this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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GitLab

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A community for GitLab, the DevOps software package. https://about.gitlab.com/

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I remember using gitlab in its very early days before it had vc funding. It was a basic github clone. Then its memory usage doubled with every release needing more, I remember 4GB in one release from like 1GB previously. Once the VCs got on board, new basic poorly-coded features were added all the time to be a github clone to obviously appease them.

Eugh, ruby that it isn't easy to develop for and eugh it's sooo slow.

It's at the the point now, I think there's no decent open source VCS if your purposes are little-more than pushing, viewing code and basic CI.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

I hate how there's no global "make duo fuck off permanently" toggle in their vscode extension. I just want to see MRs and pipelines in the extension not play whack-a-mole with settings for that

[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

There are so many basic issues with Gitlab I wish they would fix rather than adding AI.

And I definitely think there is space for AI, particularly in code review and triaging issues. But it doesn't look like Duo does either of those?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

What are those issues? I use gitlab for personal use and for a small group of people at work so I'm curious.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

Various things I've run into:

  1. Git's submodule support is hella buggy, so if you use submodules with the FETCH Git strategy then it will break. Gitlab needs a fallback where it deletes the repo and clones from scratch. Unfortunately they won't do that because they don't want to have to redownload blobs (and somehow they think completely breaking is better?)

  2. You can collapse log output in CI, but you have to decide in advance whether a section is collapsed - you can't put the collapse marker in the closing tag. Quite annoying.

  3. The built-in CI sections (cloning, cleaning up at the end etc.) are extremely verbose (especially with submodules) and can't be collapsed by default, making the log output very annoying - you always have to scroll up to see the actual end of the log.

  4. There's a bug where sometimes pipelines don't run at all, if you configure your workflow rules to not run merge request pipelines.

  5. There's a bug where sometimes git authentication fails for the first time a new submodule is added to a project.

  6. The quick search thingy sometimes fails to find a project even if you type it in exactly. I haven't looked into that.

  7. You can't configure the max length of merge trains. It's hard-coded to 20.

There's loads more... this is just what I remember off the top of my head.

Pretty much any time you find a bug you'll discover a 5 year old issue with some "A large premium customer is requesting this" comments.

I mostly like Gitlab but it has quite a lot of bugs once you use it in anger. It's doubly annoying because I can't really debug them even with the source code, because it's written in untyped Ruby and that is basically the worst case scenario if you want to follow a large code base. Even Phabricator (PHP) was easier to work on.

I haven't looked into the Forgejo code but it's written in Go so it is guaranteed to be a lot easier to work on, and probably less buggy.