from Hacker News

GitLab 8.5 released

by doubleg on 2/22/16, 2:58 PM with 241 comments

  • by josteink on 2/22/16, 6:47 PM

    Looking at this thread here, Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community, yet Github (still) remains the popular option, despite their more community-hostile traditional board-meeting decision process.

    Is there a gradual shift in the FOSS community towards Gitlab (which in all honesty would make more sense), or am I just seeing the enthusiast in this thread?

  • by jobvandervoort on 2/22/16, 3:08 PM

    We're super excited with GitLab 8.5. It's much faster, no matter the size of your instance (but especially for larger instances).

    The Todos, ability to revert commits and CNAME support for Pages, are things that have been much requested and we're happy to have now.

    As always, we're here if anyone has any questions about anything.

  • by flashm on 2/22/16, 3:26 PM

    I've moved all my private repos to Gitlab based on the chat on here and other places recently RE Github, Gitlab, and other solutions.

    I'm very happy overall, the interface is great. It's a bit slower than github currently (the web interface) as I'm using the online version rather than self hosted, but apart from that it's really bloody good.

    I'll be recommending it to others going forward and using it for all new repos that I want hosted.

  • by praseodym on 2/22/16, 4:42 PM

    Their performance graph shows response timings up to 25 seconds [1]. GitHub's mean web response time goes up to 200 milliseconds. The difference is two orders of magnitude. Is GitLab really that much slower?!

    [1] https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_5/issue_timings.png [2] https://status.github.com/

  • by joaoqalves on 2/22/16, 10:23 PM

    When I met Gitlab, 3 years ago, I didn't expect this. The product is so much mature, the UI is so much better and the feature-set increased too. I respect these guys. The competition is though out there. Github is _the_ place where many git users started and is the _de facto_ standard for open-source/show-cases or even tech blogging, these days.

    There are a few things that annoy me as a Gitlab user (UX things), apart from the search/responsiveness of the application. Moreover, they improved _a lot_ the installation/upgrade process over these years. I'm expecting big things from you now :)

    Anyway I need to say that these guys have been working a lot and deserve much credit. Kudos for you, guys!

    One of the things that annoys me most is that the homepage of the repository, where you have the README is not the same where you have a file browser (Perhaps this is Github-biased, but is soooooo much better. Think about it :)

  • by nikolay on 2/22/16, 8:22 PM

    I love GitHub, I'm loyal and grateful to them for all they've done for us, but GitLab is significantly more agile these days and loyalty easily can be reassigned. Even Bitbucket is picking up development, so, if I was GitHub, I'd really seriously reorg and ramp up development and innovation!

  • by pilif on 2/22/16, 3:22 PM

    Nitpick:

    > GitLab no longer loads large Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory when browsing a Git repository. This prevents timeouts and memory leaks.

    Nope. Not loading something doesn't prevent memory leaks. It might make existing leaks not as bad (because you're leaking less).

    Either you're not leaking at which point it doesn't matter how big the thing you load is, it will get freed once it's not used, or you're leaking at which point, yes, if you only load small things, you get to run for a longer time before you die, but you will still die eventually.

    Only loading smaller things doesn't plug leaks.

    Aside of that: This looks like a very impressive release. Congratulations!

  • by lgp171188 on 2/22/16, 6:55 PM

    Great job GitLab team! Way to go! Unfortunately I cannot use it for my projects till the issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/12920 exists. Hopefully, it will be resolved some time in the future.

    I am firm believer in FOSS and I am very glad with GitLab embracing it as much as possible without affecting their revenues. I have started creating my new repositories on GitLab from this month

  • by nrclark on 2/22/16, 4:50 PM

    Was 8.5 able to address either of these?

    Large commits can't be viewed:

    https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/10785

    Users created via LDAP login continue to count towards the user-count even if the LDAP account is deleted:

    https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11844

  • by palidanx on 2/22/16, 6:02 PM

    I just upgraded and the diffs are WAY faster now. Thanks so much for all of the hard work!

  • by fweespeech on 2/22/16, 3:24 PM

    > With GitLab 8.5, we’re offering GitLab Geo as an Alpha to all our Enterprise Edition customers. Once GitLab Geo has left Alpha / Beta state, a special license will be required to use it.

    I'm not sure I like this trend.

    While I understand some features GitLab may feel its worth a "second license" fee, it sets a bad precedent.

    Similarly, I don't want to give you $390/year for a GitLab instance with 2-3 users which keeps me from paying for the stuff I use for sideprojects. Although, tbh, if you are going the secondary license route for various features it seems I'm better off looking into an alternative and just implementing them myself.

    I honestly was just using the post-receive hook, etc. for this sort of thing.

  • by branchly2 on 2/22/16, 4:15 PM

    When I go to github, there's a search bar at the top to search for the public repo I'm looking for.

    I can't find the search feature at gitlab.com. How do I search for users or public repos of interest at gitlab?

  • by ausjke on 2/22/16, 4:15 PM

    Still using redmine + gitolite here but have been watching Gitlab for a while, in fact I tried it yesterday and it's still quite resource hungry and slow(using DO's default installation with 1GB memory).

    Redmine+Gitolite has nearly everything I need but Gitlab's code view interface is better. Redmine's backend seems running more efficiently but its interface is not modern enough at this point, especially on how to review git repos.

  • by exstudent2 on 2/22/16, 5:37 PM

    Much faster! I notice it's rendering large source files instead of displaying them as binary now, so great!

    One issue: I'm getting a really weird animation/hover over effect on the Gitlab icon in the upper left corner. Is that meant to happen? Is there a way to disable this.

    Other than that, everyone should upgrade to this version.

  • by oneeyedpigeon on 2/22/16, 5:08 PM

    I'd love to try GitLab out, but the OSX installation instructions [1] are a bit of a put off. I'm not even sure if that's the right URL, but it's where google takes me. The instructions refer to a "runner"; I'm not really sure I understand what that is, and it's not explained anywhere. The "ci" makes me think this is something to do with continuous integration, so I'm really not sure if this is the right thing to be looking at.

    The instructions also say "(In the future there will be a brew package)"; this is sorely needed!

    [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/ma...

  • by dman on 2/22/16, 6:54 PM

    Can i use dnf update on fedora to update the gitlab package if I have the repo installed? I am on fedora 23 and doing dnf update doesnt upgrade gitlab. Also doing a dnf install gitlab-ce gives me a message that gitlab-ce-8.2.0-ce.0.e17.x86_64 is already installed.

  • by cheald on 2/22/16, 5:08 PM

    Very easy upgrade from 8.4.3 to 8.5 on Ubuntu using the omnibus packages. I did have to install bundler in my system Ruby (I have RVM on the system; the install scripts executed via apt-get apparently doesn't care), but that was the only hiccup.

  • by mrmondo on 2/22/16, 9:41 PM

    Another great release in an incredibly fast turn around time, well done to the team and everyone that's contributed.

  • by giancarlostoro on 2/22/16, 7:10 PM

    Are there any blog posts about techniques used to improve performance you guys would care to share? Thanks!

  • by talles on 2/22/16, 4:36 PM

    > yes, all important things for those of you that speak Spanish or Portuguese

    What do they mean by that?

  • by whitenoice on 2/22/16, 4:07 PM

    Impressive release! Is there a guide on migrating from install from source to using omnibus? We currently upgrade from source but would like to move to omnibus.

  • by koolba on 2/22/16, 8:14 PM

    Maybe a stupid question but is there a publicly hosted GitLab that provides free repo space (and the usual pay for private repos) or is it only self hosted?

  • by d33 on 2/22/16, 3:28 PM

    Two releases ago, updating was a bit of a pain for me, so I guess I'll wait until Friday with this one. Anyway, the new features sound really good!

  • by amist on 2/22/16, 4:17 PM

    Still waiting for issues priority levels. Without it, the issues page is just a mess.

  • by dudul on 2/22/16, 4:22 PM

    Nice, looking forward to the upgrade to GitLab pages on gitlab.com !

  • by monksy on 2/22/16, 6:57 PM

    Awesome that theres a release.. but just as I'm migrating from one server that it has it built from source to a new one that uses the omnibus package.

  • by quadrangle on 2/22/16, 4:30 PM

    This comment is not meant to be the main judgment on what is otherwise an interesting update, but:

    > To focus on your content

    shows a screenshot with extremely long text lines that are far harder to read than than when the sidebar thing helps keep the lines to a still-too-long-but-not-as-bad length. How does nobody at GitLab realize that you need some max-width or a container or something to keep text line length comfortably readable‽

    (the same can be said for Hacker News, but everyone seems to know that it's ugly already)