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> fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects

How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.

assigning reviewers is a major pain with gitlab. there have been multiple issues filed to support adding a group as a reviewer, only to have them closed by gitlab, saying thats not the ‘direction’ we’re going in. instead, you can do a /request_review @group in the description, but each person gets added individually so you can’t see which reviewers are in which group, you don’t know if you have the right groups to satisfy the codeowners files, etc. it’s such a mess.

Good and bad moments, honestly. GitLab would benefit massively if they went back and deleted all of the crap they added during their "feature checkbox craze" years. Just looking at the left menu, "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops" and all this crap urgently needs to go and get out of peoples way.

And, dare I say it? There is a place for GitLab in a world where most development happens with coding agents. Its perfectly fine to be the version control & CI place. But they got stupid management (just like Atlassian or GitHub) that have convinced themselves they must be the orchestrator, the middleman, the gatekeeper to inference. They neither are nor will be that and if they go down the path of Copilot trying to ruin their product to make it happen, it will be the end.

Gitlab should be a private company

What virtue battle?

This is an important point. You have a giant conglomerate with a constant growth of new conflicts for their customers.

it seems like all the media companies are being bought up by a select few people

does not portend good things for the future

For one that deal hasn't closed and secondly not sure what the connection is between Roku leaving Github and FOX. Please expand on relevance.

“virtue battle”! like it

Apparently they have 14x more code than the same month last year in github.

I'm sure most of it is garbage.

Would also like a write-up. People assume it's just because of GitHub outages, but GitHub is slightly worse in every aspect, so for big projects and organisations it compounds to being quite messy to manage and operate.

GitLab is thought-out to support larger groups with more complex pipelines, and while it's got it's own set of quirks, it doesn't begin to compare, GitHub in contrast seems like a toy forge for toy projects.

why? like having a dozen outages in the last couple months isn't a good enough reason why?

Roku uses Gitlab internally so could just be a standardization thing.

Probably the lack of transparency regarding AI and AI accounts. They don't require any declaration..

I like Dagger but it doesn't scale very well for larger workloads. Excellent for small/medium projects, though.

I haven't used Dagger but it looks like a fundamentally different design from traditional CI engines, so some people might have issues moving to it.

I recommend Drone.io or WoodpeckerCI for hosting your own CI. It's a very good design; very simple, easy to run, easy to use, integrates with most systems you'd want to, abstracts away components rather than tightly integrating them, and you don't need to be a programmer to use it. So basically the opposite of Dagger.

Yes, I use Dagger, it's much more than building containers

- Container based workflows are the same in CI and locally (you can run containers too), they become one-liners

- Remote caching out of the box without extra steps

- Multiple language SDKs, unlocks the DAG in BuildKit and containers, real reuse

- Obfuscates secrets from your logs and agents. I've built an agent environment on Dagger, which also includes forking and time travel)

tl;dr - Dagger gives you SDK access to BuildKit and container based DAGs for building or anything else.

v1-beta just released yesterday: https://dagger.io/blog/dagger-10-beta/

---

edit: they are replacing BuildKit (for good reasons) and that is already out https://dagger.io/changelog/theseus/

(Forgive the stupid AI answer, but does this help?):

2. Submitting an App Without a GitLab Account

To get an app listed on F-Droid, a metadata file must be added to the official fdroiddata repository. While the standard workflow involves opening a Merge Request on GitLab, you still do not strictly need a GitLab account: • Alternative Logins: The F-Droid GitLab instance allows you to sign in using your existing GitHub, Google, Bitbucket, or Salesforce accounts. • Community Submission: If you do not want to interact with GitLab at all, you can post a request on the F-Droid Forum, and community contributors can create and submit the metadata file on your behalf.

----- Apparently you don't need to actually create a gitlab account? Login with your github or whatever (I assume via oauth?)

The docs definitely don't look clear (on quick perusal), and maybe this info is outdated, but perhaps you can still push to gitlab without actually creating an account just need to make sure the metadata is correct?

HN is weird. My submission yesterday "Roku SceneGraph 2.0 SDK: Migrating to TypeScript" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212170> (which also involves the not-inconsequential news that the new SDK is open source) is at least 10x more interesting but got almost no attention.

My work GitHub account got suspended because Claude ran a bunch of gh commands in parallel. (Btw why not rate limit if it’s a problem?) For days now they won’t respond to my support ticket. Guess I just don’t get to have a job anymore because GitHub doesn’t like me? Burned a lifetime worth of goodwill from me this week.

It is so mid compared to the source control ecosystem I was exposed to at Meta. It really opened my eyes to how little innovation there has been in the public space and around git pretty much since its inception.

They have a lot of downtime. I use github actions and it’s down multiple times each week.

I like github, but it’s getting kind of nuts.

A major software project is changing from one major software tool to another major software tool. How is it not important? Or at least notable for HN?

Downtime aside, what do prefer about GitLab?

> figuring out where and how to contribute has regressed 20 years

What?

Step 1: go to project's manpage/readme or website.

Step 2: find the URL of their software forge (git/svn/hg site).

Step 3: clone and contribute using that website.

That process has been largely the same for a lot more than 20 years. Most people were not using GitHub as a discovery/random-repo-browsing system.

Do you have some time?

I moved my projects over to GitLab about a year ago.

GitLab's model is different - at least it was when I moved over to it. They charged for public repositories and gave you a free private ones as a sampler for trying out the platform. That approach is far less prone to getting overrun by millions of slopositories.

GitLab never tried to be the social media of software development. Theirs is a much simpler, classical model - one of the reasons I switched to them: you pay them money, they provide you services for that money.

It already is. (source: we use it as our primary forge)

They recently added more limits which should prevent a lot of AI abuse (which GitHub should have added a year ago). They also require a credit card now, and require payment immediately for exceeding storage limit or more than 5 people on a free/personal team.

> GitLab will eventually just get overran with 24/7 agents spewing from their AI Slop Cannons

That's fine. GitLab offers self-hosted solutions where companies run the service in their own infrastructure and limit who has access to it. The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.

Fixed https://gitlab.com/rokudev/dev-doc/-/merge_requests/6

> I always found it weird that people flocked to github.

Same reason we ended up with git. Their predecessors were significantly worse, and then they had enough momentum to keep going.

Well you're a developer. Why don't you make something better instead of complaining?

> I always found (...)

You broadcasted your negative feedback but it seems you had no positive remarks to give. If you feel everything is so bad, would you mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?

    > disguised as an open source project

Gitlab CE is open-source. There exist versions of Gitlab with features that require payment. This does not mean that Gitlab (the product) is not open-source; it means that Gitlab (the company) has a core product which is open-source, and then sustains its development through the sale of licenses to product tiers beyond that.

This logic baffles me. This would mean no one gets any work done and we go in a perennial cycle of victimhood

Thanks for a good laugh, FOSS in 2026 is nothing without the money of big corporations, including Microsoft.

Everyone spent years talking against GPL, business friendly licenses like MIT and Apache were the way of the future, not viral and co.

Now we are here, most projects have their key contributors working at corporations like Microsoft, or gladly getting their acquisition money to pay the VCs, embrace your business friendly licenses.

I'm hosting Forgejo for my homelab and couldn't be happier. I have everything running in containers with dind for CI/CD. Most of my workflows just worked with minimal changes. YMMV and this is far from an enterprises' needs but it's working great so far for my needs.

>Good. I want everyone to do this

Every other free service would die nearly instantly, so maybe only want useful things to move to other services.

>I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself.

It's mostly a good idea.... but, with the current security apocalypse we seem to be under making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job. The level of security hostility on the internet recently has reached numbers I've never seen before. RCE's dropping about every day, more targeted scans than I've ever seen in my life, swarms of AI bots breaking into services.

As an idea, do you think an enterprise only Git host would work.

Say annual contracts start at 100k minimum and everyone gets a dedicated support engineer.

You get your own rack. None of this degraded shared capability nonsense.

Does that seem like a solid business ?

Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.

Because of unreviewed AI code at GitHub services?