[HN Gopher] GitLab 15.5
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       GitLab 15.5
        
       Author : jbk
       Score  : 58 points
       Date   : 2022-10-22 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
        
       | ttoinou wrote:
       | Anyone knows when the limit of 5 free users on Gitlab.com (SaaS)
       | will be implemented / effective ?
       | https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
       | 
       | It was supposed to be out on the 19th but it's the 22th and I
       | still don't see any difference
        
         | john_cogs wrote:
         | GitLab team member here.
         | 
         | We intend to roll out the application of these limits gradually
         | and impacted users will be notified in-app at least 60 days
         | prior to the user limits being applied.
         | 
         | If you have not yet received a notification, you have at least
         | 60 days until you will see any impact related to this change.
        
           | ttoinou wrote:
           | Thanks John ! Where will the notification be sent exactly ?
           | By emails ? As a todo https://gitlab.com/dashboard/todos ?
        
             | john_cogs wrote:
             | I believe it will be done via a banner in the app but I'm
             | looking to confirm this.
             | 
             | I will follow up if/when I can provide more specificity but
             | it might be Monday before I have any more information.
             | 
             | Edit: the notifications will appear as global alerts
             | directly under the Nav for all group owners.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | Since you're here commenting: the fact that you guys
           | eliminated the $5 per user per month tier before making this
           | change meant my company has started switching to GitHub. The
           | combination of the two changes makes it feel like you really
           | weren't interested in converting free tier users to paying
           | customers so much as in shedding freeloaders, which is
           | unfortunate.
           | 
           | We on the dev team would rather stick with GitLab, but
           | "Microsoft is icky so we need to pay four times as much for
           | the same product" isn't very persuasive to the people holding
           | the purse.
        
             | ttoinou wrote:
             | Maybe we are simply not meant to be their customers ? No
             | need to suppose they wanted our money in the first place
        
       | Ecstatify wrote:
       | Gitlab is the Firefox of browsers.
        
       | npigrounet wrote:
       | Gitlab is totally buggy and way too expensive.
        
       | wycy wrote:
       | What are people using these days for self-hosted version control
       | in a corporate setting, Gitlab/GitHub/gitea? I'm currently
       | testing out Gitlab for deployment at work but finding it
       | frequently goes oddly unresponsive. Is gitea appropriate in a
       | corporate setting or is it more for hobbyists?
        
         | suprjami wrote:
         | GitLab internal instance and GitLab hosted.
         | 
         | I like it, though we probably could do permission automation
         | better on the internal instance. The team who run the hosted
         | stuff have this perfect.
        
         | ghosty141 wrote:
         | Depends on your needs. Do you only need a remote repo and
         | issues + pull requests? Gitea all the way. Do you also do
         | project management (sprints, milestones etc) and want CI/CD and
         | integration with things like k8s etc? Gitlab (Premium)
        
         | vanous wrote:
         | Gitea for code, docs as code with Woodpecker for CI for test
         | tasks and build/deploy tasks. Also integrated with Weblate for
         | translation.
         | 
         | Kanboard for more complex task management with a hook server
         | for custom automations.
        
       | smithcoin wrote:
       | I was a happy gitlab user for a long time. As ops manager I led
       | the migration from GitHub to gitlab 3 years ago. At the time it
       | seemed like a great decision. Now, as tech director I am looking
       | to switch us back. It is very clear in my interactions with
       | gitlab they do not care about small companies. Their pricing
       | structure is bonkers and has completely catered out the middle.
       | IMHO the jumping the shark moment was the IPO.
       | 
       | I want gitlab to succeed. I've spent several sessions with
       | various teams there sharing my feedback and it goes nowhere. I am
       | not arrogant enough that I expect it to be implemented; there are
       | no follow ups even for clarity or to say "thanks but no thanks".
       | 
       | How is their code search so broken at this point? What features
       | are they cranking out that are more important than making the
       | site usable? Right now it looks like they are solely focused on
       | implementing pricing increases, storage limits and user
       | restrictions. I have had a representative say to me why don't you
       | upgrade to premium- as if a $99/seat/user/month is palatable to
       | any company or a realistic solution.
       | 
       | I get that companies need to make money, but their approach is
       | tone deaf. They had an issue where pricing was discussed and it
       | ended up changing nothing [0].
       | 
       | I agree with the sentiment in this thread. It seems there are two
       | common themes. 1- the inconsistencies in the UI are frustrating
       | many people. 2- The pricing that probably made them an attractive
       | alternative is no longer there.
       | 
       | I look forward to the incoming PR damage control in this thread
       | per company policy [1], that again will lead to no changes.
       | 
       | [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
       | 
       | [1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-
       | relati...
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | wdb wrote:
         | Yeah, if you want anything you need to build it yourself and
         | raise merge requests and hope they merge it to make it into
         | Gitlab.com.
         | 
         | Even their Gitlab.com runners are still not on par with the
         | Github. You pay $99/month/user and can't even get the same base
         | runner spec as Github instead of you need to pay double the CI
         | minutes to get it. Pretty mad
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | To be fair here it's a bit apples to oranges.
           | 
           | Gitlab is optimised more towards running your own runners,
           | it's natively supported and extremely easy to set them up.
           | 
           | GitHub on the other hand provides you CI which has the
           | possibility to self-host, but they're sort of awkward to use
           | due to the fact they force you to use odd tags and you don't
           | get all the features.
        
             | wdb wrote:
             | Doesn't mean they could have the same level of runner spec
             | as Github.
             | 
             | Especially, when you pay a lot of money for Gitlab. Github
             | std spec is ~7gb + 2vcpu while on Gitlab you need to pay
             | double minutes to get that. They could at least match that
             | for their paid plans.
             | 
             | Personally, I think, Gitlab keeps adding a lot of features
             | but the core CI related functionality seem to get less
             | attention these days.
        
         | jeff_carr wrote:
         | Wow, lots of gitlab hate here but at thee same time lots of
         | love. Everyone loves gitlab. I think the core issue is when
         | things become so complicated, you can run your own git server.
         | As I mentioned in another comment, projects like gitea are
         | designed for complicated problems like this. If you are as
         | savvy as you seem to be, spin up a VM and run gitea. A normal
         | VM at digital ocean at $1k a month could handle any conceivable
         | load. Don't 3rd party something you can do yourself for free.
        
           | jpace121 wrote:
           | Has anyone ran gitea at a company?
           | 
           | I'm pro open source and run gitea at home, but looking at
           | their issue list and pull requests it doesn't really come off
           | as a mature open source project that I'd want to run my
           | company from, when down time at the wrong time can get really
           | expensive.
        
         | lolinder wrote:
         | The elimination of the basic tier is the thing that really
         | threw me off.
         | 
         | I want GitLab to succeed because I want there to be a viable
         | competitor to GitHub. But they've leaned so hard into this
         | "everything in one" shtick that it's now impossible to just pay
         | for them as a GitHub competitor. Their new price point only
         | makes sense if you're also using their issue tracker and doing
         | crazy things with CI that can't be done with GitHub actions.
         | 
         | Maybe there's a market that's interested in this all-in-one
         | stuff, but I suspect most companies already have an issue
         | tracker and are not going to invest in switching, because that
         | causes headaches for years. As for CI, there's definitely a
         | "hardcore CI" market for whom GitHub actions is insufficient,
         | but they already have a solid open source option in Jenkins. I
         | worry that GitLab's lost focus on the git-with-simple-
         | automations market will cement GitHub's dominance for the
         | foreseeable future.
        
         | lol768 wrote:
         | In my experience: The UX, performance (objectively: not just in
         | terms of CI speed, which is poor, but Largest Contentful Paint
         | times for most user-facing pages on gitlab.com as well as the
         | average API response time figures for e.g. listing issues are
         | also poor), stability and "community" (I'm thinking of third-
         | party apps, integrations and marketplace for reusable CI
         | components) is strictly worse than GitHub.
         | 
         | Basic accessibility features for colour blind users lagged
         | behind GitHub for years, making it difficult for me to even
         | review diffs and work out what had been removed/added. In the
         | end, I think the customisation feature only got shipped because
         | an external company opened a merge request - and parts of it
         | still fail WCAG AA today.
         | 
         | There's no longer a gap when it comes to GitHub and GitLab in
         | terms of CI support, and I really don't think some of the e.g.
         | Kubernetes integration functionality justifies picking it as
         | the canonical location for an organisation's code.
         | 
         | Recently they've had to start to cut back on storage limits
         | (and had to 180 on deleting repositories to try and free up
         | space), which casts doubt in my mind on their financial
         | stability.
         | 
         | Really though, I'm just fed up of having to put up with using
         | it day-to-day, because clients I work with decided it would be
         | great to pick it X years ago when GitHub wasn't as feature-
         | rich. I now look at companies who cheap out and run self-hosted
         | GitLab/GitLab.com with some suspicion, and question why they're
         | not using the de facto standard tool for the job. I look at it
         | the same as if I found a Java shop that didn't use JetBrains'
         | products for development, it's a red flag.
        
       | argella wrote:
       | My company is forcing my team (data science) to shut down our
       | gitlab server and move to azure devops (ran by software
       | engineering). They've configured ADO as a pile of shit. I want to
       | quit.
        
         | neilv wrote:
         | FWIW, the Software Engineering team might not actually like
         | Azure Dev Ops. Misery loves company.
         | 
         | Teams can get stuck using platforms they hate (e.g., MS Azure
         | Dev Ops, MS Teams, MS Exchange and Outlook, etc.), but not
         | wanting to take the interruption and effort hit to switch to
         | something else.
         | 
         | Or it might not be their choice. Organizations can also get
         | stuck because, say, some non-techies made the purchasing
         | decisions, staffed support people with
         | familiarity/certifications with those, committed to contracts,
         | etc. Those people are politically invested in that being
         | considered a success.
         | 
         | Even someone who isn't politically invested would be in the
         | position of calling out bad choices, which is awkward and
         | worse. They'll also be putting their neck out, if try to
         | propose changes (which would be corrective costs no one wants,
         | and also might fail for reasons other than their merits).
         | 
         | (I'm talking bigger-company politics, because that's who tends
         | to buy into MS enterprise sales. But if you're actually a tech
         | software startup that's inexplicably using things like Azure
         | Dev Ops, find out why, and get that person the compassionate
         | healing help they need, while shifting the startup onto a more
         | sensible and respectable path.)
        
         | mirekrusin wrote:
         | Wasn't azure devops deprecated yet after github aquisition?
         | 
         | ps. I'd probably quit as well
        
           | zhfliz wrote:
           | haven't seen an official announcement of this, only various
           | people assuming in various places on the internet.
           | 
           | if you have any official statement to support that i'd be
           | happy to see that.
        
           | hu3 wrote:
           | One of my clients use Azure DevOps and I hear nothibng but
           | praise. MS Teams tho, not so much.
           | 
           | Also I think AzureDevops just got a revamped "Sprint page
           | 2.0" from what I heard so they are releasing new features.
        
           | input_sh wrote:
           | Nope, it and TFVC (an alternative versioning system to Git)
           | are unfortunately still alive. But at least Azure DevOps
           | supports Git, which makes it slightly less horrible.
           | 
           | And it doesn't look like it's going anywhere, with Azure
           | DevOps Server 2022 RC1 being released in August
           | (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
           | us/azure/devops/server/releas...).
           | 
           | Did I mention how much Microsoft sucks at naming things?
        
             | foepys wrote:
             | TFVC is more like Subversion but has a lot more features.
             | It has next to nothing in common with git except that you
             | can use it to version control files. Although I would agree
             | that git's workflow is better for almost all use cases.
             | 
             | Azure DevOps has a lot more features than GitHub for
             | micromanagement which means that middle management loves
             | it. You can design elaborate workflows on boards and link
             | almost everything together. It also supports reporting,
             | connects directly to the Azure AD, and supports complex
             | permission management with ACL for nearly every feature you
             | can imagine.
             | 
             | It also supports free stakeholder accounts.
        
       | misnome wrote:
       | Our internal gitlab spends an hour every night intermittently
       | responding and at least 20 minutes literally unresponsive because
       | of running the "backup" and "upgrade" steps.
       | 
       | I'm told that we're talking to the Gitlab premium people and it's
       | currently unavoidable. We don't have a large instance.
       | "Maintenance mode" makes the whole process slower, so we don't
       | turn it on.
       | 
       | And I think premium now costs the same as self-hosted GitHub?
       | 
       | Has anyone had similar bad experiences with medium company (~500
       | employees, probably 1/4-1/3 developers) enterprise self-hosting?
        
         | lbotos wrote:
         | My email is in my profile if you have an open ticket number for
         | this issue that I can take a look at when I'm at my desk
         | Monday.
        
         | jeff_carr wrote:
         | Have you tried gitea? It's super hard core. Also, it's written
         | in golang.
         | 
         | The only thing that will cause gitea to fail, as far as I can
         | tell, is the hardware. It's basically a daemon on top of the
         | linux kernel.
         | 
         | Stand on the shoulders of giants.
         | 
         | When you can.
        
           | bogwog wrote:
           | Gitea has had reliability issues whenever I've tried to use
           | it. And by "reliability issues" I mean the thing would spit
           | out an "internal server error" message if I clicked around
           | too fast in the UI while it's running locally on the same PC.
           | 
           | It is a lot faster and lighter than Gitlab, but I don't
           | really care about that for something like this. Gitlab is
           | fast enough, and since I run it on a dedicated server, I
           | don't really care how much memory and resources it's using as
           | long as it doesn't exceed the limits of the server.
           | 
           | EDIT: to be fair though, I haven't used gitea in at least a
           | year. Things might have improved in that time.
        
           | kenniskrag wrote:
           | even the gitea people are using github for development. The
           | reason they mention on the migration issue is, that not all
           | features needed are ready. They e.g. implemented issue
           | deletation a few months ago.
           | 
           | https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029
        
             | vanous wrote:
             | >even the gitea people are using github for development.
             | The reason they mention on the migration issue is, that not
             | all features needed are ready. They e.g. implemented issue
             | deletation a few months ago.
             | 
             | Actually,data gravity is the issue, not features.
             | https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/18165 needs to be
             | merged to be able to leave Github.
        
               | kenniskrag wrote:
               | They are writing an import function im this pull request.
               | 
               | I think the code an pull requests are easy migrated
               | manually. The 2k open issues would have to be cleaned up
               | first. Then migrate the remaining issues via api. One
               | issue could be the non existing user on the import side.
        
         | mgbmtl wrote:
         | Presumably this is only the SQL backup? (you can backup almost
         | everything else using a regular backup system)
         | 
         | 20 minutes seems really long for running an SQL backup. How big
         | is the database? Is the disk/storage fast?
         | 
         | Have you tried replicating the database and running the backup
         | off the secondary server?
         | 
         | Restarts are annoying though, and fairly slow (2-3 minutes?),
         | but less than once per week?
        
         | fuzzy2 wrote:
         | Maybe using filesystem snapshots (either directly on supported
         | filesystems or using LVM or the like) could remove the
         | bottleneck here.
         | 
         | Are you monitoring the system status? How's the CPU and I/O
         | load when the backup is running?
        
       | maxbond wrote:
       | I'd like to move off of GitHub but I'm disappointed that I'll
       | have to leave behind the discoverability and cache of GitHub. I'm
       | not sure that it will be as clear if I put a GitLab on my resume,
       | for instance. I imagine others have given this thought; any
       | advice or experiences to share?
        
         | suprjami wrote:
         | Think of this the other way around. Do you want to work for a
         | company who equates "GitHub" with coding and doesn't know what
         | GitLab is? I wouldn't.
        
           | maxbond wrote:
           | I think lots of perfectly good companies have hiring people
           | who might make this kind of mistake. But I'm also concerned
           | it would doom an open source project, as contributors/users
           | would have more trouble finding it.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | What discoverability does GitHub provide anyway? I know they
         | have that Explore page but I was under the impression they were
         | trying to kill that. I have mostly found projects through the
         | source link on whatever package manager I discovered it on.
        
         | ktaylora wrote:
         | I started on GitHub, moved to a job that used Gitlab, and then
         | another that uses Bitbucket. Being platform agnostic about
         | CI/CD and Git, I think, looks better than being wed to a single
         | provider.
        
       | kyriakos wrote:
       | I'm hoping for a gitlab release with no new features just UI
       | optimizations. It's a great product with a huge range of features
       | but it feels like a kitchen sink of tools glued together. The UI
       | is inconsistent, some parts dynamically update some don't. The
       | settings interface is a mess. Merge requests review UI is nowhere
       | as good as github. I wish some time was spent on polishing and
       | ironing out these details.
        
         | suprjami wrote:
         | I honestly find MR in web interface has sucked in every
         | platform I've tried.
         | 
         | Use the `lab` commandline tool, it's good and makes managing
         | MRs really easy.
        
         | zeeZ wrote:
         | Every time I have a problem or miss a feature, or it behaves in
         | an unexpected way, I check if there's an issue open. Most of
         | the time there is, multiple years old, sometimes with a bunch
         | of missed release goals.
         | 
         | With all the recent pricing changes and the way billing if set
         | up, I can't help but feel their end goal is ticking boxes on as
         | many "enterprise" shopping lists as possible by adding as many
         | features as possible to provide a nice resume, but without
         | actually maintaining those features.
         | 
         | Smaller teams are becoming increasing irrelevant, and when you
         | call them out on it and they say they do care, you just get
         | pointed at a sales representative whom you never hear from
         | again.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | I'm pretty happy with the general GL experience but some of the
         | features are just useless. I tried out the Sentry integration
         | and found it to just be a worse version of the index page on
         | Sentry, not really any point connecting it to GL. And then
         | other things like deleting old images in the docker registery
         | seems to be just broken to the point I couldn't work out how to
         | delete them. And then the usage quotas were being brought in
         | while I still couldn't clean out these hundreds of old
         | containers.
        
         | stinos wrote:
         | _Merge requests review UI is nowhere as good as github_
         | 
         | This is my main issue with it. I don't really care about the
         | settings UI: mostly using the API for that because I have a
         | couple of projects which all need the same settings, and
         | otherwise it's not visited often. Code review on the other hand
         | is super common, and its UI in combination with that UI also
         | not being very fast is quite annoying.
        
       | mdaniel wrote:
       | > Email notification when two-factor OTP attempt is wrong
       | 
       | I love that idea and hope I never see one of those emails
       | 
       | Separately, that's awesome about them upstreaming fixes to
       | kubernetes, but latest comment on the issue that the PR has
       | tagged as closing totally captures my experience with all those
       | stalebots:
       | 
       | > @k8s-ci-robot added lifecycle/rotten (Denotes an issue or PR
       | that has aged beyond stale and will be auto-closed.) labels 8
       | days ago
        
         | hobo_mark wrote:
         | > Email notification when two-factor OTP attempt is wrong
         | 
         | Sounds like they read HN:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32911299
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Hope it has better noscript/basic (x)html support, at least for
       | core functions (like bugzilla has).
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | Did you file an issue about that experience? I would not expect
         | any such thing to be prioritized but it for sure won't be
         | prioritized if there's no issue for it
        
           | sylware wrote:
           | Yes, a long time ago I did manage to contact somebody there,
           | got the finger.
           | 
           | I don't expect less from most javascript kiddies.
        
           | Gigachad wrote:
           | It's not an "issue" its the design. GitLab is a web app and
           | not a document so there is no chance they will rewrite the
           | whole thing to support not running scripts.
        
       | beardedman wrote:
       | Wow, rewind 2 years and the comments for any GitLab post looked
       | really different. I'm still a GitHub user/fan - but seems the GL
       | folks might want to pay attention.
        
         | jpace121 wrote:
         | It's very interesting to see how different the responses are. I
         | think if I was in charge at GitLab I would at minimum be trying
         | to determine why.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | In the last 2 years GitHub has improved massively while GitLab
         | seems to have only hiked prices while not improving much on the
         | reliability and general UX sides. I don't personally have any
         | issues with them putting quotas on all the stuff that used to
         | be unlimited because I recognize things have to remain
         | sustainable, but to justify these costs, the service has to
         | feel rock solid like GitHub does.
        
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       (page generated 2022-10-22 23:01 UTC)