GitLab is great, but it's kind of a copycat project. Nothing wrong with that, it's just there really isn't a compelling reason to join beyond "less-predatory pricing".
And the people who care about that use private repos, not OSS.
Private repo can be useful for early stage of OSS projects.
Agreed though that it still feels too much like a clone of GitHub. The UI for example is way to close to the original.
The main thing I find extra useful on gitlab is the ability to mark a MR as a WIP.
> The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive
We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body.
> For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar?
Good example. Agree its still non-intuitive in some places. For you particular example we created an issue to fix - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480.
> And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use"
Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria.
> And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it?
You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences.
P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
In GitLab today, we end up deleting and re-creating merge requests, or waiting until <requester> comments "@<reviewer> ready for merge".
Now this would be awesome:
> We’re thinking about more improvements to the Merge Request Approvals, the main improvement being automatic suggestions for reviewers, based on the history of the changed files in the merge request. For instance, if Jane worked a lot on a certain class and you submit a change to that class, Jane gets suggested to approve your merge request.
Today we are using the self-hosted community edition though.
If we start recommending automatic reviewers based on the blame this would likely be an EE feature.
I've always thought GitHub's pricing is awesome and very accessible. Can you explain?
Even though it's not tons of code, GitHub's pricing breaks down horribly in this case. I think that that in the long run many startups will move to embrace GitLab in the early days for price if nothing else.
So, if my company finishes 30 projects per year, we'd be paying $360/year to GitHub for what is essentially "storing a backup". And if we do this every year, that's $1000/year within 3 years. Not to mention that for "Organizations" the prices are doubled. For some reason. So... $2000/year?
Right now the same job is done by a $5/mo linode, with the prospects of upgrading to $10/mo.
The one I have is mostly about analytics, sales, and support tools, and unfortunately repository hosting wasn't a question asked. I also wish they would make this data source public so others could see shifts early -- for example the wave from HipChat to Slack would have been very visible.
Perhaps StackShare might be the closest open source of similar data.