from Hacker News

GitLab 13.0

by marksamman on 5/22/20, 3:33 PM with 84 comments

• by emilycook on 5/22/20, 4:04 PM

  Hi! There are a lot of new features with this update, so here are a few highlights:

  -improved version of Gitaly service called Gitaly Cluster for high availability git storage [1]

  -simplified deployment of GitLab to Amazon ECS [2]

  -added epic hierarchy on roadmaps (+ other improvements to our epic and milestone features) [3]

  [1] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/05/22/gitlab-13-0-rel...

  [2] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/05/22/gitlab-13-0-rel...

  [3] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/05/22/gitlab-13-0-rel...

• by apple4ever on 5/22/20, 6:03 PM

  I really like GitLab, especially the Kubernetes integration. Its nice to see some Terraform integration as well. I do hope some of the security scanning goes to lower tiers, that can be very helpful.

  The biggest issue with GitLab I find is their stubbornness to have different prices for reporters vs developers[0][1]. It really makes no sense other than they just want more money (even though they are losing a bunch because lots of companies refuse to do it).

  [0]https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/3320

  [1]https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#reporter-user...

• by majkinetor on 5/22/20, 6:10 PM

  Exporting environment variables via artifacts sounds like a strange decision, but I guess its one way to do it. After years of waiting for jobs to communicate other then relying on file artifacts this is somewhat disappointing.

  I would like to see parent/child pipelines recive some love as currently it does work but quirks are all around. For example, its not easy (or sometimes even possible) to pass pipeline variables from parent to child, pipline UI behaves differently when being part of relation (and many times unusuable or shows a wrong thing), not being able to repeat manual jobs with the same var initially passed, not even being able to run it again with any other var unless you delete all previous executions, strange limitations on masked secret vars, $ in your password will get evaluated as variable etc ...

  Seems like an afterthought, rather then a carefully designed feature set. Too organic for my taste (I guess Conway's law is full blown there).

  While Gitlab CI is getting better (or more capable, rather then better) then before in every release, it does seem bloated, overly complex, full of surprises, not reproducible locally, very slow (caching is ridiculous feature that makes job often run longer then without it) and with strange design that doesn't let me view my build log full screen or collect entire pipeline output easily.

  Generally, Windows is also lagging behind (I can't use pwsh as runner shell today after 4 years in existence?). The worst recent offender: you display 'fail' on every job in color: "WARNING: Failed to load system CertPool: crypto/x509: system root pool is not available on Windows". This trips everybody that job has failed when it didn't.

  I think Gitlab guys need to start taking CI/CD/runner more seriously or at least bring some fresh mind to it. After all, this is one of the major reasons for many people to use it.

• by akater on 5/22/20, 5:24 PM

  It looks like it's now impossible to login to gitlab.com web interface via Tor. I only post it here because it was a recent sudden silent change that made gitlab.com unavailable to some, and there does not seem to be a response.

• by bearjaws on 5/22/20, 4:52 PM

  Terraform integration, and improved DAST scanner that will read in your OpenAPI doc and generate a dynamic scan, for my company which is striving for HiTrust certification, Gitlab has made my life easier. We switched last year and it keeps paying dividends for our security programs.

  I hope they begin to focus on more production stability, this week alone we've had 3 disruptions due to issues (although one looked like Google Cloud outage).

• by TekMol on 5/22/20, 5:27 PM

  What keeps me from using gitlab.com is that they flat out reject a signup with an email from my email provider.

  Anybody else having that problem?

  I wonder if they have a whitelist and only accept users who use the big boys like gmail etc. Or if they for some reason have totally legit email providers on their blacklist.

• by traspler on 5/22/20, 4:47 PM

  I really hope some of the the project management tools and scanning features will trickle down to the cheaper/free tiers some time.

  I can understand that not everything has to be free but the current feature split of project management and scanning features among the tiers feels a bit haphazard with some crucial things at the highest prices, making it hard to justify the in-between tiers and impossible to buy the highest.

• by candiddevmike on 5/22/20, 6:49 PM

  The Terraform bits are incredible, GitLab has almost made Terraform Enterprise irrelevant (aside from sentinel, for now). Will we see Vault management soon too?

• by gnachman on 5/23/20, 3:44 AM

  Since Gitlab is listening: users sometimes attach files to issues on my project and then regret it. There doesn’t seem to be any way to permanently delete such an upload. Sometimes these files have passwords or their employers’ secrets. I asked for help in the forums but got no response. Help?

• by efiecho on 5/23/20, 7:20 AM

  As said before it's frustrating that you can't browse source code or view replies to issues without javascript enabled. This is very basic functionality. I don't expect advanced stuff to work without javascript, but simple operations definitely should. Every other Git repository manager I know of, got this right. Just my two cents.

• by dimitropoulos on 5/22/20, 5:03 PM

  I was so happy when I saw the attention paid to deployment on ECS that I thought maybe they finally (years later) put some more attention into GCP[1], but it appears not. Hopefully in some time in the next few months!

  [1] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/charts/-/epics/4

• by gravypod on 5/23/20, 6:57 AM

  I love gitlab but I run into two issues constantly:

  1. Gitlab CI with DinD kills the docker cache on every build. For a large monorepo this is a huge pain. Really needs to be addressed with some host volume mount of the docker daemon layer cache per concurrent job.

  2. No say to specify CPU/disk/memory usage of a CI stage. I have a large number of builds that need ~512mb of ram per build and another build that needs 4GB of ram. Because of this I need to make sure every instance of the runner has exactly 4GB of ram available. This is a large waste of resources.

  Gitlab is a fantastic product and I'm super happy for migrating multiple companies to it and that they keep innovating.

• by flatiron on 5/22/20, 5:17 PM

  Already bumped our postgres RDS to 11 for this. Upgrade time! [edit] Upgrade went well

• by throwaway483284 on 5/22/20, 7:35 PM

  I am running Gitlab in Docker (using official images), how would you go with upgrading from version 12.10 without losing any data? I am using volumes for Gitlab data.

• by siscia on 5/22/20, 5:10 PM

  The thing that is really missing in gitlab CI is the impossibility to define a matrix for builds.

  We have to do the same actions on different environments and it is very troublesome.

• by noxecanexx on 5/24/20, 2:00 AM

  Nothing against gitlab as I use and pushed for it in my company, but I feel it's heading towards Azure Devops(this might be entirely baseless). By that I mean it's geared more towards enterprise teams and business than startups looking to build stuff and deploy. I say this off the complexity of their UI, their feature set and what they seem to prioritize.

• by argella on 5/23/20, 4:46 PM

  Too bad for me my company's IT team is going to force my group off of gitlab and on to azure devops.

• by subhrm on 5/22/20, 5:37 PM

  Does gitlab offer a stripped down version with only vanila 'git' ?

• by KayL on 5/22/20, 8:34 PM

  Issue edit history still has not enabled

• by Jahak on 5/22/20, 4:28 PM

  Hooray!