GitLab

Created by: phortx

Currently I'm trying to introduce GitLab in my company. I have used GitLab for personal purposes and private projects some time and Gitlab does a nice job most of the time.

Unfortunately my and my colleagues are facing some issues while evaluating if gitlab fits for us, which causes us to rethink if gitlab is a good solution as a internal git and collaboration platform for a company. I thought you may be interested in those issues and I want to share them to help you to make gitlab even better.

1.) Permissions

First of all, a big issue is the current permission concept. There are fixed roles and fixed permissions for those roles and no opportunity to change those. Additionally the permissions are very insane in some parts. A team member with a developer role can't even close issues he has finished. Or assign unassigned issues to himself. Why? Another example: What if I want to have someone how should maintain milestones but doesn't be able to delete or rename the project? Not possible currently.

2.) Unstable 6.4

Another big problem, which I faced in my private use of gitlab too, is the fact that the version 6.4 was very unstable. There was a bug (several issues open there) I had to ninja patch on our production server to get ldap running (which is essential im my company). I hade to comment the line https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/lib/api/internal.rb#L38 to get it working. Otherweise the ldap users always got an access denied. In my private usage of gitlab I faced an issue where cloning wasn't even possible ( #5774 ). So there have been two big problems which have made 6.4 unusable. I hope the next release will be more stable.

3.) Wikis

Another issue is the fact, that the wikis don't use the full feature set of gollum. So no diagrams, table of contents and such stuff is possible, which we really miss. Unfortunately the GitLab maintainers don't even want to have those features. Additionally it's not possible to change the title of a wiki page (the one which is displayed in the sam line as "Page History" and "Edit".

4.) Team and group management

Some versions ago, the team-feature was removed and substituded by groups, which reduced flexibility a lot, especially if your maintaing more then 15 dynamic teams and over 250 projects. Too Bad.

5.) Hardcoded /home/git

The whole installation was really painful since we ware not able to install gitlab to /home/git/... due company guidelines. But the /home/git path is hardcored in many places inside gitlab, which has made it really hard to get gitlab running.

6.) Issue filter presets

Another feature, which I really miss are presets for issue filters since my filters are always pretty the same.

7.) Label colors

And what we really could ne in our team was the opportunity to set the colors of specific labels like it's possible in github.

That's it. I think there are many other companies out there which may want to use gitlab and are facing the same problems or missing the same features. I hope you may consider those issues and make gitlab as powerful as it could already be.