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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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:
> Not the op, and while your criticism of their negativity may be somewhat justified, the ask is kind of silly.
Not really. It's pointless to go around accusing everyone of picking what they believe to be subpar alternatives when they even fail to establish what the par actually is, let alone what would be a preferred option.
It's as if they post this blend of comments just to try to feel smug.
> There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
See, that's what makes these exercises pointless. Those might work for your weekend pet projects, where you have the luxury of wasting all Sundays toying with how to deploy CICD systems because you have nothing better to do. For actual work, not so much. For example, SourceHut is renowned for being in perpetual alpha. It's baffling how it's being floated as a reasonable alternative to either GitLab or GitHub. Here's what they have to say about the risk of choosing them at this stage:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did not know this. Can you expand on it? When I was on Roku channel it looked like it was all free. I dodn'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+?
Spot on. Thats really interesting. Especially the subscription revenue. Never knew they had that. Thanks for providing a link to that! I got some research to do.
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.
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.
Individual policies do not define a party's leaning.
The GOP has lefty economic policies too: protecting public pensions & healthcare, government-funded fertility treatment, protectionism and industrial policy.
That's not true at all, actually - just a weird reddit meme. The European spectrum is fairly similar to the American one on social issues like abortion, gay rights, and marijuana. It's a bit more left on economic issues like universal healthcare are a bit more right on civil liberties issues like free speech, individual freedom and gun ownership.
America is significantly to the left of the global average. MSNBC can only be described as right of center if you're ethnocentric enough to ignore the entirety of Asia and the global south.
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.
If the aim is simple portability, I think it would be better to use Docker to create a lightweight image. Dagger supports general-purpose programming languages. So it allows you to write powerful logic.
Dagger is powerful, but I found the migration challenging because it’s the heavy tool with its quirks.
Dagger wasn’t right for my needs.
I created a small tool (https://github.com/lask-task-runner/lask) for building lighter, simpler Docker layers. At my work, a simple tool like this was enough.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The core open source version is called Community Edition like IntelliJ. That tells you something when most projects use the unqualified name and then have Enterprise or Cloud as paid services.
They take contributions but not if they would add the equivalent of a paid feature to the free version, they see it as reducing the value of enterprise in any way or just going against their vision. It's clearly a company run project, not even a hybrid like Redis or VSCode.
i don’t think they would accept a pr given that someone from gitlab closed these issues on purpose and provided a reason. a few of them might have even been PRs, i forget
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.
(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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
At its core, Meta uses a modified version of mercurial. Most of the cool stuff I was referring to is not related to the core "hg" operations but related to the server-side hosting (monanoke) and the platform for operations like code review (diffusion), CI/CD (sandcastle), and all kinds of other tooling (notable mention: interactive smartlog for its fantastic GUI). I see no functional reason why a company like GitHub could not make the "Hub" part of GitHub better. It seems like they basically just haven't because they don't want to.
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.
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.
157 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] threadIn 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.
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-...
https://git-scm.com/tools/guis
https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit
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 ?
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.
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.
Ideally this would be DevOps as a service. But I’d have to charge an absurd amount of money to do it right.
Back to the drawing board
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same reason we ended up with git. Their predecessors were significantly worse, and then they had enough momentum to keep going.
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?
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.
Not really. It's pointless to go around accusing everyone of picking what they believe to be subpar alternatives when they even fail to establish what the par actually is, let alone what would be a preferred option.
It's as if they post this blend of comments just to try to feel smug.
> There are a bunch of well known alternatives:
See, that's what makes these exercises pointless. Those might work for your weekend pet projects, where you have the luxury of wasting all Sundays toying with how to deploy CICD systems because you have nothing better to do. For actual work, not so much. For example, SourceHut is renowned for being in perpetual alpha. It's baffling how it's being floated as a reasonable alternative to either GitLab or GitHub. Here's what they have to say about the risk of choosing them at this stage:
https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/
does not portend good things for the future
lately, I'm just watching About Oliver, he does blind / no-wiki / no-backseat gaming
https://www.youtube.com/@AboutOliver
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.
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.
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
I generally look for those whose primary means of income is not their reporting or podcast.
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.
Not sure if that translates into real demand for it, most consumers are going to consumer.
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.
Page 6 of the below PDF has their revenue broken down by category. Going by Q2 of 2026:
Advertising: 673m
Subscriptions: 548m
Devices (hardware): 134m
https://www.roku.com/investor/quarterly-results
The reason MSNBC recently changed to MS NOW is because the relationship to NBC ended.
Americans consider Germany's AfD or France's Rassemblement National as left? I don't know that that stands up to scrutiny.
The GOP has lefty economic policies too: protecting public pensions & healthcare, government-funded fertility treatment, protectionism and industrial policy.
Both sides are the same is important talking point if you are the one lying and destroying more.
It’s the 6th largest media company and probably the least diversified. They basically only do news and sports.
- 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/
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 :]
How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.
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.
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.
Which would be sad, because then quite a nice project is going to die.
They take contributions but not if they would add the equivalent of a paid feature to the free version, they see it as reducing the value of enterprise in any way or just going against their vision. It's clearly a company run project, not even a hybrid like Redis or VSCode.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm sure most of it is garbage.
Even as an appreciator of multiple Git forges... Github seems good?
I like github, but it’s getting kind of nuts.
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.