GitLab 8.11 Released with Issue Boards and Merge Conflict Resolution (opens in new tab)

(about.gitlab.com)

295 pointsAtroxDev9y ago122 comments

122 comments

102 comments · 31 top-level

We're super proud of this release. As always, we're here for any questions or comments.

The issue boards are a big deal, so congrats on getting that out!

I've said this before, but one huge thing you guys could do that would draw in a lot of companies to Gitlab EE is if you supported custom issue fields [1][2] with various field types. That feels like a pretty logical place to go from here, so I hope you guys are strongly considering it.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988 [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14884

sytse9y ago

Thanks! Let's continue the conversation about custom issues in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988#note_141...

sofaofthedamned9y ago

Agreed, custom fields is where the pinch point is for most companies I contract at.

sinatra9y ago

Since using Asana, one feature I want in every project management / issue management tool is the @mention [0]. Asana's @mention allows you to link other tasks or issues very conveniently. Just like HipChat's commands feature mentioned in your release notes, Asana's @mention feature is extremely convenient.

[0]: https://asana.com/guide/help/fundamentals/text

sytse9y ago

In GitLab you can use @ to mention people, # to mention issues, and ! to mention merge requests.

2 more replies

ythl9y ago

New features look awesome.

Any idea of when we'll get global search? For a long time I've been wanting to search for a particular code snippet or file name across all projects.

sytse9y ago

Thanks! Isn't that global search possible with Elastic Search http://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/elasticsearch.html (EE only)?

1 more reply

Sir_Substance9y ago

Thanks for making a neat-o product!

/me wanders off to update

sytse9y ago

Thanks, I hope the update goes well.

kolanos9y ago· 6 in thread

Congrats on the release. Haven't tested this version, but have tried recent versions and if there's one thing that I think GitHub still runs circles around GitLab it's accessibility. If you don't believe me, try firing up a screen reader and see which you find easier to navigate with your eyes closed. In some cases you'll run smack into a brick wall with GitLab. So if there's one area where massive improvement is needed (and would be appreciated) it's accessibility. Happy to help on this front, but I know for a fact there's already several open issues relating to accessibility for GitLab.

sytse9y ago

Thanks. I agree will still have work to do in terms of accessibility to screen readers. Feel free to file an issue, existing issues are on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&sta... And of course code improvements to fix things are also very welcome.

fsiefken9y ago

Hi Kolanos, I count 6 GitLab command line interfaces of a different type. They might not provide all the features, but perhaps it provides a solution for visually challenged users. https://about.gitlab.com/applications/

foepys9y ago

This is one of the few points I have to criticize as well. GitLab's design is a bit too chaotic for me. It's missing visual dividers in a lot of places, especially in the issue tracker. Also GitHub feels better on horizontally smaller screens.

luibelgo9y ago

Also having that big header plus tabs just grabs most of the vertical space in the screen, very bad decision now that most of the screens have way more horizontal space.

rmetzler9y ago

Gitlab's in-project navigation recently changed, Everyone on my team was confused.

sytse9y ago

We know that navigation redesigns are confusing. But we want to keep iterating to make it better. We explained the reasoning behind the change in https://about.gitlab.com/2016/06/06/navigation-redesign/

1 more reply

nickysielicki9y ago· 6 in thread

With both GitHub and gitlab, I wish there was more work in making it easy to create pull requests without having to click around on a website.

I'll often check out software, notice something small that I can easily fix, and spend 5 minutes fixing and testing it. But then I have to spend another 5 minutes going on GitHub, forking the repository to my profile, going back into my shell, changing the URL for origin, pushing the change, going back to GitHub, creating the pull request on the project, and then going back to my profile and deleting the fork that I have no interest in maintaining. This should be so much easier.

That being said, I run Gitlab under a small docker box and I couldn't be happier with it. It's so darn easy to setup. Grats to gitlab team.

AaronBBrown9y ago

Have you tried `hub`? https://github.com/github/hub

    ~/src/bar (foo =)$ hub pull-request
    https://github.com/foo/bar/pull/5

There is also `hub fork` and others:

    These GitHub commands are provided by hub:

       pull-request   Open a pull request on GitHub
       fork           Make a fork of a remote repository on GitHub and add as remote
       create         Create this repository on GitHub and add GitHub as origin
       browse         Open a GitHub page in the default browser
       compare        Open a compare page on GitHub
       release        List or create releases (beta)
       issue          List or create issues (beta)
       ci-status      Show the CI status of a commit

mweilgart9y ago

You mean something like this? GitLab just added the feature; it looks like what you're asking for.

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/22/gitlab-8-11-released/#mr...

DouweM9y ago

Depending how small the fix is, you can edit a file in any project right from the GitLab interface, and a fork and merge request will be created automatically in the background! The only thing left to do is to remove the fork after the MR has been accepted.

carussell9y ago

This doesn't really help for anything except for content editing (e.g., markdown). Consider the above example: the original poster now has all these files they've changed on disk. The best case scenario now involves opening all those files up one by one and pasting them into the browser's textarea. (Can you change multiple files this way and wrap it up into a single atomic commit? Whatever the case, this actually results in a lot more pointy-clicky, not less.)

A patch is a unit of change. Historically, that's the type of unit that the open source world has operated with. The only reason we're having this conversation right now is because GitHub decided to build on top of pull requests instead of patches for lock-in reasons. GitLab has no such motivations, so it's silly to continue following them, especially since Git has had native support for patches from the beginning.

Just support patches already.

knownothing9y ago

You can use GitHub's web UI to do all of that.

nickysielicki9y ago

Right. But what I'm saying is that you have to use GitHub's web UI to do all of that.

1 more reply

qznc9y ago· 6 in thread

I have yet to understand where this kanban board stuff makes sense. Apparently, the Agile philosophy [0] introduced this to the software development world. Most implementations (Gitlab, Wekan) seem to miss central features (limits, cycle time stats).

I guess those boards serve as a issue tracker extension for short term development? How does that improve the process? Why do you need that on top of an issue tracker? Replacing the issue tracker is probably not idea?

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban

Nickoladze9y ago

I work at a small IT company that does website development for small businesses around the city. Our projects usually last around 1 to 4 months. We use JetBrains YouTrack with all open projects showing on one big board.

Each week we meet with project owners (somebody at the client company). They give us a list of tasks they want completed this week and we go over tasks we finished last week.

After the project is done, we move to only working on one-off issues they send. Usually bugs or small new feature requests. A simple issue tracker would work fine here, but we still have weekly meeting with our boss to show that we actually did work last week.

We already use self-hosted GitLab for our code, so I want to try out this new board feature to see if it meets our needs.

unethical_ban9y ago

The visualization and instant-modification of kanban boards is really appealing from a task/issue management perspective. It shouldn't replace issue tracking, it can serve as a frontend to portions of it.

flukus9y ago

And prioritization, Cards get ordered by priority instead of 100 items all market "urgent, fix yesterday".

sytse9y ago

It complements the existing issue tracker, the issues and the labels are the same. You can use issues without the board but it might be useful to give a visual overview. In meetings it is frequently easier to use a board see the many issue at a glance and to drag and drop them.

I'm not sure we want to have the software enforce limits, but I do agree that you don't want any list/column to become too long.

Cycle time analytics are planned in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20975

gsmethells9y ago

I think it would useful if the admin could opt-in to have limits enforced. That is a central tenet of kanban methodology. While the default could be no limit, I don't see why self-limiting should be prevented. I can open an issue if you like. :)

1 more reply

dragonwriter9y ago

The Gitlab version isn't a kanban board specifically, though they say it can be visually like one (its a more general thing and, as you note, it doesn't have the specific additional features that would make it usable as an automated kanban system, so you'd have to manually enforce process controls and collect data to really get what you'd want out of a kanban board.) I'd think of it more as a customizable dashboard view over the issue list (it doesn't replace the issue list, since its strictly drawn from it.)

johnnydoebk9y ago· 5 in thread

Is it a matter of taste or Github's UI indeed looks more professional than Gitlab's one? I've tried to switch from GH to GL hosted for my personal projects multiple times and no luck. I like the fact that Gitlab is open-source and it has a lot of features but I still don't feel comfortable using it. Any opinions and preferences on GH's UI vs. GL's UI?

quadrangle9y ago

GitHub has a better container in their CSS. GitLab defaults to letting text lines be overly long and this just makes the whole thing feel uncomfortable even if you think you don't mind it. Otherwise, I think GitLab is largely alright UI.

jakecodes9y ago

Hey thanks for the feedback. We are certainly working on it. Feel free to contribute to the issue. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13680

nzp9y ago

I think GH gives off this impression because the UI looks like it has more stuff going on at the same time. It's probably an illusion caused by GH's design having more contrast between elements. GL is trying to look minimalistic like a clean sheet of paper. But that's kind of my issue with GL's interface: the contrast between elements is so low that it really looks like a blank sheet of white paper. But it's not paper, it's an active screen, so it feels very straining. Sometimes I feel like it's burning my eyes. I get used to it after a while, but it's an issue.

atsaloli9y ago

I find GL's UI easier and actually pleasant to use because it is less "busy" visually.

1 more reply

dudul9y ago

If we're talking only about the UI, I have to admit that GL's UI bothers me too. I wouldn't say that it's not professional, I feel like it's really really similar to GH in terms of links, buttons, etc, but made different (and less usable) on purpose to not be exactly like GH's.

In terms of product/features, GitLab is so much better than GH though.

neuromute9y ago· 5 in thread

I just migrated our companies repos away from Bitbucket to GitLab. The whole process was super-easy. Really happy so far!

KamiNuvini9y ago

What made you pick Gitlab over Bitbucket? Both can be self-hosted, but I'm not sure yet which one to choose myself. We do use Jira/Confluence internally so we might want to stick within that ecosystem but I hear very good things about Gitlab. I believe both integrate well with Jira as well and support smartcommits. What were the advantages for you?

jschumacher9y ago

Great to hear you're already using JIRA and Confluence. Adding Bitbucket to the mix will give you access to a bunch of great integration features.

We've been working on making it easier for the entire development team to collaborate and give them the right information at the right time. Here is a selection of features that I think you will find useful:

JIRA's Release Hub, to let you know if you're ready to release or not: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/04/jira-6-4-release-confiden...

The development panel, to turn every issue into a dashboard for it's development work: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/visualize-development-jir...

Automated issue transitioning, because it's easy to forget to move that issue to "In Review": http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/08/jira-6-3-untangle-develop...

Hope this helps. For a good overview, you can also take a look at the documentation that outlines the above integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/JIR...

mweilgart9y ago

I've been using GitLab for almost a year and I love it. I tried BitBucket and found it confusing and counterintuitive—the UI is crowded, as is the UI for JIRA and Confluence. (Don't forget that GitLab replaces Bitbucket and JIRA and Confluence, and actually does even more than that.) https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/#gitlab-ceee-vs-bitbucke...

sytse9y ago

Just wanted to mention that GitLab CE/EE have support for using JIRA http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/jira.html

sytse9y ago

Thanks for believing in GitLab. Enjoy the CI, CD, and all the other features.

dak19y ago· 3 in thread

I've recently moved to pushing all my open source code to both GitLab and GitHub, but using GitLab for actual issue tracking, continuous integration, build tests, etc. I've found GitLab's integrated toolset to be superior to what GitHub currently offers, and in truth there isn't really anything I feel like I've been missing (some tools like Code Climate are only free for GitHub accounts, but it's easily resolved by just using both).

Plus the GitLab team has just been killing it with each release, and it just feels good to use open source (and be able to open issues, vote on improvements, track changes for the upcoming release...). Free private repos is just icing.

Setting up a project for both just takes a few initial commands to configure git:

  git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:account/repo.git
  git remote set-url --add --push origin git@gitlab.com:account/repo.git

Then pushing to origin will always push to both. I also add a github and gitlab remote in case I only want to push to one as well.

jtrtoo9y ago

Oh, good tip! Up until this moment I thought a remote mnemonic (e.g. "origin") could only refer to one. I didn't realize you could stack several behind a mnemonic.

tedmiston9y ago

> some tools like Code Climate are only free for GitHub accounts, but it's easily resolved by just using both

Are you doing a read only mirror to GitHub for this?

dak19y ago

Effectively. My project still gets pushed to GitHub and lives there, but I've disabled every feature I could (you can't disable PRs, but it's easy enough to redirect PRs over to GitLab).

Code Climate can still happily read from the GitHub project and I can add the badge to the README if desired, which is visible on both GitLab and GitHub.

And since origin pushes to both, they are rarely if ever out of sync.

And by using GitLab I get GitLab CI instead of Travis (which is quite nice), GitLab's amazing Issue tracker and board, which blows GitHub away, more fine grained control over merging (no more forced --no-ff merges if you don't want), Issue and MR templates, an activity stream, far more control over your project's settings... really I can't say enough good things about my experience with GitLab over the last ~6 months.

1 more reply

jkot9y ago· 3 in thread

GitLab looks very tempting, congrats to their team.

Question: I would like to migrate from Github to Gitlab, but can not really move. Is there some bridge, which would mirror Github repos (with Issue tracker and pull requests) on Gitlab?

YorickPeterse9y ago

While you _can_ import data such as issues we do not have any automatic mirroring system for this in place. We do however have repository mirroring, but this _only_ mirrors the repository data.

sytse9y ago

We're discussing a full sync in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/904

aeharding9y ago

You might be pleasantly surprised with the migration process of issues -- I had some inlined images and checklists in Github that got seamlessly migrated to Gitlab. I was pretty happy with how well it worked.

This is just in terms of ripping off the band-aid. I'm not sure of any mirroring, but I don't think that would be worth the hassle.

rawfan9y ago· 3 in thread

Gitlab has a really great set of features and I appreciate the open and professional development style very much. It's very resource-hungry, though. At one point I just gave up and switched to Gogs. Less features, sure, but very fast, even with many users.

sytse9y ago

Yeah, if you want to use less resources Gogs is a great option. Did you know out team member Kim works on Gogs fulltime? https://about.gitlab.com/gogs/

Flimm9y ago

Fascinating. I'd understand why GitLab and Gogs might not be competing with each other, but why invest in Gogs? How does that benefit GitLabs the company?

1 more reply

ptman9y ago

Wow, that is really nice of you. Can you elaborate on the decision?

allan_s9y ago· 3 in thread

congrats for the new release, here my critic (don't take me wrong, I use and love gitlab for so long, and the other features of 8.11 are really awesome)

* merge conflict resolution: It definitely looks cool and make conflict resolution BY MERGING easier than any other way i know BUT most of the time I want my co-worker to resolve conflict BY REBASING (i.e as if they had branched just right now) , following the principle that you merge from specific to generic. So though I definitely agree most of people don't care, but for larger team/project where you often need to make archeology and dig inside the commit history , the "master merged into feature branch" makes the commits tree look weird

Outside of this, it's maybe only me, but most of the team I've worker with where using a scrum-like taskboard (like http://taiga.io ) instead of a kanban-like, is it planned to be added/provide the option or (which I perfectly understand) do you plan on focusing on kanban and letting third-party project for those who prefer scrum ?

sytse9y ago

Hugo already mentioned the rebasing option in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339492

As for the Kanban board, as far as I can read in https://www.cprime.com/2015/02/3-differences-between-scrum-a... the only difference with a scrum board is that you can set a maximum number per list. Feel free to create a feature proposal for that, I've already heard that request before today.

allan_s9y ago

hmm yes you're right, I was mislead by the name of each list on the blog post, it's true that nothing prevent me from naming each column "new" , "in progress" , "ready for qa", and "done" , my bad. this + burn down charts (like proposed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/91 ) would really start for us to make gitlab embrassing the full life-cycle of our products.

As for resolving conflict by merging, thanks I didn't know EEhad this feature.

1 more reply

K0nserv9y ago

GitLab EE has an option to require MRs to be fully rebased before allowing merges.

mi100hael9y ago· 2 in thread

I migrated to using GitLab.com from GitHub for all of my publicly-hosted repos and use a self-hosted instance for some other projects as well. I love that I don't have to compromise features or usability when opting for the free software alternative.

karma_vaccum1239y ago

I was considering going self-hosted too, but then gitlab.com got a lot faster (thanks!!)

sytse9y ago

Glad to hear you're noticing the speed. We still have a lot of improvements in the pipeline. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 We now host 2 repo's on Ceph, we'll move GitLab CE shortly and transition all the rest after that. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...

balabaster9y ago· 2 in thread

Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into ideas", not the other way around?

We're always trying to promote this idea of "don't sell the product, sell the problem you're solving" and your opening statement completely tips that on its head.

Not knocking GitLab in any way, I love your product and have used it for a while. Amazing work. Just me being a pedant ;)

RandomBK9y ago

> Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into ideas", not the other way around?

They're using "issue" as in "issue tracking", not "issue with how the world works". In this sense, you take an idea and write it down as an issue, which can then be discussed and implemented.

balabaster9y ago

Fair enough, though ambiguity doesn't help their narrative. If I questioned it, I can't believe I am the only one.

shandor9y ago· 2 in thread

I'm glad there's starting to be a good amount of choice in this realm of tools!

I've actually just lately been looking into a new all-in-one package like this for our company. Git hosting, code reviews, issue tracking, wiki, and nice project management features all in one place. My current systems-under-test are Phabricator and Jira.

Anyone have an opinion on how GitLab compares to those two?

DouweM9y ago

We compare GitLab with a bunch of other tools on our website: https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/. We don't have a section on Phabricator yet, but if you end up trying both GitLab and Phrabicator, please consider writing down some of your observations!

Like all of our website (and our product, as a matter of fact), we accept merge requests to improve that page: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/sou...

shandor9y ago

Thanks for the reply!

I'll see if I have time to evaluate yet more tools very thoroughly , but if I look into GitLab I'll definitely hit you with something for that page :)

one thing that jumps at me from those comparisons is that mostly all of them are against other tools that are mainly for repository hosting. Is it intentional, and similarly the main idea of GitLab itself?

1 more reply

stevenringo9y ago· 2 in thread

This is awesome. Is it possible to have a central set of issues per group? Many (real-world) projects have issues that span across multiple (GitLab) projects. I guess one could create an "empty" project for issues, but this is hacky. Thanks again.

sytse9y ago

Great suggestion. With milestones you can already aggregate issues on a group level, but it makes sense to have a group level issue board too. I created an issue in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/911

vmlrodrigues9y ago

skift9y ago· 2 in thread

How do we use the mattermost features on gitlab.com ?

DouweM9y ago

Mattermost is not enabled on GitLab.com, in part because it's not prepared for multi-tenancy, and in part because it is shipped with the GitLab package specifically for people who want to have a self-hosted development and collaboration environment. If you're fine with using hosted tools, there are plenty of great hosted chat tools out there!

zegerjan9y ago

DouweM, it is possible though to do this. Although a good seamless integration would require some extra work from our end. I've proposed this in an issue[1]. It is not planned though, at this time.

[1]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21251

aban9y ago· 2 in thread

GitLab's been going at it for quite a while now, congrats for another awesome release! And keep up the great work guys, it's much appreciated!

jobvandervoort9y ago

Thanks aban! Any feedback?

aban9y ago

You guys are awesome!

For my 2¢, it would be really great to see some "official" love for Haskell at GitLab :) E.g. having Haskell tools installed on shared runners would be pretty nice!

I'm also curious to know the state of functional programming at GitLab. I know you guys mostly do Ruby, but would you be open to employees using functional languages or frameworks for work? (e.g. Elm, Elixir, Haskell and other exciting functional stuff)

1 more reply

K0nserv9y ago· 1 in thread

GitLab keeps surprising me with the consistency and quality of their releases. They are really putting GitHub on the spot at the moment and I for one love the competition in this space

jobvandervoort9y ago

Great to hear and thanks for the work you're putting in to support GitLab for Danger. The other day a colleague said "DANGER IS AWESOME".

hardwaresofton9y ago· 1 in thread

Another excellent Gitlab release -- I'm super excited to hear about the addition of issue boards. Please replace Jira and github at the same time.

I <3 Gitlab

tedmiston9y ago

I hope this is the intention. I'd love to migrate off Jira. Presumably like others, it's the reporting and accounting features for management purposes that have kept us tied to it.

ma1389y ago· 1 in thread

Congrats to the Gitlab team for pushing this out the door so quickly!

Back when we built one of ZenHub’s [1] first features — task boards inside GitHub — we believed strongly that development teams needed a single source of truth in order to move faster and communicate better. That belief has underscored everything we’ve built since. It’s awesome to see further validation for this philosophy here with Gitlab!

[1] https://www.zenhub.com/

sytse9y ago

Totally agree with the single source of truth. I think ZenHub is very well done.

mikewhy9y ago· 1 in thread

What's the reasoning behind the different characters in slash commands?

    # Why
    /milestone %milestone
    /label ~foo

    # Instead of
    /milestone milestone
    /label foo

DouweM9y ago

Both of those formats also work in comments outside of slash commands, are automatically linked to the respective entity, and label references are rendered as pretty labels, with their color and description tooltip.

Using those characters also enables autocomplete in the Markdown textarea.

In the web interface, they are very convenient, but they are not required, so when using slash commands with reply-by-email, you can leave them out and write exactly what you have under "Instead of"

superice9y ago· 1 in thread

A tiny question: does this mean a workflow in which only one user would be able to merge a specific branch (say: master) is only available in the enterprise edition? I imagine this is quite a common workflow, even at smaller companies or non-profits. This essentially forces you to use an entire repo per user to do code review, even though oftentimes you wouldn't need this when you can restrict branch access to a specific (set of) users.

For example, I'm active at a small non-profit computer shop at the campus of my university, and we develop our own stock managementsystem inhouse. This would be a very interesting feature even for non-enterprise users like us, because that'd allow for easy code reviews without having to fork the repo.

DouweM9y ago

CE does support restricting branches to specific roles: Master and Developer. In your case, I would suggest giving this single maintainer the Master role (which they already have if they're the owner of the project), making everyone else a Developer and configuring the master branch to only allow pushes (and merges) from Masters.

benjaminpv9y ago· 1 in thread

My job would never cotton to putting stuff on Github, so GitLab existing and being of such high quality has been fantastic. Really been impressed with it.

sytse9y ago

Glad to hear that!

sofaofthedamned9y ago· 1 in thread

I'm seeing this as Gitlab working towards their Jira killer. With Mattermost also in the omnibus edition this is rather ace. Congratulations to the team!

sytse9y ago

Thank you!

alfg9y ago· 1 in thread

So excited for this release! These guys are killing it on features!

Also noticed the speed/performance improvements lately.

Great job, GitLab!

sytse9y ago

Thanks Alfred!

steve3719y ago· 1 in thread

Awesome! Really awesome features. Time to persuade my boss to move to Gitlab now.

Just need some data on the latency and reliability. so far, I only found https://status.gitlab.com/. need some historical data now.

sytse9y ago

http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794 shows it for the last 7 days. If you want to have higher uptime also consider https://githost.io/ that we run.

glitcher9y ago· 1 in thread

My first impression of the Issue Boards is that it reminds me of Trello quite a bit! I happen to like Trello, and whether or not this new feature was Trello-inspired I'm excited to give it a test run.

jobvandervoort9y ago

We were definitely inspired by awesome software such as Trello and Asana. We've woven it into GitLab and have some iterations to go before it's exactly what we want, but we believe we've shipped something useful so far.

Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

nrclark9y ago

The "Gitlab doesn't handle big commits" bug is still a thing, and the two issues open for it are still open (and have been for months).

8.11 overhauled the diff backend, which works great! But the front-end still chokes up and freezes because the default appears to be 1000 files worth of diffs. This still pegs my CPU and hangs my browser when the page tries to render.

The second time loading the page is always fast (maybe something caches somewhere), but the first time is slow and chews the heck out of my poor PC. :(

Any chance we could get some sensible limits on the amount of information shown in a diff? Nobody is going to wade through 1000 files of diff in a web browser, so there's no reason to jam things up trying to render it.

https://gitlab.com/nrclark/dummy_project/commit/81ebdea5df2f...

edit: also, clicking the "Plain Diff" button breaks Gitlab

ocdtrekkie9y ago

Merge conflict resolution seems like something incredibly obvious to have, that yet is a pretty unique feature for the web UI. I've done a lot of stuff with GitHub's web UI, and I pretty much hit a wall any time I do something that's going to create a merge conflict, since I never really bothered to learn Git CLI. I saw GitBook did something similar to this a while ago, but that's for books, not code.

akerro9y ago

This is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsJ8tkHAa8

kirtant9y ago

An awesome release! Waiting for Koding to be enabled on gitlab.com ..

iamleppert9y ago

Anyone notice that Github is getting dog slow lately? When browsing source trees it used to be lightning fast. They're trippin'.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

122 comments

102 comments · 31 top-level

jobvandervoort9y ago· 9 in thread

We're super proud of this release. As always, we're here for any questions or comments.

alexwebb29y ago

The issue boards are a big deal, so congrats on getting that out!

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988 [2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14884

sytse9y ago

Thanks! Let's continue the conversation about custom issues in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/8988#note_141...

sofaofthedamned9y ago

Agreed, custom fields is where the pinch point is for most companies I contract at.

sinatra9y ago

[0]: https://asana.com/guide/help/fundamentals/text

sytse9y ago

In GitLab you can use @ to mention people, # to mention issues, and ! to mention merge requests.

2 more replies

ythl9y ago

New features look awesome.

Any idea of when we'll get global search? For a long time I've been wanting to search for a particular code snippet or file name across all projects.

sytse9y ago

Thanks! Isn't that global search possible with Elastic Search http://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/elasticsearch.html (EE only)?

1 more reply

Sir_Substance9y ago

Thanks for making a neat-o product!

/me wanders off to update

sytse9y ago

Thanks, I hope the update goes well.

kolanos9y ago· 6 in thread

sytse9y ago

fsiefken9y ago

foepys9y ago

luibelgo9y ago

Also having that big header plus tabs just grabs most of the vertical space in the screen, very bad decision now that most of the screens have way more horizontal space.

rmetzler9y ago

Gitlab's in-project navigation recently changed, Everyone on my team was confused.

sytse9y ago

1 more reply

nickysielicki9y ago· 6 in thread

With both GitHub and gitlab, I wish there was more work in making it easy to create pull requests without having to click around on a website.

That being said, I run Gitlab under a small docker box and I couldn't be happier with it. It's so darn easy to setup. Grats to gitlab team.

AaronBBrown9y ago

Have you tried `hub`? https://github.com/github/hub

    ~/src/bar (foo =)$ hub pull-request
    https://github.com/foo/bar/pull/5

There is also `hub fork` and others:

    These GitHub commands are provided by hub:

       pull-request   Open a pull request on GitHub
       fork           Make a fork of a remote repository on GitHub and add as remote
       create         Create this repository on GitHub and add GitHub as origin
       browse         Open a GitHub page in the default browser
       compare        Open a compare page on GitHub
       release        List or create releases (beta)
       issue          List or create issues (beta)
       ci-status      Show the CI status of a commit

mweilgart9y ago

You mean something like this? GitLab just added the feature; it looks like what you're asking for.

https://about.gitlab.com/2016/08/22/gitlab-8-11-released/#mr...

DouweM9y ago

carussell9y ago

Just support patches already.

knownothing9y ago

You can use GitHub's web UI to do all of that.

nickysielicki9y ago

Right. But what I'm saying is that you have to use GitHub's web UI to do all of that.

1 more reply

qznc9y ago· 6 in thread

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban

Nickoladze9y ago

Each week we meet with project owners (somebody at the client company). They give us a list of tasks they want completed this week and we go over tasks we finished last week.

We already use self-hosted GitLab for our code, so I want to try out this new board feature to see if it meets our needs.

unethical_ban9y ago

flukus9y ago

And prioritization, Cards get ordered by priority instead of 100 items all market "urgent, fix yesterday".

sytse9y ago

I'm not sure we want to have the software enforce limits, but I do agree that you don't want any list/column to become too long.

Cycle time analytics are planned in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20975

gsmethells9y ago

1 more reply

dragonwriter9y ago

johnnydoebk9y ago· 5 in thread

quadrangle9y ago

jakecodes9y ago

Hey thanks for the feedback. We are certainly working on it. Feel free to contribute to the issue. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13680

nzp9y ago

atsaloli9y ago

I find GL's UI easier and actually pleasant to use because it is less "busy" visually.

1 more reply

dudul9y ago

In terms of product/features, GitLab is so much better than GH though.

neuromute9y ago· 5 in thread

I just migrated our companies repos away from Bitbucket to GitLab. The whole process was super-easy. Really happy so far!

KamiNuvini9y ago

jschumacher9y ago

Great to hear you're already using JIRA and Confluence. Adding Bitbucket to the mix will give you access to a bunch of great integration features.

JIRA's Release Hub, to let you know if you're ready to release or not: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2015/04/jira-6-4-release-confiden...

The development panel, to turn every issue into a dashboard for it's development work: http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/03/visualize-development-jir...

Automated issue transitioning, because it's easy to forget to move that issue to "In Review": http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/08/jira-6-3-untangle-develop...

Hope this helps. For a good overview, you can also take a look at the documentation that outlines the above integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/BitbucketServer/JIR...

mweilgart9y ago

sytse9y ago

Just wanted to mention that GitLab CE/EE have support for using JIRA http://docs.gitlab.com/ce/project_services/jira.html

sytse9y ago

Thanks for believing in GitLab. Enjoy the CI, CD, and all the other features.

dak19y ago· 3 in thread

Setting up a project for both just takes a few initial commands to configure git:

  git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:account/repo.git
  git remote set-url --add --push origin git@gitlab.com:account/repo.git

Then pushing to origin will always push to both. I also add a github and gitlab remote in case I only want to push to one as well.

jtrtoo9y ago

Oh, good tip! Up until this moment I thought a remote mnemonic (e.g. "origin") could only refer to one. I didn't realize you could stack several behind a mnemonic.

tedmiston9y ago

> some tools like Code Climate are only free for GitHub accounts, but it's easily resolved by just using both

Are you doing a read only mirror to GitHub for this?

dak19y ago

Effectively. My project still gets pushed to GitHub and lives there, but I've disabled every feature I could (you can't disable PRs, but it's easy enough to redirect PRs over to GitLab).

Code Climate can still happily read from the GitHub project and I can add the badge to the README if desired, which is visible on both GitLab and GitHub.

And since origin pushes to both, they are rarely if ever out of sync.

1 more reply

jkot9y ago· 3 in thread

GitLab looks very tempting, congrats to their team.

Question: I would like to migrate from Github to Gitlab, but can not really move. Is there some bridge, which would mirror Github repos (with Issue tracker and pull requests) on Gitlab?

YorickPeterse9y ago

While you _can_ import data such as issues we do not have any automatic mirroring system for this in place. We do however have repository mirroring, but this _only_ mirrors the repository data.

sytse9y ago

We're discussing a full sync in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/904

aeharding9y ago

This is just in terms of ripping off the band-aid. I'm not sure of any mirroring, but I don't think that would be worth the hassle.

rawfan9y ago· 3 in thread

sytse9y ago

Yeah, if you want to use less resources Gogs is a great option. Did you know out team member Kim works on Gogs fulltime? https://about.gitlab.com/gogs/

Flimm9y ago

Fascinating. I'd understand why GitLab and Gogs might not be competing with each other, but why invest in Gogs? How does that benefit GitLabs the company?

1 more reply

ptman9y ago

Wow, that is really nice of you. Can you elaborate on the decision?

allan_s9y ago· 3 in thread

congrats for the new release, here my critic (don't take me wrong, I use and love gitlab for so long, and the other features of 8.11 are really awesome)

sytse9y ago

Hugo already mentioned the rebasing option in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12339492

allan_s9y ago

As for resolving conflict by merging, thanks I didn't know EEhad this feature.

1 more reply

K0nserv9y ago

GitLab EE has an option to require MRs to be fully rebased before allowing merges.

mi100hael9y ago· 2 in thread

karma_vaccum1239y ago

I was considering going self-hosted too, but then gitlab.com got a lot faster (thanks!!)

sytse9y ago

balabaster9y ago· 2 in thread

Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into ideas", not the other way around?

We're always trying to promote this idea of "don't sell the product, sell the problem you're solving" and your opening statement completely tips that on its head.

Not knocking GitLab in any way, I love your product and have used it for a while. Amazing work. Just me being a pedant ;)

RandomBK9y ago

> Shouldn't the video start with "We make software by turning issues into ideas", not the other way around?

They're using "issue" as in "issue tracking", not "issue with how the world works". In this sense, you take an idea and write it down as an issue, which can then be discussed and implemented.

balabaster9y ago

Fair enough, though ambiguity doesn't help their narrative. If I questioned it, I can't believe I am the only one.

shandor9y ago· 2 in thread

I'm glad there's starting to be a good amount of choice in this realm of tools!

Anyone have an opinion on how GitLab compares to those two?

DouweM9y ago

Like all of our website (and our product, as a matter of fact), we accept merge requests to improve that page: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/blob/master/sou...

shandor9y ago

Thanks for the reply!

I'll see if I have time to evaluate yet more tools very thoroughly , but if I look into GitLab I'll definitely hit you with something for that page :)

1 more reply

stevenringo9y ago· 2 in thread

sytse9y ago

vmlrodrigues9y ago

skift9y ago· 2 in thread

How do we use the mattermost features on gitlab.com ?

DouweM9y ago

zegerjan9y ago

DouweM, it is possible though to do this. Although a good seamless integration would require some extra work from our end. I've proposed this in an issue[1]. It is not planned though, at this time.

[1]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/21251

aban9y ago· 2 in thread

GitLab's been going at it for quite a while now, congrats for another awesome release! And keep up the great work guys, it's much appreciated!

jobvandervoort9y ago

Thanks aban! Any feedback?

aban9y ago

You guys are awesome!

For my 2¢, it would be really great to see some "official" love for Haskell at GitLab :) E.g. having Haskell tools installed on shared runners would be pretty nice!

1 more reply

K0nserv9y ago· 1 in thread

GitLab keeps surprising me with the consistency and quality of their releases. They are really putting GitHub on the spot at the moment and I for one love the competition in this space

jobvandervoort9y ago

Great to hear and thanks for the work you're putting in to support GitLab for Danger. The other day a colleague said "DANGER IS AWESOME".

hardwaresofton9y ago· 1 in thread

Another excellent Gitlab release -- I'm super excited to hear about the addition of issue boards. Please replace Jira and github at the same time.

I <3 Gitlab

tedmiston9y ago

I hope this is the intention. I'd love to migrate off Jira. Presumably like others, it's the reporting and accounting features for management purposes that have kept us tied to it.

ma1389y ago· 1 in thread

Congrats to the Gitlab team for pushing this out the door so quickly!

[1] https://www.zenhub.com/

sytse9y ago

Totally agree with the single source of truth. I think ZenHub is very well done.

mikewhy9y ago· 1 in thread

What's the reasoning behind the different characters in slash commands?

    # Why
    /milestone %milestone
    /label ~foo

    # Instead of
    /milestone milestone
    /label foo

DouweM9y ago

Using those characters also enables autocomplete in the Markdown textarea.

In the web interface, they are very convenient, but they are not required, so when using slash commands with reply-by-email, you can leave them out and write exactly what you have under "Instead of"

superice9y ago· 1 in thread

DouweM9y ago

benjaminpv9y ago· 1 in thread

My job would never cotton to putting stuff on Github, so GitLab existing and being of such high quality has been fantastic. Really been impressed with it.

sytse9y ago

Glad to hear that!

sofaofthedamned9y ago· 1 in thread

I'm seeing this as Gitlab working towards their Jira killer. With Mattermost also in the omnibus edition this is rather ace. Congratulations to the team!

sytse9y ago

Thank you!

alfg9y ago· 1 in thread

So excited for this release! These guys are killing it on features!

Also noticed the speed/performance improvements lately.

Great job, GitLab!

sytse9y ago

Thanks Alfred!

steve3719y ago· 1 in thread

Awesome! Really awesome features. Time to persuade my boss to move to Gitlab now.

Just need some data on the latency and reliability. so far, I only found https://status.gitlab.com/. need some historical data now.

sytse9y ago

http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794 shows it for the last 7 days. If you want to have higher uptime also consider https://githost.io/ that we run.

glitcher9y ago· 1 in thread

jobvandervoort9y ago

Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

nrclark9y ago

The "Gitlab doesn't handle big commits" bug is still a thing, and the two issues open for it are still open (and have been for months).

The second time loading the page is always fast (maybe something caches somewhere), but the first time is slow and chews the heck out of my poor PC. :(

https://gitlab.com/nrclark/dummy_project/commit/81ebdea5df2f...

edit: also, clicking the "Plain Diff" button breaks Gitlab

ocdtrekkie9y ago

akerro9y ago

This is great https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWsJ8tkHAa8

kirtant9y ago

An awesome release! Waiting for Koding to be enabled on gitlab.com ..

iamleppert9y ago

Anyone notice that Github is getting dog slow lately? When browsing source trees it used to be lightning fast. They're trippin'.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse