitLab
issues, and you can use GitLab issues as usual.

------
jasonrhaas
I think I must be in the test group or something, because I saw no change from
my current GitLab instance (cloud hosted).

I've been a fan of GitLab for a while, and I like how they continue to iterate
and improve it. As far as being a full suite for software development, GitHub
and BitBucket can't match it. GitLab seems to be charging ahead faster than
the others, and for that, I salute them.

------
sandGorgon
Is the Gitlab team looking at TruffleRuby , especially after the release of
Java 9? It could mean a much higher performance and better packaging in
general.

~~~
Laaas
Their blocker was a C extension I think, but with TruffleC that worry should
be gone.

~~~
brodock
I'm personally looking forward Truffle implementation just because of that
(and also benchmarks are looking really nice).

I don't think this will be out anytime soon TBH.

------
bhhaskin
Congratulations Gitlab team on the release! Looks like a good one, and I am
very excited to try it out.

~~~
Snappy
Thanks! We're excited for you try it out too! And as always, send feedback or
create issues for anything you see that needs improvement.

------
bischofs
Been using gitlab for a while, I love it -- but the new look in 10.0 is
bleghghgh,

They say you can change the theme but why not make the default grey or white
instead of that awful indigo? And they do not allow a default theme from the
admin section (that i could find).

Im also slightly concerned about the feature creep here, I love that they try
out new devops and CI tools but I wish you could get just a stripped down
interface and turn the features you want on and off. The UI is becoming
cluttered and the RAM usage is climbing because of it - not everyone is
running hot-rod servers and a huge dev team!

Besides that good work and thanks for having a community edition, it keeps
small teams like mine alive!

~~~
svesselov
You can define the default theme for your instance in the GitLab configuration
file config/gitlab.yml. Hope that makes it a little less bleghghgh for you!

~~~
bischofs
Thanks!

------
systems
In a windows environment, any reason to use Gitlab over TFS?

~~~
0xfeba
The CI and WebUI is eons better, not to mention just having git's diff-ing and
conflict resolution (assuming you were referring to TFS proper and not git in
TFS 2013+).

We switched a large Nodejs project from TFS to GitLab and it's been night-and-
day on our productivity.

~~~
systems
I am not sure what do you mean by TFS proper vs TFS 2013+

I meant TFS + Git , the lastest TFS is TFS 2017

~~~
Sacho
I've only used VSTS, not TFS on premises, but my experience is that all the
"cool" VSTS features(complex work items, custom queries, kanban boards, etc) I
just don't find much of a use for. These features are focused on heavy
management requirements for very large teams. I can get most of what I want
from work items via github/gitlab label tagging, the custom queries are only
useful if you actually use the complex features of the work items, and so on.

Meanwhile, the critical feature for me is a easy-to-write and easy-to-read
history of discussion on a work item. This is nascent in VSTS. The description
and discussion blocks don't even support markdown; The description box has its
own WYSIWYG editor, the discussion block barely supports linking to work
items(but http links aren't recognized, which makes it awkward to link to e.g.
the code or the wiki). File attachments go in a separate tab, so it's
difficult to contextualize what part of the discussion they are for.

Speaking of the wiki, it was just introduced and it's pretty basic. For some
reason you can only place attachments in a single special directory, which
makes editing it through the repo annoying - I want to colocate my pages and
their images/attached files, like you would do normally...

I also have some minor quibbles like the stupid iteration workflow(add
iteration to project, go to team, select project iterations for team...talk
about optimizing for the edge case).

I think VSTS should really replicate the github/gitlab/etc issue description
and discussion page. Past that, they seem to be pretty good at keeping feature
parity(the pull requests are nice, the CI is okay).

------
arunc
I wish Gitlab supports Mercurial

~~~
jobvandervoort
We have no plans to support Mercurial, unfortunately.

------
marmaduke
Gitlab is great. We've got it setup on a HPC cluster and use CI to automate
Ansible configuration for the whole cluster (mostly.. not the VNX). We also
use it to automate testing of new algorithms on clinical datasets, something
we could not do with anything else and so little effort.

~~~
sytse
Great to hear that. Thanks for posting.

------
haik90
I hope they didn't change the UI too often, even if they change the UI I hope
only small part.

After last change, can't remember which version since it already few month
ago, I leave for gitea.

Too many times my co-worker asking for location of x in menu. Where is X,
where is Y

------
pmoriarty
So how is Gitlab compared to GitHub?

~~~
jakebasile
It has some features over GitHub like integrated CI and integrated Docker
registry. I think the UI design is better. Merge (pull) requests and issues
have some extra fancy stuff like multiple assignees and discussions on code
that can be marked as competed or not.

It lacks in user base (which might not matter for internal use) and
performance and reliability. It can be slow and it goes down occasionally. It
hasn’t been enough of a problem for my company to move back to GitHub.

These observations only apply to the hosted GitLab.com, as I don’t self host I
don’t know the differences there. I have both public and private personal
projects as well as private company projects on it.

~~~
fortythirteen
Enterprise Gitlab is miles beyond enterprise Github IMHO, if for nothing else
just the integrated CI/CD. Trying to set up a third party enterprise CI/CD and
then getting it to play with enterprise Github is a pain in the ass.

With Gitlab you set up a runner instance with their CLI and you're good to go.

~~~
jakebasile
Yeah I was really surprised how easy their CI runner was to set up (I didn’t
want to use the public ones for my company’s projects). Like you say it’s
pretty much “install from apt, run this command”. Wonderful.

------
j7ake
I use git mostly for solo projects, are there advantages to hosting on gitlab
versus GitHub versus bitbucket ?

~~~
okaram
The big one is that github doesn't provide free private projects (it is nice
to be able to have some private repos if/when you need them).

Other than that, for casual use, they are all excellent products

