There is plenty of things that can make your life easier on Github/Gitlab, especially when working in a team:

- Issue tracker

- Merge requests that are easy to analyze

- Ability to put comments during a code review on specific lines of code and discuss it from there

- Embedded wiki for a project

- Managing different access rights to different repos

I couldn't see myself using pure git without any additional tooling for anything more that personal projects that I work on alone.

I don't understand the utility of the wiki.

Markdown is already rendered in the repo and can live next to the code. Meaning that merge requests can update both the code and documentation at the same time. And GitLab / GitHub have embedded editors that allow you to edit the markdown files using from the browser, just like a wiki.

Basically the only thing that is left is that the wiki can be edited without supervision.

My company uses GitLab/Jira/Confluence, and two super-important features that make Confluence a winner in my mind are a) a way better story for media embedding (including photos and random uploads like PDFs, but also rich/interactive media such as LucidChart and rendering ticket lists from a Jira filter), and b) the inline discussion/annotation framework that lets you tag/nag people, ask for clarification, etc. A big part of inline discussion is that it's an instant marker for later readers that the content may not be up to date or is under discussion/review, whereas a Markdown file in some repo can have a ticket filed against it, but there's nothing in the repo that alerts a later reader to the existence of that ticket until the problem is actually resolved.

I've always been an advocate for the "markdown in the repo" scheme with CI-generated Sphinx (or whatever) docs, but these features have really won me over to the standalone wiki at least in some cases.

Non-programmers are more comfortable in the Wiki. And it's probably safer to keep them there anyway, and edits can be allowed there with fewer safeguards.

Then again I'm not sure how many non-technical folks are willing to dig into GH anyway. I've heard Issues & friends called "too confusing" for "non-technical" folks, in favor of Asana and Jira, of all things. Huge WTF from me since I'd say the opposite is strongly true regardless how "technical" one is, but that's the perception I guess.

> Basically the only thing that is left is that the wiki can be edited without supervision.

Yes, that's a significant difference. Publically contributed information (Wikipedia, Stack Overflow) can be quite good.

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Another difference is that the wiki is not versioned with your code. (An entirely separate repo, but stil logically connected with the code repo.)

HEAD of wiki is documentation for version 1, version 2, version 3, etc. of your code.

That may be a good thing; that may be a bad thing.

I find they're rarely good, but I can see that having them live alongside code is good sometimes (as you say) but not so great when it needs to be changed independent of the code around it and you have a load 'fix markdown rendering' or 'fix typo' commits.

That feels like a failure of the tool/workflow— when you use the web UI edit button, it should put your edits on a branch for review, and make it easy to make further edits/corrections and then squash all of the piddly fixes into one big change at the end.

Fortunately, you can disable the wiki (and snippets!) on a per-project basis in at least Gitlab. Which is what we do on all our projects to ensure that everything goes through a single versioning flow.

They're also convenient synchronisation points for tooling e.g. CI, linters, fixers, merge bots, …

Ok, different question, but does that justify gitlab's recent valuation of 2.75B?

Yes.

That's like asking if shitty burgers really "justify mcdonalds valuation".

Maybe you are not impressed with the product, but millions of people are interested in buying it.

The difference is that with a little help (e.g. 10M) I can start a (serious) gitlab competitor tomorrow. Not so with the hamburger chain.

Gitlab is not just git hosting, they want to own the full developing cycle. they already got ci pipelines, easy ways to deploy on kubernates, and much more and its feature are growing at a fast. You cannnot replicate every gitlab feature with 10M, and you still have to fight the network effect.

For years Gitlab had a better offer then Github, and yet github was always more popular due to the network effect.

Maybe you haven’t noticed this, but Gitlab is an open-source project.

It’s pretty hard to claim a technical moat when most of what you sell can be replicated with a repo fork.

That's not how it works. Open source makes it trivial for the nerds inside a company to deploy. Soon, they start taking advantage of various APIs and integrations. They'll have scripts written in Bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and what not talking to various API endpoints, communicating with other systems using JSON, XML, etc. Every single bot or integration like that is one more "tentacle".

Without signing a contract or even having the board or upper management discuss it, the organization is now entrenched with this piece of software. Comes along a new regulation for your industry; GPDR, SOX, HIPAA, etc. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Fortunately, the provider of your "open source" (or rather: open core) solution offers features supporting your use case. You just have to upgrade from the MIT-licensed core, community edition to the enterprise edition, for $xx,xxx per year.

Nobody cares about that. Sales and value is what matters in the real-world. Gitlab has sales from customers who have proven they value the product. That's where the valuation comes from.

It doesn't matter if you can clone it exactly tomorrow. Go ahead and do so. It won't give you the same valuation and it won't hurt theirs because that's not how it works.

Right. And next you’re going to tell me that the majority of their users don’t just download the software and deploy it without paying.

Gitlab as a company is about a precarious as Docker as a company. Most of its users are using it for free, and the few that are paying would happily pay anyone else who provided support for the same software. It’s a commodity.

All freemium business models have a large free usage tier. This is completely unsurprising.

But yes, many people also pay Gitlab for enterprise features (which are not open-source), hosting, support, and more. If they would pay anyone else then why aren't they using Github? If they just wanted git itself then why aren't they using the numerous lightweight alternatives?

Business isn't as simple as replicating a product, it's about selling value, and Gitlab has a unique solution that covers the entire software lifecycle. I'm sure you know all this but yet you've made numerous posts disparaging this company. Why, exactly?

GitLab is an open-core project, people pay for additional features in the (proprietary) Enterprise Edition.

I love how the gitlab fanboys try to have it both ways.

When arguing why it’s better than alternatives, the talking point is that “it’s open-source!” But when it’s (rightfully) pointed out that this doesn’t leave much of a defensive moat, the open-source philosophy gets thrown under the bus.

Yes, yes...it’s “open core”. That just means that it’s 10% more difficult to clone and replicate the business. Mark my words: someday, Gitlab will do something to piss off the “community”, and this will quickly happen.

> The difference is that with a little help (e.g. 10M) I can start a gitlab competitor tomorrow. Not so with the hamburger chain.

True, you could start a burger chain for a lot less than $10m...

For 10M you can definitely start a hamburger chain that competes locally with McDonalds.

Gitea is already a decent competitor, valued at $0. What gives a company like this value are the contracts and the technical lock-ins making sure you can milk a relatively small group of captive, high-value users for many years. There are many companies using Gitlab.

Building a product is the easy part. Building the user base is what makes an evaluation. Just the same as anyone can start a fast food chain but if no buys any food in there the chain isn’t worth squat.

> The difference is that with a little help (e.g. 10M) I can start a (serious) gitlab competitor tomorrow.

You are greatly overestimating your abilities.

When our firm moved to git, Github and Gitlab were chosen as options and since gitlab gave us a better offer, we took it. However, the firm also uses Jira and now we are getting a better offer with Jira, Confluence and bitbucket. Eventhough Gitlab is loved by our team, It looks like Bitbucket will be the future for us. So you should not underestimate the market presence of a company.

It is a mistake to let the issue tracker (Jira) drive tool selection instead of the developer tools (configuration management, continuous integration). Be cautious of the switch if your company is switching for that reason.

The problem is that we are a team of 12 use the versioning, while more than 500 people of various teams use Jira and Atlassian toolset ( Whose jobs dont require versioning, as we create tools that hide/simplify the process for them).

This is just your greed for $10m speaking. The cost is vastly, vastly less than that.

source: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/<BVRVZEWYB30Q.3H...

Go ahead then.

I don't know, but for reference GitHub was acquired for 7.5B and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B.

> and Atlassian has a market cap of 30B.

Because Atlassian manages to extract boatloads of enterprise money for a product portfolio that can be best described as an inconsistent, unintegrated mess.

Everything they have was bought together and crudely integrated, with each product having totally different ways of using and administrating them. Not to mention that core features (e.g. "merging" duplicate user accounts, SAML login) are paid-for plugins of varying quality. Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence.

But still, enterprises are buying up that crap because the alternatives to JIRA and Confluence plainly suck even more. The only thing that has real competition is Bitbucket, with Gitlab and Github as more than viable alternatives.

Atlassian have very successfully aligned themselves with the managerial layer that like to think their organisations are "agile", or believe that buying some software suite will somehow bring that about, rather than simply codify and entrench their existing faulty workflows and add new processes to bureaucratize.

Agile equals a bunch of complicated "workflows" in Jira. This is a real thing that a non-small number of managers believe. Or if they don't believe it, they sure act like they do.

Wow circle of life stuff. When you remember they got into enterprise through winning heart and mind

> Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence.

One such 'feature request' is 'unsubscribe from email': https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/How-can-us...

Mental.

I have a rule to send it all to spam.

This came up on the Hadoop JIRA lately. Someone submitted an issue several years ago and the team is investigating it now and he was trying to figure out how to get off the notification list. They ended up having to change the reporter. jfc jira's a mess.

Extracting money is what a business does. They managed to extract enough to get their valuation. It has nothing to do with how bad the product is, and shows why sales is far more important than tech when building a company.

No it doesn’t justify the valuation, but a list of things one person likes about gitlab/github over plain git isn’t supposed to justify a valuation.

Less than half the price that Microsoft paid for Github.

> Issue tracker

There are bug trackers that have more features compared to Github/Gitlab.

> Merge requests that are easy to analyze

You can get that through pure git by using git format-patch and git send-email

> Ability to put comments during a code review on specific lines of code and discuss it from there

You can get that by replying inline to the email containing the patch (much like I'm doing here when replying to a certain part of your comment).

> Embedded wiki for a project

That could be maintained in the docs directory of the project

> Managing different access rights to different repos

Given that the project maintainer(s) maintain access to their repos, they could just as well handle the access rights without having to rely on Github/Gitlab.

That’s all true, but a lot of people prefer to have this all in one place.

I'm a happy GitHub user, these things I'd miss from pure git:

- Search (across code, issues, pull requests etc)

- Issue tracker (~ manage my backlog, write down potential ideas)

- Pull requests, review UI around them

- GitHub Apps and Actions (~ automation) and integration with third-party tools (auto-deploy changes to zeit.co / netlify / heroku etc).

- Security audits (GitHub can send pull requests to bump my dependencies when security vulns are discovered in them)

- Ability to contribute without having to fork/clone/push changes (I quite often contribute to projects by editing the code directly through the GitHub website).

> (I quite often contribute to projects by editing the code directly through the GitHub website)

Whenever I do that I get as far as the commit message and, lacking vi and a 72 char marker, commit 'wip', pull down the changes, amend the commit, and wish I'd done the whole thing locally faster and more easily in the first place.

I've never the GitHub editor/UI to submit non-trivial changes which require more than a few words to describe. I do not need vi to write "Fix a typo in the documentation".

Is it you or the project owners who care about the 72 character limit? IME most projects will accept contributions regardless of formatting of the commit message. Most people are just happy about contributions, regardless of source.

It's my own preference.

I just format the message in my text editor and paste it back into the commit message box before submitting.

Pull-requests and integrated review/comments.

When you work in a team and want to be productive, pure Git just doesn't provides the tools.

PRs are a necessary tool.

Also comments on issues are a crucial part of the documentation for devs.

"Looks like this does not work as documented" "Yes, this corner case is a bug, will be fixed soon, use this workaround in the meantime".

For me, using pure git is fine when working on solo projects. The benefits of such services is when there are many developers in the same project. Gives a good overview of issue reports, what commits are linked to what issues, easy "pull request" overviews/quick reviews without checking out branches etc. It's more about the social and less about the source control for me

Continuous Integration. Don't understand how anyone wants to run a software project without an independent and automatic test-runner. For Github this means using Travis CI, CircleCI, Appveyor etc

You don't need CI if you don't have any tests...

You don't need anything if it doesn't matter whether the software works or not.

Sure you do. Lots of projects are using compiled languages, even if the developers for whatever reason have decided to not write tests (lazy? lack of competence? decided tests wont benfit the project).

These projects too will benefit from a independent CI-service validating their commits.

Or deployment.

TBF this can be integrated to a pure-git setup e.g. Python had buildbots (on mercurial but samesies) long before it moved to github or whatever.

Generally speaking you'd set up your own "synchronisation channel(s)" for such tools e.g. mailing lists.

"pure git has all the features you need, if you use pure git alongside all these other third party tools"

The point of github / gitlab / etc is to have all the tools in one place, nicely integrated

I most certainly agree.

You don't really need gitlab/github for that, you can automate any kind of tests/build/deployment process with pure git hooks.

I personally feel gitlab/github are useful from community and collaboration aspects - there is nothing I couldn't do without github on my solo projects from purely technical point of view, it's strengths are issue tracking, pull requests, wikis, distribution of code.

GitLab CI. IMHO there is no CI platform which comes close to this (except Circle CI maybe).

For my personal projects I use Gitea (source code hosting) + Bazel (build system) + Drone.io (automated builds) + Harbor (container registry) + Keel (deployment to Kubernetes). At a glance of Gitlab's documentation it looks like these tools cover most of what GitLab CI/Registry does, is there anything major I'm missing that you'd describe as a killer feature?

Sorry for the late response. The killer feature of GitLabCI is that it offers the same functionality as all the tools you've mentioned but much better integrated because they are all part of GitLab. E.g. for CI you don't need to configure webhooks to trigger a build, you just assign a runner to the project and add a .gitlabci.yml.

Source control is really only the 'hook' that brings developers into both GitHub and GitLab.

Primarily they're communities which grow in value based on the number of developers and projects hosted within them.

Some of the powerful resulting centralized features are:

* The social / team functionality - collaborating on code review, receiving notifications on repository activity, managing access control across multiple codebases

* Code discovery - the ability to find projects which use a particular library, search for (and subscribe to) issue reports/fixes, follow other developers' activity

These could more-or-less be achieved by configuring individual repos and setting up your own email alerts and notifications; GitHub & GitLab just make it very convenient and bring it all together in a single place.

I wanted to point out the different "levels" between your own local git repo and GitLab/GitHub. If you're by yourself, a local git repo is great. "One step up," would be a remote git repo you push/pull to (people often use this for encrypted password repos or dotfiles). After that are things like Gitea or Gogs, which add a lightweight web interface. As you move to GitLab/GitHub you start to see features like; accounts, permissions, code search, issues, wiki, pull request, CI integration, etc.

You can use something like GitHub/GitLab for most all of these tasks, but it's a bit overkill on things like maintenance and hardware requirements if your needs aren't great.

In my opinion, I still use straight Git even though we have a GitLab server. We only do pull requests through GitLab when we have a new hire or a contractor. I don't believe that using GitLab to manage the remote repositories has impacted anyone's ability to use Git to get their work done.

In terms of what I would miss if we had to move away from GitLab, it's having remote repository management and continuous integration in one spot. In the past when a new project started, an administrator had to setup the repository and link in SSH keys, that same person had to setup Jenkins for the CI workflow. With GitLab, developers can set these things up on their own.

And there's one less tool to manage.

> If you guys that use GitLab or GitHub or alike would have to switch to pure git - what is the one thing you would miss most?

Github & Gitlab do tons of things which pure Git does not:

    - issue-tracking
    - wikis / documentation
    - release and package-management
    - CI
    - a free of cost (and effort) "public facing website" for your project by default
    - notifications to collaborators

I'm sure there's more I've missed which I would remember in a heart-beat if I was forced to go plain git and were suddenly without, but those are the most obvious ones I can come up with without even thinking.

I've made a short presentation about filling the gap between just pure git and something like gitlab.

https://her.esy.fun/slides/git-project-manager.html

Mostly, project-management features.

Gitlab isn't just a code repository, it's an entire DevOps platform. I don't use GitLab, but my equivalent (Azure DevOps) gives me things like automated builds on checkin, runs unit tests against those builds, and one-click deployments to my test and production environments.

On my local machine, there's nothing stopping me from using any Git client I want, including the Git CLI..

Very nice web view of source code, inline commentary on merge requests... merge requests themselves.

To a one-click view of CI pipelines, that's nice too.

On my solo projects I use Gitea because otherwise I'd miss tickets and wiki.

You could replace those with TODO/FIXME comments in the code and .md files checked in git though.

Fossil seems to offer the best of both worlds, but unfortunately it's too confidential and no one else seems to use it.

We use it. It's great. Extremely secure too, since you can sync over ssh without having to expose a web server at all, since your wiki, tech notes, and tickets get transferred over ssh with the repo then are accessed locally using `fossil ui`. Self hosting, and it is extremely simple to setup. Backups are super simple as well.

On the social side, that would be starring/watching cool project on the platform.

Mostly I would miss to organise 50+ developers on one platform. GitLab offers a very good authorization mechanics. Furthermore the CI pipeline is extremely helpful. There is no need to use anything else.

The main thing I'd miss is GitLab CI. The documentation is great, it was pretty fast to learn, and it runs on every push to remote.