Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
PedroBatista | on: Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab
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..
ivanjermakov | parent | next
> fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects

How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.

GuB-42 | root | parent | next
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.

txtsd | root | parent
Gitea is shady af. Use its fork Forgejo instead. That's where all the original developers went.
AlexeyBelov | root | parent
Can you elaborate on the shadiness?
myko | root | parent | next
I found it much easier to organize repos hierarchically with GitLab. Permissions also seemed easier to setup.
tyingq | root | parent
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.
IshKebab | root | parent
Yeah I agree. There are only very minor differences.
koolala | root | parent
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/

radlad | root | parent | next
It is important for some companies. https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.22/admin/inst...
koolala | root | parent
Is it more expensive?
loading story #50228481
quietbritishjim | root | parent
That is important or critical in some companies. But that's surely not what they meant by fitting their "mental model" better.
kart23 | parent | next
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.
nullpoint420 | root | parent
Is Gitlab Open Source or one of those weird "code available" projects? Can we make a PR?
loading story #50229751
loading story #50233487
loading story #50229709
stefan_ | parent | next
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.

1718627440 | root | parent
> "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.

nikau | root | parent
From my experience nobody uses them, they just want a pretty ui to view job status and logs.
yieldcrv | parent
Gitlab should be a private company
ralph84 | root | parent
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.
chrisandchris | root | parent
> 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.