Roku developer repositories moved from GitHub to GitLab (blog.roku.com)

285 pointsby cxr16 hours ago195 comments

PedroBatista 14 hours ago

Gitlab, for all it's flaws fits so much better in "regular" company/organization projects. It's more in line on what people involved in software dev and all the tasks around it have as a mental model and less of a "open source dev social network" like Github tried to be almost from the start and lately got Microsofted. An lets not even bring the CI / Github Actions topic..

ivanjermakov 14 hours ago

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

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

IshKebab 14 hours ago

Yeah I agree. There are only very minor differences.

koolala 14 hours ago

Isn't being able to self host it on your company network a big important feature? Like for all the non-public branches and projects you keep internal. Gives you the same UX for everything.

This sounds pretty annoying though: https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/license_usage/

radlad 13 hours ago

It is important for some companies. https://docs.github.com/en/[email protected]/admin/inst...

koolala 5 hours ago

Is it more expensive?

radlad 3 hours ago

Than Gitlab?

I'm not sure, you'd have to check their pricing pages.

koolala 3 hours ago

It doesn't say does it? For self-hosted commercial use? Wish either were open-source.

quietbritishjim 13 hours ago

That is important or critical in some companies. But that's surely not what they meant by fitting their "mental model" better.

myko 13 hours ago

I found it much easier to organize repos hierarchically with GitLab. Permissions also seemed easier to setup.

tyingq 13 hours ago

Gitlab is terrible at cross-group permissions if you use dedicated or self-hosted. Because gitlab.com is made to keep top level groups separate (separate tenants). Things like cross-group MR approval, use of the built-in artifact repositories, terraform module registry, gitlab components, and so on...is very messy...so many granular cross-group allows you have to turn on.

GuB-42 12 hours ago

Fundamentally, that's just git with a few common features like pull requests, account management and bug tracking.

Choosing one over the other is just a matter of details. How well it integrates with the corporate network, how pretty it looks, the options regarding CI/CD integration, overall popularity and community, etc... Last time I got to choose, I went with Gitea, because performance was good and it met my needs.

stefan_ 13 hours ago

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.

1718627440 11 hours ago

> "Secure" "Deploy" "Operate" "Monitor" "Analyze" "Auto Devops"

Deploy contains the released versions and packages.

Operate is for Infrastructure as Code.

Analyze are project and CI statistics.

I doubt you want to remove any of them, they are quite needed functionality.

nikau 8 hours ago

From my experience nobody uses them, they just want a pretty ui to view job status and logs.

yieldcrv 9 hours ago

Gitlab should be a private company

ralph84 7 hours ago

Their current CEO was brought in to sell the company to private equity like he did with New Relic in his last job. Unfortunately for him, private equity is being selective in which SaaS companies they acquire right now with interest rates spiking and uncertainty over the future of SaaS as AI becomes more capable. Acquisition by an AI lab was probably their next best hope, but the labs seem to all be rolling their own developer platform instead. Maybe Bending Spoons will make a move if the stock revisits its lows.

kart23 8 hours ago

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.

nullpoint420 7 hours ago

Is Gitlab Open Source or one of those weird "code available" projects? Can we make a PR?

bob1029 13 hours ago

(Assuming the move was due to the recent outages)

I don't know that the grass will remain green for very long anywhere in this current scenario.

GitHub is not having most of its outages because GitHub's engineers are using AI (although there might be a case or two of this). The primary driver of the outages is the fact that developers can move so much faster in their workflows. Every single user of these products is placing a heavier demand on the system. I don't think this ramping of demand will cease any time soon. I fully expect to receive an email any second now about how my 5,000 req/hr GH API quota will be cut in half before 2027.

I don't understand how GitLab would be immune from these forces, unless we were willing to reach for self-hosted & enterprise plans. Both of which GitHub offers.

LtWorf 10 hours ago

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

I'm sure most of it is garbage.

rr808 15 hours ago

Worth mentioning that Roku is being acquired by Fox so in the virtue battle with Microsoft neither are clean

verdverm 15 hours ago

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

does not portend good things for the future

robertfw 15 hours ago

for the future? this has already been happening for years and is a major reason we're in the predicament we're in

cwbriscoe 15 hours ago

What predicament are we in?

verdverm 15 hours ago

the greatest wealth concentration and inequity in american history, blatant corruption and nepotism

an out of control, bipartisan oligarchy

The majority of HN has been on the winning side of this equation, benefiting greatly from the rise of the computer, internet, and now Ai. This is not most people, we forget about them, we tell them it's their own fault when it is not. The game is not fair, it's rigged for most humans.

Michael Sandel explains it better than I can yet

extraextra 14 hours ago

Funny how within 4 comments we've went from mundane tech news to communist political philosophers

ezst 14 hours ago

What about OP's comment rings communistic, or even political to you? Or is it the link between information control and wealth consolidation that you find controversial?

extraextra 14 hours ago

I have clearly never claimed that OP is a communist, you're misinterpreting

He did, however, recommend an author at the end of his comment, and that's whom I was referring to when I said "communist political philosopher"

verdverm 13 hours ago

Michael Sandel is not a communist, he thinks capitalism and markets are the better way to organize an economy. He's trying to reframe the conversation around meritocracy, the inequality this leads to, and distributive vs contributive justice.

Distributive is more the communist / far-left take from the rich and give to the poor. Contributive is about the dignity of work. People are happiest when they are part of a community, have work which can support a family and contribute to the greater good, and above all receive social recognition for their contributions. (like the essential workers during COVID we rarely speak of these days)

While we've always had technological advancement and automation, the computer changed things. We stopped producing new types of tasks for many humans. Almost all new tasks are cognitive. We told people "if you want to get ahead in the new economy, go to college." Well, most people do not have college degrees, and within that there is an implicit insult that if they are suffering, it is their fault for not doing what we told them. The people who rigged the game also obviate these people and make it harder for the average person to have a decent life.

I recommend his conversations with Daron Acemoglu. Both have perspectives worth hearing and considering.

ozgrakkurt 15 hours ago

what is a predicament?

edoceo 14 hours ago

Consolidated and Sanitized media controlled by a few brands, that coordinate propaganda messaging.

lotsofpulp 14 hours ago

In my almost 4 decades of life, today is the least amount of control over information that leaders have had, whether political or business.

When I was younger, the only way information, and especially video/audio was spread is via a select few outlets.

Today, anyone can upload anything to a variety of servers and spread the information within seconds.

verdverm 13 hours ago

> Today, anyone can upload anything

This is not necessarily better, I'm still unsure myself. I would like it to be true, but misinformation and foreign influence campaigns are much more effective these days.

The most significant change is that we no longer have a shared reality. Before our current situation, at least we got the same news. Today we get different hyperbole.

nostromo 12 hours ago

That was more true in the 2000s than it is today.

Today everything you’re exposed to has to be approved for release by Google, Meta, and all of the backbone providers along the way - or you’ll be shouting into the void.

TV is dying and streaming is stagnant so I don’t think it’s particularly worrisome that big companies are buying up the dinosaurs before they go extinct.

dylan604 10 hours ago

One problem I see with this is discoverability. Most people viewing these "independent" sources are seeing them on some platform like TikTok/YouTube/FB/Twitter where algorithms have a lot to say who sees what when.

Another problem with these "independents" is they are fed their material via farms that have been proven to be run by Russian operatives which makes the quotes around independents necessary.

lotsofpulp 9 hours ago

That is a problem of not having unlimited time. The internet (at least as it broadly exists now) solved the problem of a few people being able to prevent access to information, and in such a manner that distribution is almost instant.

Lack of unlimited time means people will need some way to choose which information to learn and which to not learn, which may well be to choose whatever is curated by Meta/Alphabet/etc, but that is a choice made by the user, not by leaders.

verdverm 6 hours ago

> that is a choice made by the user, not by leaders

Within the constraints of the algorithms and controls those leaders put into their platforms. Most of those algorithms were designed to maximize ad profits, which is tied to time on platform, with the algorithms converging on anxiety and similar negative emotions. Big data can be dangerous

OnlineTux 7 hours ago

Information has never been cheaper to spread, and facts never more expensive to verify.

News outlets used to be held to journalistic standards; these days they can self-regulate. Finding reputable news sources is getting harder and harder.

verdverm 6 hours ago

at the same time, the nature of "news" content has moved away from reporting what happened to speculating what might happen

alt227 15 hours ago

Especially judging by whats happening in the gaming industry right now. Mass layoffs everywhere from once leading lights in the industry, now acquired by big business and having to succumb to broad budget cuts.

verdverm 14 hours ago

I hope for more indie, in games and software - more lifestyle & small businesses - where creativity and uniqueness can flourish

20after4 14 hours ago

Abandon all hope, yee who enter.

lossyalgo 12 hours ago

Well there is certainly more "indie" AI slop nowadays. The latest example is Next Fest on Steam right now, almost 8k demos and, well, just have a look, or read any media outlet who is reporting on it - it's an absolute travesty.

verdverm 12 hours ago

Yup, I let streamers help me figure out what games are worth playing.

Lately, I'm just watching About Oliver, he does blind / no-wiki / no-backseat gaming. If you are a Minecraft fan, you'll experience something no one else in the community can do. He's currently doing a Create series, but watch the first season first, it's really special.

https://www.youtube.com/@AboutOliver

Also working on an NES harness instead of gaming myself after a too long stint with X4 foundations :x

lossyalgo 12 hours ago

I'm confused, it looks like he plays 90% Minecraft and KSP?

I agree in principle though - I usually search on YT for reviews and/or gameplay before I buy anything these days, since gameplay trailers are like Hollywood movie trailers: they either give too many spoilers and/or they trick you into buying something that isn't what I want.

verdverm 12 hours ago

Check out the playlists, he's done a number of games. I have the Outer Wilds on in the background. (very cool game play)

Oliver is not a streamer I get recommendations from, he gets recommendations from his followers. I watch him more for the blind playthroughs of my more favorite games.

I've used some genre top lists YT videos lately

lossyalgo 12 hours ago

I still can't believe EA just shut down Bioware.

Of course considering who just bought EA (PIF, a Saudi fund + Kushner and some other asshats) and it all makes sense. But I'm still shocked and really sad.

LtdJorge 8 hours ago

Bioware is a cadaver. All the original people are gone, they aren’t even a shadow of their former self.

OnlineTux 7 hours ago

Bullfrog, Origin, Mythic, Westwood, Maxis and others.

As for Bioware - Mass Effect Andromeda, Anthem, Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

EA's prior behaviour combined with Bioware's recent performance would be enough for this to make sense.

This also isn't unusual with what's happening across the AAA gaming industry; take a look at the layoffs at Microsoft.

pokstad 13 hours ago

At the same time, more people are getting news from independent sources on social media and self publishing platforms. I can’t remember the last time I watched cable news.

verdverm 13 hours ago

"independent" may be a misnomer these days, much of it is catering to the audience and political alignment, with people living in different realities

the new incentives do not seem to have served us well, and perhaps worth noting that the same oligarchy controls the algorithms of the new platforms

weberer 9 hours ago

Independent in the sense that they're not part of the corporate media.

verdverm 6 hours ago

I'm not so sure, they are still beholden to click / subscription optimization, which has their content and headlines tuned for their base. Think outfits like Laura Loomer or Meidas Touch.

I generally look for those whose primary means of income is not their reporting or podcast.

toomuchtodo 12 hours ago

It is a strong signal that open solutions should be available to swap into when the enshittification comes.

I have been unable to find an open equivilent of Roku, Apple TV, and Nvidia's Shield, but would be interested in sponsoring an open version via https://bounties.fulu.org/ that could be manufactured through CrowdSupply. An open design and code to run on the hardware avoids future commercial capture. One can then own their media system end to end, from storage, streaming (Jellyfin ecosystem), and hardware on a display.

verdverm 12 hours ago

I've heard this is a recent clout chaser trend, more with smart TVs directly than a stand along accessory.

Not sure if that translates into real demand for it, most consumers are going to consumer.

cramer4next 12 hours ago

Roku isn't a media company. They make hardware and license software.

VanTheBrand 12 hours ago

They are also a media company. They run the Roku Channel streaming service which produces original content and also has a 5% share of all us tv viewing tv viewing.

Paramount+ has a 2.5% share and Disney has a 4.7% share for comparison.

https://advertising.roku.com/learn/resources/nielsen-gauge-4...

cramer4next 11 hours ago

Ok. But I really wouldn't trust numbers coming from the same company that produces them. A better gauge would be Nielsen. Roku doesn't even show in the top 10.

https://www.nielsen.com/data-center/top-ten/

Personally I've had Roku from the beginning and never once saw or watched the Roku Channel. But I did look it up now. Looks like all "D" rated films and really old media. They produce nothing and licence and syndicate everything.

tiew9Vii 8 hours ago

They are an ad and media distribution company.

The hardware looses them $80m+ while the add and media distribution brings them in $1b+.

The hardware is a side hustle run at a loss to acquire users for the main business.

cramer4next 3 hours ago

I did not know this. Can you expand on it? When I was on Roku channel it looked like it was all free. I didn't watch long enough to notice if it had advertising embeded in it. If it is ad supported your telling me after distribution costs their advertising network brings in 1b+?

rnd0 2 hours ago

There's no way the future is good, near term or long term. Not unless you're a part of that specific class.

veryfancy 15 hours ago

“virtue battle”! like it

cramer4next 15 hours ago

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.

otterley 14 hours ago

What virtue battle?

murillians 11 hours ago

Microsoft previously owned a left leaning news network MSNBC (now MSNOW) in contrast to Fox’s right wing news networks.

Grombobulous 9 hours ago

Microsoft hasn’t owned any part of MSNBC since 2014.

The reason MSNBC recently changed to MS NOW is because the relationship to NBC ended.

angry_octet 7 hours ago

Hilarious that Americans describe MSNBC as left leaning. The Overton window has moved so far right that a network that reports news with a centre-right establishment tilt is classified as leftish.

kube-system 7 hours ago

I get your point, but that really isn’t accurate. Neither MSNBC/MSNOW nor Fox News “report with a tilt”, they are explicitly opinion journalism. The vast majority of their programming is political commentary.

pjmlp 3 hours ago

From US point of view even right wing European parties are socialists, that is how extreme late stage capitalism is.

pokstad 13 hours ago

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

tangotaylor 16 hours ago

I wish they would spill some tea and articulate why they moved.

jeron 16 hours ago

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

prologic 16 hours ago

Or Microsoft/OpenAI (and others) just blatantly scraping all your codebases and violating thousands of OSS licneses?

echelon 15 hours ago

We're going to need something more expansive than OSI software licenses for the future.

Something like, "if you look at us, we must be able to look at you"

abc42 15 hours ago

How about "if you're not the customer, you're the product".

seanhunter 14 hours ago

At the risk of stating the obvious, that isn’t a software license.

pjmlp 15 hours ago

If the repos are public, hosting location doesn't make a difference.

prologic 8 hours ago

public repos don't have to be scraped or cralwed all over by bots right?

pjmlp 6 hours ago

They should not, then again they are.

tinyhouse 15 hours ago

No horse in this race but GitLab has been down a few times recently too.

misnome 15 hours ago

GitLab is just as bad, just not as big so doesn't get the coverage. https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...

And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).

mcrowder65 15 hours ago

Weird. I’ve been on a self hosted enterprise gitlab and I think we’ve have only one or two performance degradations/outages in the past 6 years

otterley 14 hours ago

We’re talking about the SaaS version, not self-hosted.

pbalau 11 hours ago

Are you sure?

> [...] and FWIW our *self-hosted* premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime

Volundr 15 hours ago

I was responsible for administering a self hosted GitLab instance for a medium sized company and our backups never required downtime. The built in backup command doesn't require downtime but also isn't a consistent point in time snapshot (specifically because the instance keeps running while the backup is being taken). If they've decided they need one for some reason, stopping GitLab is certainly the easiest way, but not the only way of accomplishing that goal, but that'll be true of any self-hosted forge, including GitHub.

icefo 15 hours ago

You could stop it, do a snapshot of the storage and backup that for <1 min of downtime probably.

But at the same time, if you're not a global company, doing it at 3am is probably fine.

NewJazz 14 hours ago

It can be an issue if you are using gitlab as your container/package registry and production workloads need to pull from it, though.

esseph 14 hours ago

They should be pulling from a pull through scanning repository cache anyway, so they can be scanned before going into production.

LoganDark 14 hours ago

Doing a snapshot of the storage while it's running wouldn't be bad either, it'd just be like having cut power at the point of the snapshot, right?

PixyMisa 13 hours ago

Yes. And the database used by GitLab is Postgres which handles that just fine.

petermefrandsen 13 hours ago

Considering the sheer volume GitHub received lately I wouldn’t be surprised if GitLab would experience similar issues unless self hosted.

Or what do you think?

gchamonlive 15 hours ago

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.

macki0 10 hours ago

Having used GitLab pipelines, I would definitely not describe it as well thought out. Their method of forcing all jobs/pipelines for a repo through one file controlled with a load of ‘if’ rules is a complete mess. Makes running multiple pipelines for one repo a huge PITA. Compared to GitHub Actions or Jenkins its a pretty poor experience

gchamonlive 5 hours ago

This only happens on poorly thought pipelines and GitHub actions model or Jenkins high level directives won't make up for it. Eventually it'll break.

In Gitlab you can use the main file for describing high level stage pathways (tests, builds, deployments...) and offload individual control of jobs to granular files. Tests can be self contained child pipelines. Templates make them easy to replicate and components give them more flexibility.

You can do a lot more than GitHub actions with a lot less complexity than Jenkins.

thirtyseven 15 hours ago

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

midnightclubbed 14 hours ago

Moving changes back and forth between gitlab and github is a pain. Could indeed be as simple as standardization and reducing development pains.

otterley 14 hours ago

What makes it more complicated than doing a Git push against two remotes? Assuming that one of those is used for collaboration and the other is just a mirror.

darkstar999 14 hours ago

The CICD pipeline is not directly compatible, for one.

otterley 14 hours ago

You don’t need to run the CI/CD pipeline in both. Choose one as your collaboration space, and the other as a mirror.

viking_fullz 8 hours ago

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

brightball 15 hours ago

I saw a big write up on using Dagger for CI no matter your git host and I was curious if there were any real benefits?

verdverm 14 hours ago

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/

zrail 14 hours ago

Have you written or posted publicly about your agent environment? It sounds really interesting.

verdverm 13 hours ago

The breadcrumbs start here: https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof/tree/_next/lib/agent (my personal developer swiss army knife)

I'm gearing up for a major rewrite, there is a lot of cruft in there from nearly 10 years of my experiments and explorations :]

0xbadcafebee 14 hours ago

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.

shepherdjerred 13 hours ago

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

prologic 16 hours ago

Did this back in ~2021 for my own repos :D https://prologic.blog/posts/2021-07-11-why-i-no-longer-trust...

Lerc 13 hours ago

The thread here is interesting, because I am in a rather different situation.

I made a game that I thought people might like. I'm trying to offer it to F-Droid and I am encountering pressure to create a GitLab account.

I have been finding it intensely ironic that a project like F-Droid is doing this. It seems like they have, themselves, built processes that have resulted in a form of lock-in that requires others to sign up to GitLab for interoperability.

wormius 13 hours ago

(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?

Lerc 12 hours ago

Well that is another issue, It has been very difficult to follow their documentation. I read a bunch of pages that bounced me around links each containing a little information, but not in a manner I could turn into anything that I understood to be a clear path forward.

I asked on the #fdroid IRC channel without success. I only got as far as I did by asking an AI to decipher their documentation. I have posted on the forum, but it seems clear that this is a second class approach. It feels a little Kafkaesque to choose the non-GitLab path and have them recommend you use GitLab.

Sign in with an auth from another account is still creating an account, You may be able to use the other accounts to log in, but it still puts you through the sign up process asking a bunch of details.

stefangordon 6 hours ago

If Roku has moved then I guess it is game over.

ram_rar 13 hours ago

Is it just me who is baffled, as to why is this surface level article getting soo much attention? a software company moved from one tool to another so what? There is no technical or non technical reasons mentioned in the article atleast. Why is this piquing interest in HN community. What am I missing here?

cxr 13 hours ago

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.

clivedup 11 hours ago

Every thread relating to Github seems overwhelmingly negative towards Github.

Even as an appreciator of multiple Git forges... Github seems good?

desolate_muffin 10 hours ago

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.

_dky 9 hours ago

Forges catering to public should follow standards. This limits your ability to get creative. Git client has become the defacto standard.

kart23 8 hours ago

gitlab is extremely bad compared to meta as well.

prepend 10 hours ago

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.

bluesnowmonkey 10 hours ago

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.

koyote 8 minutes ago

Microsoft has abandoned Azure Devops so we've had to move to Github for any 'new' (read AI) features.

Github is so bad I don't even know where to start. It's fine for small personal projects and the odd project with a few collaborators. But it's just not built for managing large software projects. Even the PR process is awful compared to Azure Devops (and Azure Devops was, in my opinion, ok bordering on good). Diffs are somehow worse than any tool I've ever used.

I am now questioning what Microsoft has been doing all these years they've owned it.

abc42 15 hours ago

Why is this important news?

zulban 14 hours ago

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?

clivedup 11 hours ago

What if it had moved from Gitlab to Github?

zulban 9 hours ago

Then my comment could be repeated verbatim, no?

robswc 15 hours ago

GitHub is such a mess. They seem to be doing everything and nothing. GitLab is 100x better, in terms of DX. While I still have a soft spot for GH, its frustrating to use it when GL exists.

CodesInChaos 15 hours ago

Downtime aside, what do prefer about GitLab?

locknitpicker 14 hours ago

GitLab has a top of the class CICD system that is leaps and bounds over GitHub Actions. That alone makes it worth using GitLab.

otterley 14 hours ago

What’s so much better about it? I use both and I don’t see significant differences, but I’m happy to be enlightened.

esseph 14 hours ago

Parent child pipelines

Shared pipelines across multiple projects

rules: have far more flexibility than githubs if:

GitLab is very easy to fan out CI/CD runners on your own k8s infra.

otterley 13 hours ago

Doesn’t “needs:” handle the parent-child case?

Shared pipelines also exist: https://docs.github.com/en/organizations/managing-organizati... and https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/repositor...

Hosting runners on K8S is similarly easy; GitHub even built a controller to help: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/concepts/runners/actions-...

esseph 11 hours ago

Oh look, they may have started to catch up. Like actually out some effort in!

treyd 13 hours ago

It has a wider feature set and is just generally easier to use. When I had to set up GHA I was constantly surprised with how hard some very basic things were that were trivial with GitLab CI.

GHA was based on Azure Actions, which was never intended as a CI system nor meant to be used in a context where actions could be malicious. So it's the wrong tool for the job that had to be adapted to fit another use case, straying from its original design principles to make it work.

otterley 13 hours ago

Thanks for responding, but unfortunately it’s still too vague to agree or disagree with.

locknitpicker 21 minutes ago

> What’s so much better about it?

It's so trivial to put together any CICD pipeline that it barely registers as a skill you need to develop. All jobs run on containers you control, you specify the scripts you want to run in each job (e.g., npm test), and done. For standard pipelines you don't even bother to set precedence and fan-out/fan-in because if you set your stages as the default stages then that's already done for you.

Also nice, GitLab provides terraform providers for it's CICD infrastructure.

GitHub Actions in comparison is a god-awful mess that has only parallel in Azure YAML Pipelines, another abomination that should be used as a punishment instead of a production system.

jesse_faden 5 hours ago

I don't understand why GitLab CI is praised so much when it is the most limited and unintuitive ones of all the CI systems I've worked with.

I have hit so many issues and limitations on GitLab which is just simply possible on GitHub. Here's a few of my rants with GitLab

1. The smallest unit of action on GitLab is a whole job, on GitHub, that's a task. So all of the actions or templated files can perform a single task instead of a whole job. This granularity is incredibly useful and lets my team create a catalog of actions that our downstream teams can simply include and compose it over a variety of tools and frameworks.

2. You cannot share secrets between jobs. This was just outright ridiculous when it meant that in each new job you have to fetch an STS token even though the token from a previous job would suffice. So much repetition. When you have a template like fetching AWS credentials using OIDC, that's the only thing you can do. Hence proving point 1.

3. Multiple workflow files instead of a single `.gitlab.yml` with a scrambled mess of rules

4. Dynamic services, in GitHub it is effortless to build a matrix AND have services spun up from it. The amount of duplication this reduces is insane.

    name: Test Actions

    on:
      push:
        branches:
        - main

    jobs:
        preTest: 
            runs-on: ubuntu-latest
            outputs:
              services: ${{ steps.services.outputs.serviceJson }}
            steps:
              - uses: actions/checkout@v3
              - run: echo "serviceJson=$(cat .github/workflows/demo.json | jq -c)" >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT"
                id: services
                shell: bash
              
                
        test: 
            runs-on: ubuntu-latest
            needs: [preTest]
            services: ${{ fromJson(needs.preTest.outputs.services ) }}
            steps:
            - run: echo "Hello"
              shell: bash

locknitpicker 28 minutes ago

> don't understand why GitLab CI is praised so much when it is the most limited and unintuitive ones of all the CI systems I've worked with.

I'm baffled by remarks of GitLab's ICD being "unintuitive". I mean, GitLab's pipelines are made up of a set of stages, and stages are made up of a set of jobs. To put it differently, GitLab's pipelines are made up of jobs, which are grouped into stages. Does this go against your personal notion of a pipeline?

> The smallest unit of action on GitLab is a whole job

No. A job is the smallest unit of execution you can assign a runner to execute. It is used to set things like dependencies and runtime environments. Once your job sets the environment, your job can start to execute your scripts. This means a set of individual shell commands or shell scripts you provide.

> You cannot share secrets between jobs.

Yes, and only a very silly and clueless person would ever think it would be a good idea to share secrets through random runners due to exfiltration risks.

This is not a GitLab thing, mind you. You should really read this

https://secure-pipelines.com/ci-cd-security/gitlab-ci-cd-sec...

> Multiple workflow files instead of a single `.gitlab.yml`

Now I wonder if you're just trolling.

> Dynamic services,

Now this is just silly. Did you even bothered to learn how GitLab handles this?

https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/yaml/matrix_expressions/

robswc 7 hours ago

In general, the foundations upon which it was built.

In specific, off the top of my head:

- you can't group repos

- CI/CD is far behind what GitLab offers

- Review apps (though I think now you can do this on GH with other tools)

- Can't mark PRs as drafts by default in GH

- better metric tracking, easier to see a "snapshot" of where something is at on GitLab

Tbf, GH may have closed some gaps over the years but when I was bouncing between the two GH always felt a lot more rigid and further behind than GL. It did have fantastic support for open source though, and has a few unique and fun things like the `io` site stuff. Overall though if I could choose which to work in for serious projects I'll always choose GL.

rootnod3 13 hours ago

Move to Game of Trees and the integrated gotwebd, move on, have a happy life.

pinkgolem 16 hours ago

We did the same, quit happy

tonymet 7 hours ago

It’s frustrating that now we’re back to repo fragmentation and figuring out where and how to contribute has regressed 20 years

zbentley 6 hours ago

> 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.

backendEngineer 11 hours ago

gitlab > github

outfitx 16 hours ago

Why? Any specific reasons?

jacquesm 16 hours ago

Do you have some time?

rlonstein 15 hours ago

>> Why? Any specific reasons?

> Do you have some time?

Okay, I laughed.

sanex 8 hours ago

PR > MR

wtf_is_up 10 hours ago

Roku has developer repositories?

CyanLite2 16 hours ago

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

locknitpicker 15 hours ago

> 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.

slantedview 14 hours ago

Wouldn't that be Github enterprise? It's been around since 2012 IIRC.

20after4 14 hours ago

Yes, though enterprise is expensive and GitLab still had a free option last time I checked.

bigstrat2003 14 hours ago

> The same cannot be said by GitHub, though.

That isn't true. Self hosted Github exists, and has for years now. From what I hear (from a friend who had to administer his company's instance) it's not a good product by any means, but it does exist.

esseph 14 hours ago

It's a paid enterprise offering vs GitLab Open Source

kannanvijayan 14 hours ago

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.

otterley 14 hours ago

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

0xbadcafebee 14 hours ago

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.

skullone 16 hours ago

The readme.md still says welcome to their GitHub repository :D

jdorfman 15 hours ago

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

BatchJob 15 hours ago

I always found it wierd that people flocked to github. The app sucks, if I have to use it for work it infuriates me at nearly every turn with its sad excuse for UI. People like free sh*.

As for gitlab...yuck. But whatever. Most of the dev tool space is really just "sh* we have to put up with now", none of it is any good, all of it is dated from the early aughts, and taken as a whole is even worse because none of it works together.

While software development itself got better in the last ten years these tools stayed the same or got worse (enshittification). And this is part of why folks are self hosting.

The other part is that AI is destroying the Internet and its time to pack your bags anyway. The smart people already have.

carlosjobim 15 hours ago

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

CodesInChaos 15 hours ago

> 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.

locknitpicker 15 hours ago

> 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?

20after4 14 hours ago

> mind sharing what tolerable alternatives are there to GitHub and GitLab?

Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly. There are a bunch of well known alternatives:

Self-hosted free software:

Gerrit <https://www.gerritcodereview.com> Phorge <https://we.phorge.it>

SaaSsy:

Codeberg <https://codeberg.org> SourceHut <https://sr.ht/>

There are a lot more, of course, these are just the ones I have experience with.

BatchJob 7 hours ago

There are none. This industry is a joke on all of us.

robinhood 15 hours ago

So they replaced a tool from an evil corporation by another one disguised as an open source project.

sidcool 15 hours ago

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

verandaguy 15 hours ago

    > disguised as an open source project

A software project either is or isn't open source. Gitlab CE is source-available (here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) with an MIT license, which is a permissive open-source license.

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.

neya 16 hours ago

Good. I want everyone to do this. I want to see the downfall of Microsoft. Time and again they've proved that anything they touch can't be trusted nor reliable. I am tired of this. They even bully their users - on Mac OS, GitHub desktop doesn't respect the word "no". It installs all kinds of helpers and acts like borderline spyware. Someone created an issue about it on Github and the MS employees told them to fuck off in corporate[1]

I am even considering hosting my own GIT server myself. Some of our deployments got affected multiple times in the last 6 months alone we were really caught off-guard. Thankfully our clients were understanding of the GitHub outages. But, this should not be the baseline. Reliability should not be the cost of doing business.

[1] https://github.com/creativefoundrysg/desktop#an-open-letter-...

to11mtm 16 hours ago

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.

latsu 16 hours ago

Just use Sublime Merge, it's probably the best GUI for Git there is.

alt227 15 hours ago

Here try one of the others:

https://git-scm.com/tools/guis

turtleburger 14 hours ago

GitKraken has been good in my experience with it for many years

valiant55 16 hours ago

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.

vips7L 14 hours ago

My friend group also moved to self hosted forgejo. Couldn’t be happier and then I don’t have LLMs training on my code.

neya 12 hours ago

Thank you, just looking at it. Looks awesome so far. Thanks so much!

999900000999 16 hours ago

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 ?

the__alchemist 16 hours ago

Is that Bitbucket?

999900000999 15 hours ago

Both GitLab and Bitbucket still offer free repos for hobbyists.

What I'm thinking of is a company that exclusively caters to the enterprise.

You get a support engineer and they help on everything, migration, CI/CD, hosting, etc.

Nothing goes down without a solid 3 page write up.

neya 10 hours ago

I think so, but, only if you differentiate in the privacy angle (think Proton vs GMail) and this is similar to how most enterprise GIT offerings work, too. The risk is GitHub offering to existing orgs who are already on Office 365 a self-hosted version (I think they already do). So, this business model will fail in the SWOT analysis itself. Still, there might be some looking to exit MS office ecosystem, it might make more sense for them.

999900000999 6 hours ago

It’s a dream, I don’t have the money to do it.

But it could work as a franchise model too, maybe I just refer your company to an affiliate located in your country of choice.

For example, most European clients would pick German locations.

If I was in the EU I’d be applying for a grant to build on the idea. Their’s no rational reason for European companies to fully trust Microsoft to act in good faith.

habinero an hour ago

No. You'd be competing with multiple mature cloud services plus Github Enterprise Cloud/self-hosted plus multiple open source options.

I don't need or want a dedicated support engineer for my VCS, I need it to integrate with all the bullshit products I already have, tick off the compliance and governance checkboxes for the suits, give me controls so SWEs do less dumb shit and above all, not be something I have to think about except at contract renewal time.

I'm just not going to trust a rando to run all that for me and get it right, especially not at that price point.

pixl97 15 hours ago

>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.

sedan_baklazhan 15 hours ago

Running an up to date self hosted Gitea server takes like 5 minutes a week.

pixl97 15 hours ago

I mean, last year, but if you're updating once a week now, that means you've had 6 days to get exploited.

sedan_baklazhan 14 hours ago

Nope. Take a look at gitea update frequency.

pixl97 14 hours ago

Missing the point completely. It doesn't matter how often they update, it matters how fast attackers find exploits.

neya 12 hours ago

> making sure your own shit doesn't get pwned is a full time job.

Not if you didn't vide code your architecture. I have a 7 year box running without a single incident (touchwood) because 7 years ago we didn't have vibe coding and I used a compiled language. To use PHP for anything serious in 2026 is just insane, let's be honest.

pjmlp 15 hours ago

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.

neya 12 hours ago

So, the solution is just "suck it up and deal with it"? We pay good money to Microsoft for some of our client orgs and defending this level of piss poor reliability is just cope in the name of support for FOSS. I don't see why this should be accepted. This is mainly because their shitstorm that's Azure.

pjmlp 6 hours ago

Hardly any different from dealing with Amazon or Google clouds problems and support, other FOSS darlings.

steffenfrost 16 hours ago

A devops friend of mine said GitHub turned into a hot mess.

valyala 16 hours ago

Because of unreviewed AI code at GitHub services?

cdmckay 16 hours ago

Or maybe because the use of GitHub has skyrocketed?

InsidiousWombat 14 hours ago

Because MS is at helm