Hi All, So I thought I'd post about our experiences switching from Atlassian Stash to Gitlab CE at a banking institution from South Africa. As well as ask some questions).
I think GitLab as a product and how the company is run, is simply awesome. Enjoy reading the blogs and the "openness" of the company. I also like the idea to try put as much data/content under git and GitLab control. So we decided to switch away from Stash (which we were paying for) and switch to GitLab CE. Unfortunately some departments are still running with Stash (and the various Atlassian products) but at least our division isn't. The good: There is a lot. But some of the highlights for us have been: 1) It's blazing fast compared to Stash. It's like comparing a cheetah to a turtle, seriously. In our case the turtle was also sick, and would often time out and or have errors. Moreover the merges are kind of asynchronous in GitLab compared to Stash where they appeared synchronous and one would have to wait for each MR to 2) Omnibus is really great. There are so many reasons why we've found omnibus great. - We can and do automate the updates of GitLab nightly via apt-get. - Really quick and easy to get it up and running. And one can feel confident it's well configured. - The software stack gets updated too with GitLab updates. 3) Way more KISS solution. In every way. Which encourages users to use the system more as well as makes sysadmin of the system easier too. 4) Being able to revert merges (not just commits) and via the web interface is really nice. 5) RSS by default, nice stats integrated, WIP feature, milestones, TODOs, integrated issue system, syntax highlighted diff etc. 6) Admin impersonate feature. This is really helpful under various scenarios. It also helped with the migration. 7) Single page to view all MRs. This simple and crucial feature was missing in Stash. 8) System resources. Before we had multiple nodes with beefy virtual hardware. We now have one relatively low spec VM on vplex which performs great as is HA enough for us. 9) Frequent/rapid development of GitLab :) 10) Documentation is simple and great. 11) The community focus and openness of development. 12) It's completely free software! (CE). The drawbacks since switching from Stash: 1) (This one is major for us. This may be a bug or perhaps it's something we're doing wrong. I'm really not sure and have no idea how to debug this further. So any tips here would be appreciated. I may go ahead and file an issue if need be.) The way our git process works is we have two long standing branches, nonprod and production. We create new branches off production typically make the change in the new branch and submit two MRs, one to nonprod and one to production (which is selected as the default in the project). The issue/bug(?), is a) The diffs view (Changes) view for the nonprod MR is incorrect IMO and differs from that of the production MR. It shows commits that aren't from the branch I created. I think these commits are always merge commits. The issue is that the diff view then shows changes/diffs for changes that aren't from the source branch. *These "extra" changes have already been merged into the target branch*. So the diff appears incorrect. The MR to the target production(default) branch is always correct/perfect. There are no extra merge commits and the diffs are always correct, ie just the things I changed/just the difference between the source and target branch. It doesn't show these extra invalid changes that have already been merged. b) When this occurs the title for the MR for the target nonprod will be set to the branch name (with the underscores stripped and the title capitalised.) This differs from the target production(default) MR, that MR title is set to from the commit in the branch. This makes the MR overview screen confuses because one can't easily see the two MRs are the same, just to a different target. I unfortunately can't consistently reproduce the issue, it happens randomly. The above description is what happens when the issue occurs. How can I debug this further? Should I log an issue for this? I think it may be a bug in GitLab as this didn't occur while we were with Stash. Unless it's something we're doing wrong. 2) When submitting a new MR, the source branches aren't sorted by last modified/updated. Therefore one needs to type in(and remember the name) of the branch name when submitted a new MR. Rather then likely just clicking the branch from the top of the list. Similarly other views, like the MR Merged page, I think, should be displayed by Last updated by default. 3) Stash's PR/MR view was a little "clearer". Specifically one could see the source branch name and the target branch name from the overview screen. We find this very helpful. GitLab only shows the target branch name, if it's not the default target branch. It also doesn't show the source branch name which we find helpful. 4) We miss the ability to approve MRs and or require mandatory reviewers. However it's understandable for this to be missing in the CE edition and still makes the switch well worth it. Other nice to haves: 5) We use the thumbs up/down to "approve" MRs. A proposal would be that when one thumbs up/down a MR it shouldn't count or increment the chat bubble icon on the MR dashboard view. The reason is that it's nice to look at the MR overview page and see if a MR is approved or not while being able to see if there is comments on the MR. ie differentiate between the two the MR overview page. 6) Having a automatically merge this at date/time would be great. As some of our changes (in an infrastructure as code environment) happen as specific date/times. I'd like to log issues/proposals for some of the above. However I thought I'd post here first and take it from there. Summary: The actually switch from Stash to GitLab CE was also very easy and problem free. Overall, switching from paid for Stash to the free GitLab CE has been an a wonderful *major upgrade* for us and made our working environment so much better. It's a pity we never switched earlier. Thanks to all and keep up the great work. -- Best regards, Divan Santana -- Best regards, Divan Santana Red Hat Certified Architect RHCA | CCNA | MCSE Mobile: +27 82 787 8522 Email: [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GitLab" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/gitlabhq/87lh4tv67y.fsf%40santanas.co.za. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
