[Rafert]

Excellent article. I tried to develop on GitLab once but the sheer amount of gems it pulls in (~100 directly declared, 350+ including dependencies if I remember correctly) with a bunch of installation problems made me decide it was not worth the hassle.

[sytse]

I'm sorry to hear you had installation problems trying to develop for GitLab. Have you tried the GitLab development kit https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-development-kit? If still are interested and experience problems please email [e-mail] and reference this comment for help.

I agree with the article, the less dependencies the better. GitLab's gemfile.lock https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/Gemfile.... has over 1000 lines and GitLab uses a lot of memory. We try to be careful what we pull in but if anyone has suggestions which can be removed please let us know. Recently we found out that we still had to remove Redcloth as a dependency, it will be gone in GitLab 8.5.