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frnkng | 3 years ago

I use gitlab since a lot of years. Let me phrase it like this: in the past I was more happy with using gitlab than I am nowadays. And it gets worse over time.

1. Nearly all features feel like they are half-baked. I do not even know where to start my enumeration of things that can be improved. The worst is maybe the search, followed by the wiki, followed by the issues.

2. It is more important for them to add more features then to improve existing features.

I think this is a direct consequence of the company politics as stated in the article. People may like working there and see it as gold standard. But from my point of view (as a paying customer) I’d like to see more people there work more on consolidation and refinement. Of course engineers prefer working on the cool new stuff. If there is no one who forces the focus on improving existing stuff, nothing gets better over time. At our company we have the same sickness, I wonder what others are doing differently that they don’t have the same problem. E.g. Apple.

On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to gitlab. Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?

discuss

order

Spivak|3 years ago

This is a leadership problem (or not a problem) at its core. The engineers make whatever the people at the top reward making. Unless the people running the actual business side of the business choose to invest in maintenance and refinement it won’t happen. And very often that is a deliberate choice.

I think a lot of engineers miss the forest for the trees when it comes to stuff like this because what we value is good engineering and convince ourselves that such a thing is a prerequisite to the overall business success.

If you can’t convincingly argue why $work will have a positive ROI with engineer hourly rates then it won’t happen. How I’ve sold it in the past is having a bug bash where we groom and fix a couple hundred open issues and then use it as marketing fodder. It’s possible to make bugfixes as flashy as a new feature release if you sell it right.

ofrzeta|3 years ago

> I’d like to see more people there work more on consolidation and refinement

It's also quite frustrating to encounter the endless threads on years-long open issues with no solution in sight.

KronisLV|3 years ago

> On the other hand: there is not much of an alternative to GitLab.

Honestly, in larger organizations self-hosted GitLab is still one of the better options. It has lots of features and gets the basics right (though not all are excellent) - you get code review, CI/CD, even functionality for issue tracking, Wikis and much more.

You might use Jira or Atlassian for some of those, or maybe something more tailored and optimized for your workflows in smaller orgs, but GitLab still offers you options for most of the things you might want to do (even some monitoring and feature flags).

As long as you can keep up with resource requirements and updates, as well as configuration, you aren't likely to get fired for picking it and you'll be able to succeed and ship projects while using it, if self-hosting is a must/preferable.

> Atlassian self hosting is no more. Maybe Gitea + anything for CI/CD?

That said, for my personal needs, I migrated away from GitLab and run Gitea (for the code), Drone (for CI) and Sonatype Nexus (for container images, libraries etc.): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/goodbye-gitlab-hello-gitea-...

In my case, dealing with updates is a bit easier now and breakages don't affect the whole solution (since previously I ran Omnibus GitLab for my own needs, which made launching it easier, at the expense of more coupling) and the total footprint would be much lower, if only Nexus wouldn't love to gobble that much RAM.

Sometimes integrating a bunch of specialized solutions is also a valid approach, especially because in my case container image cleanup in GitLab was a bit of a mess and while Nexus still has its problems (e.g. skipped deletion of old container images when they have multiple tags), it's a bit better and gives you more control.

Gitea is great, though and should work with most of the popular CI solutions as well - whether you want to run Drone, Jenkins, or anything else.

intelVISA|3 years ago

You might like OneDev, it's basically the good parts of Gitlab mixed with Gitea and has CI/CD.

SuperQue|3 years ago

This is spot on. The issue was a culture of new over improve.

It had the upside of making some things more integrated. MR and issues and CI work much better together than GitHub or atlassian.

But it had the down side of expanding into feature categories half baked.

I only managed to stay for 4 years before I couldn't stand it. But I'm more an SRE than a feature developers.

I left for a job that has "burn tech debt" as a key goal.

la_fayette|3 years ago

Jenkins works fine for small/mid sized projects.