I've only noticed one: the ability to do less. Along with its excellent improvements over the years, it also gained some staggering RAM usage.
It used to be really nice for self-hosting your own private GitHub alternative on a little VPS or RasPi, but those days are apparently behind us.
Being able to comfortably host a limited version of GitLab for a small team on the lowest tier of Digital Ocean or EC2 instances (<512MB) would be a game changer in terms of the accessibility of GitLab as a product. It would give you access to the long tail of potential privacy-conscious users who would like to avoid hosting their code on a SaaS service (and thus wouldn't be already captured by the market leader, GitHub), but might be put off by the high operational costs involved with self-hosting a GitLab instance compared to some of the lighter weight alternatives.
It's entirely possible that a single Puma process may end up using more memory than a single Unicorn process, so the only way to know for certain is to measure the difference.
As listed in https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html the minimum is 1GB "1GB RAM + 3GB of swap is the absolute minimum but we strongly advise against this amount of memory. See the unicorn worker section below for more advice."
Most of the memory for the configuration of 4GB we recommend is to run extra unicorn workers https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html#unicorn... You would save this memory because you can multithread one worker.
It doesn't have a pretty interface, but it works, and its requirements are minimal. I've had good success using it to host student repos in my classes for about 4 years.
Gogs is fine.
People, for whatever reason, think devs have to continue adding more and more features otherwise they see the project as "dead". It's not.
In my opinion the Gitea folks are creating a bloated version of Gogs. YMMV.
He was also totally ok with the fork to gitea.
Gitea exists so that more features can be added faster, not necessarily keeping the code quality ideal.
For many more features I use gitlab. With gogs I'm looking for simplicity.
GitLab.com subscriptions https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ are more recent but this is growing rapidly.
I'm leeching on gitlab.com today, but not enthused about it, if only because I've become disillusioned with GitLab itself.
I pay for email, and I'd be willing to pay for code hosting, too, on the following conditions:
- it's running something like Gogs/Gitea instead of GitLab
- whatever software's on the backend, my subscription needs to allow me to choose the community edition, not some enterprise version
- priced at XX/yr instead of X/mo
Even ignoring that, telling someone their product isn't what you want and to please offer a different product isn't an outlandish thing to say.
I understand I risk looking like an idiot but did you mean X per user per month? If not, what's the difference?
The difference between XX/yr and X/mo is that the latter is a tactic that relies on perceptual psychology to downplay the cost, same as when you see something priced at $3.99 instead of $4. It might be important to clarify that when I say XX/yr what I mean by XX is ~50USD. That's a reasonable price for a small instance (especially since the current going rate for something comparable is $0). Something priced at $8–9/mo, however, costs twice as much, even though the monthly pricing scheme helps to hide it. If you're buying hosting for your code, you don't really need the flexibility of monthly pricing. (What're you gonna do, spin up some short-lived instances for as long as you need them and then shut them down when you're "done" with them? No. The expected user model for code hosting is one that's cumulative.)
Side note: charging per user per month for a hosted instance would be pretty arbitrary, anyway. Put a cap on instance size, workload, number of simultaneous requests, and daily or hourly data in and data out, not on number of users. Charging by the user for a hosted instance is very nearly unashamed rent-seeking. The only reason it makes sense for GitLab EE is because it's on-prem.
I can't help but think of the old "what are you trying to optimize for?" question though. Gitlab.com is OK for me because I don't make money writing code so I'm OK just getting free private repositories and any ci stuff I get is just gravy. I used to think "how will they ever make money?" and this makes sense.
I read this other story about how a DNS service was getting rid of its free tier because the free tier users can't convert. I think gitlab and github have found a good opportunity by giving away free service to free and open source software which means people will have experience using the service and might just keep using it at work (haven't checked but I'm sure github enterprise is not cheap).
I am a GitLab reseller and offer a 10% discount to HN users.
I'm glad that Gitlab exists, however the lazy person in me sees no immediate need to use it. Even if all Github datacenters are destroyed by an asteroid, copies of repos I care about will still be around in enough people's computers to be able to recover.
But anyway, the same argument could be made of an asteroid hitting your own datacenter with self-hosted GitLab instead.
You still have a git repo on both github and bitbucket, even if they stop development you will be able to download your code and host it anywhere you want. No?
You can take a look at some ongoing performance-related issues at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf... as well as some already completed improvements at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...
There's also a plethora of ongoing efforts on making our hosted instance GitLab.com even faster. Lots of issues to look over at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...
Their real-time updates like the pipeline completion signalling still has some lag. But I think the plan to improve real-time updates is on the roadmap for a big overhaul.
You can self host it which is cool and means that if the company's funds dry up and they stops development (hopefully never), you can continue using the product. With Google Code shut down and Github losing 66 million in 9 months in 2016, it's an important question to ask about where you keep your source code.
Featurewise, I haven't noticed anything that I can't use Gitlab for that I wanted to do. The interface is still less familiar to me than Github, but that seems to be a function of it being changed relatively often as well as the time spent looking at it.
I also like how much Gitlab embraces open source. They recently acquired Gitter and will open source it. Even though I mainly just use it as an alternative to the still more popular Github, I'm considering picking up one of the Enterprise plans to help ensure the development pace continues like this!