Comment by PedroBatista
16 hours ago
Gitlab, for all it's flaws fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects. It's more in line on what people involved in software dev and all the tasks around it have as a mental model and less of a "open source dev social network" like Github tried to be almost from the start and lately got Microsofted. An lets not even bring the CI / Github Actions topic..
> fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects
How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.
Fundamentally, that's just git with a few common features like pull requests, account management and bug tracking.
Choosing one over the other is just a matter of details. How well it integrates with the corporate network, how pretty it looks, the options regarding CI/CD integration, overall popularity and community, etc... Last time I got to choose, I went with Gitea, because performance was good and it met my needs.
I found it much easier to organize repos hierarchically with GitLab. Permissions also seemed easier to setup.
Gitlab is terrible at cross-group permissions if you use dedicated or self-hosted. Because gitlab.com is made to keep top level groups separate (separate tenants). Things like cross-group MR approval, use of the built-in artifact repositories, terraform module registry, gitlab components, and so on...is very messy...so many granular cross-group allows you have to turn on.
Yeah I agree. There are only very minor differences.
Isn't being able to self host it on your company network a big important feature? Like for all the non-public branches and projects you keep internal. Gives you the same UX for everything.
This sounds pretty annoying though: https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/license_usage/
5 replies →
assigning reviewers is a major pain with gitlab. there have been multiple issues filed to support adding a group as a reviewer, only to have them closed by gitlab, saying thats not the ‘direction’ we’re going in. instead, you can do a /request_review @group in the description, but each person gets added individually so you can’t see which reviewers are in which group, you don’t know if you have the right groups to satisfy the codeowners files, etc. it’s such a mess.
Is Gitlab Open Source or one of those weird "code available" projects? Can we make a PR?
The core open source version is called Community Edition like IntelliJ. That tells you something when most projects use the unqualified name and then have Enterprise or Cloud as paid services.
They take contributions but not if they would add the equivalent of a paid feature to the free version, they see it as reducing the value of enterprise in any way or just going against their vision. It's clearly a company run project, not even a hybrid like Redis or VSCode.
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Good and bad moments, honestly. GitLab would benefit massively if they went back and deleted all of the crap they added during their "feature checkbox craze" years. Just looking at the left menu, "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops" and all this crap urgently needs to go and get out of peoples way.
And, dare I say it? There is a place for GitLab in a world where most development happens with coding agents. Its perfectly fine to be the version control & CI place. But they got stupid management (just like Atlassian or GitHub) that have convinced themselves they must be the orchestrator, the middleman, the gatekeeper to inference. They neither are nor will be that and if they go down the path of Copilot trying to ruin their product to make it happen, it will be the end.
> "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops"
Deploy contains the released versions and packages.
Operate is for Infrastructure as Code.
Analyze are project and CI statistics.
I doubt you want to remove any of them, they are quite needed functionality.
From my experience nobody uses them, they just want a pretty ui to view job status and logs.
Gitlab should be a private company
Their current CEO was brought in to sell the company to private equity like he did with New Relic in his last job. Unfortunately for him, private equity is being selective in which SaaS companies they acquire right now with interest rates spiking and uncertainty over the future of SaaS as AI becomes more capable. Acquisition by an AI lab was probably their next best hope, but the labs seem to all be rolling their own developer platform instead. Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.
> Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.
Which would be sad, because then quite a nice project is going to die.