> If there's anything I want Gitlab to copy from GitHub, it's the opinionated decision making of what to show and when to show it.
Thing is, that will never happen. The project has already sprawled out of control and if they tried to remove things or drastically change the product users would just start forking the project. Or someone would copy GitLab and make a totally open source clone (that'd be ironic).
It's different because I don't have a commercial stake in the game, I just really care about privacy and my posting history and blogging history back that up.
I find it odd that someone would pick one commercial entity over another when they're otherwise anonymous, which is yet another thing you really can't say about me.
Github vs Gitlab is one commercial party against another, if the products are roughly comparable and you want to take a very strong stand in favor of either party you should declare your affiliation (or none). ACs that from the very beginning seem to have an agenda are always under that cloud, and it's easy enough to dispel any doubt.
Contrary to that there is no gain for me to be a privacy advocate.
How is this different than the pro-Gitlab people, who are on the same threads doing the opposite?
I’m personally tired of seeing Gitlab employees and fanchildren spamming every halfway-related thread on HN. If there’s someone here advocating for Github, he’s a refreshing change of pace.
It’s true. I have a perception that there is frequent GitLab advocacy going on on HN. Almost as if their team uses HN as a de facto marketing channel. Any announcement from GitLab immediately gets upvoted to the front page. And the prior commentor being accused of being a Github shill— is that any different than the frequent comments from the same cast of characters promoting GitLab?
Plenty of shills on here and they aren’t generally the Github people. Every GitLab story’s comments consist of a barrage of comments complaining about Github. An impartial observer could be led to believe that there is some astroturfing happening. I know a lot of developers and not a single one uses GitLab. But if the HN sample is representative, it seems like most developers hate Github. The GitLab/Github threads don’t seem to track with my real world observations.
Github changed software development for the better. It isn’t perfect, but acting like a Github clone is the second coming of source control management is getting tired.
Use whatever the hell you want. The seemingly non-stop discussion about SCM systems is getting stale. Unless GitLab does some incredible innovation, why must we keep seeing stories about it getting voted to the front page? Unless Github does something especially evil, why must we be constantly be taking and complaining about it? Every time GitLab makes an announcement, they get free advertising by virtue of the upvote cabal. Seriously it’s like HN has become their PR agency. Every time Mixpanel or New Relic or Codeship or Travis CI posts a blog post announcement, it doesn’t make the front page — neither does the press release announcements of dozens of more relevant startups than GitLab. GitLab announces a pricing change! OMG, let’s vote it to the front page because everyone in the Hacker News community should care!
GitLab is “open core” and apparently Github is evil because it’s closed source. GitLab is cheaper and that’s important because spending $12 per month for private repos is just offensive. Good grief. It’s getting as ridiculous as the Windows-Mac debates 10 years ago.
Unless GitLab actually creates some new innovation, I vote for a moratorium on any stories about them making the front page; a pricing change is hardly interesting. HN ought not co-opted as a free marketing channel. The past few days, Hacker News should have been called GitLab News.
> The past few days, Hacker News should have been called GitLab News.
You did notice the announcement that Microsoft has agreed to buy GitHub? I suspect that and nothing else is what drives the attention to GitLab which operates in the same space. There are also lots of postings about other competing companies entities, far more than normally. (Gitea, Gogs, comparison links and so on)
GitHub is popular because it allows developers to connect the tools they want to use to their repository. Some people find having everything in one package convenient, but the truth is there are better tools for most everything GitLab does. I don't see how jamming everything into one application makes it appealing.
I prefer GitHub's approach of allowing applications to deliver more information back into GitHub https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ As the tooling we use becomes more complicated that will be the winning strategy.
GitHub is popular because it's popular. A lot of it is network effects. As far as I can remember, they were the first user-friendly git web host. (Key being user-friendly).
GitHub has also been really great at giving back to the community (in ways that even GitLab has benefited I'm sure).
But I doubt the source of their popularity is the integration, although their robust APIs have made the ecosystem around them flourish.
The integrations are specifically why I use Github. When I had been on Bitbucket projects a few years ago, I remember how deficient they were with integrations. It was painful using Bitbucket for that specific reason.
It's true that they also make widgets, but the proportion of people who use GitHub because of their desktop client has to be vanishingly tiny. GitHub became popular originally because of pull requests. It stays popular because of network effects that counterbalance its deficiencies (terrible search, weak bug management, short analytics window, etc).
With GitLab, the convenience is just another option, though in my experience it's a very powerful option that will get you further, easier, than many of the alternatives. There's nobody saying you can't run your CI on Jenkins or Travis, or deploy to whatever, wherever. GitLab gives you some powerful options built-in, whereas GitHub _requires_ you to bring your own for many of those use cases.
Not to mention it's open source, so if you find something you need, you can actually contribute it to GitLab. Not that it won't be work for you, but it's an option beyond asking somebody to put it on their dev team's roadmap.
They're not paying you to move, they're offering a discount... Semantics aside, this is a pretty common thing for a competitor to do when something negative comes out about their competition (Either giving out blanket discounts regardless of social media or having you verify a tweet some how)
None of the things you listed are focused on usability, which is what OP complained about. Liking some isolated features of a product doesn't mean it's easy to use/understand or well-designed.
Well OP didn't mention any specifics, which is what we're asking for. I mean those were isolated features that I liked, but in general I liked the UI too. I was just mentioning specifics.
I mean the merge request cycle works well (way better than BitBucket or Gerrit). Sure the initial project screens could use a little work (show the files instead of the readme/project info?) but in general I think the UI is decent, especially compared to BitBucket. Needing some improvements is different than being a "complete mess."
It could be improved sure, but I don't think the current UI gets in the way of my development in significant ways.
Thing is it’s not even an exodus. It’s just a few thousand repos. And they aren’t even prepared to handle that. If there actually was a mass migration GitLab would completely fall over. I’m sure that would give folks a lot of confidence in the platform though.
I'd like to point out that GitLab is not independent. They are owned by investors, including Google Ventures. So anyone who thinks they're giving GitHub/MS the finger by migrating their repos, please be ready to move everything again when GitLab disappoints you.
And it's worth pointing out that you can run GitLab on your own server, so even if GitLab.com ever ends up disappointing you, you don't need to go through the trouble of migrating to the next best thing.
Windows is still doing a lot of bullshit with ads in the start menu and forced updates. A bunch of their open source stuff which has included spyware has been less than upfront about including spyware.
I think what happened to Skype is a case in point. It doesn't matter who's running Microsoft, after that disaster I don't think anyone's going to be trusting them.
Skype has basically become unusable for professional communication. It’s getting worse with every update. I kind of expect the same for Github then. That’s my concern.
> If there's anything I want Gitlab to copy from GitHub, it's the opinionated decision making of what to show and when to show it.
Thing is, that will never happen. The project has already sprawled out of control and if they tried to remove things or drastically change the product users would just start forking the project. Or someone would copy GitLab and make a totally open source clone (that'd be ironic).
On a side note, does the issue tracker for GitLab CE worry anyone else? https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues Nearly 11k issues some from 3 years ago.