[ericfontaine]

"There are many other hosting services like gitlab, what would make gitlab different so that it would deserve a pitch there?"

Which is why I said the blogpost would be fairer to just post the wikipedia comparison link. I never said that gitlab should "deserve" a pitch on the blog. I did say it was fair for GitLab to pitch their services, as the CEO has done here, but that is different from "deserving" a pitch.

It is hard to objectively determine what is the better hosting, but based on people's individual preferences, they can subjectively decide for themselves, which the wikipedia article helps out by clearly explaining the differences. Everyone who uses google code knows about github anyway, but might not be aware that there are other services.

We saw gitorious, an entirely-opensource service, fail due to lack of revenue. And we've seen Google Code, an entirely-proprietary solution, fail. For those concerned about the longevity of their hosting setup, they may want a hosting provider that both has a steady source of income to help guarantee longevity and that is based significantly on opensource software (maybe for reasons of philosophical principle in that opensource development should use opensource infrastructure, or for pragmatic reasons such that they can always fork the hosting service code). GitLab fills this niche nicely, in that the community edition is based on fully open-source code, while the enterprise edition (that the their commercial service gitlab.com is based on) uses proprietary extensions.

"The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github."

The lack of stars on gitlab projects may simply be due to the first-mover advantage of github, but does not necessarily represent any fundamental deficiencies is the hosting service.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> It is hard to objectively determine what is the better hosting, but based on people's individual preferences, they can subjectively decide for themselves, which the wikipedia article helps out by clearly explaining the differences.

It's quite easy to tell actually. Responsiveness of the UI, featureset, availability, size of the community.

* Gitlab is measurably slower (it takes about 5 seconds to load the commit page of a project, compared to <1 for github) * Gitlab's lacking many features that github has (many filetypes cannot be previewed, lack of integrations, general inferior issue tracker, no search and much more) * Availability: github rarely goes down. Right now it tracks at 100% availability over the last month. * Size of community: there is really no discussion here.

Note: I'm not talking about commercial hosting, but about a place for Open Source projects. There is currently absolutely no objective reason to put a project on gitlab.

[ericfontaine]

Well if we're using "Responsiveness of the UI" as the metric, then I would argue that http://fossil-scm.org/ beats both GitLab and GitHub. Fossil is easily self hosted (just run one small executible file). And it is really fast, because it is written in C with sqlite and is simple and minimalistic. It is not git based, but is a simpler DVCS. Dynamically generated pages on my home computer take less than .001 ms to display. It has all the features most small developers need, with a builtin lightweight wiki, issue tracker, and code tree. Your self-hosted website is available even if you don't have an internet connection, or you can use free hosting service like http://chiselapp.com/. Of course it looses in terms of size of community. But popularity does not determine quality.

You will likely loose arguments on public forums if you make statements like "absolutely no objective reason to ..." because someone just needs one reason to disprove. Here goes: GitLab has a functioning interface for managing git projects and lets anyone selfhost the community edition. Therefore there is an objective reason to put a project on GitLab. QED.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> Well if we're using "Responsiveness of the UI" as the metric, then I would argue that http://fossil-scm.org/ beats both GitLab and GitHub.

Which is why I really don't think (and that was my original point) that a Google announcement of shutting down Google Code should act as some sort of advertisement for $code-hosting-site/project. Github and Bitbucket deserve the mention because those projects are well established.

[ericfontaine]

> "Github and Bitbucket deserve the mention because those projects are well established."

According to Wikipedia article, GitHub and Bitbucket were established in 2008, and GitLab in sept 2011, making it ~3.5 years old and about half the age. Although the precise meaning of "well established" is vague, and while you could say that GitHub and Bitbucket are "more established" than GitLab, I would say GitLab is at least "sufficiently established" (i.e. at least sufficient enough to host projects with %99+ uptime). Quick searches reveal that GitHub is known to go down, with major ddos in Nov 2011 and 2 hours in March 2014, Bitbucket was down sometime 27th April 2014, GitLab.com went offline for a full 8 hours in July 2014. (Someone who cares further can do a more precise comparison of uptime). But they were all fixed quickly, still up, functioning, learning, and improving. While maybe your threshold for consideration an internet service to be "well established" is different from another person's threshold, your threshold is not necessarily more valid and cannot be determined without more specific criterion.

Based alone on the argument that "well established" services deserve mention, then that should mean services established before Github and Bitbucket that are still running reliably should be mentioned as well. But you have specifically said it's ok for github and bitbucket to deserve mention but not others.

> "I really don't think (and that was my original point) that a Google announcement of shutting down Google Code should act as some sort of advertisement for $code-hosting-site/project."

It should not. And as I pointed out clearly in my original comment which I will repeat for emphasis as it has been the core of my whole argument:

"google code blogspot post specifically mentioned both GitHub 8 times and Bitbucket 3 times"

While it was appropriate (and arguably a duty as benefactor) for google to post a link to https://code.google.com/p/support-tools/ containing their export tools to github and bitbucket and the sourceforge import, that reference only takes one sentence and doesn't even require the google blog post itself to specifically mention any services. Considering that a shutdown announcement is a serious matter, it should be kept brief and limited to only information relevant to shutdown. All those specific references could have been omitted and the shutdown announcement would still make sense. By specifically mentioning certain services multiple times, the writer of the blog post has opened the door to queries about mentioning alternative services specifically. Had he written in a neutral manner (either by only posting the Wikipedia link or not mentioning any services), then it would have been inappropriate for GitLab to query for a request to be mentioned.

[sytse]

Thanks for the concrete examples.

GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:

wget https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commits/master master.1 [ <=> ] 66.40K 382KB/s in 0.2s

wget https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/commits/master master.2 100%[=====================>] 183.50K 662KB/s in 0.3s

Again, your milage may vary (cache) and I do agree that the commits page of GitHub feels faster most of the time.

GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).

There are less integrations than GitHub but I would not say there is a lack of them https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master/app/mode...

We think the issue tracker is good, working with labels can be improved but getting a milestone overview across projects is pretty sweet.

Availability of GitLab.com is over 99.9% at the moment http://status.gitlab.com/

Over 700 people have contributed to GitLab http://contributors.gitlab.com/

We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:

For the initial HTTP request maybe and if you're in the US. Gitlab is painfully slow when loaded from a European network connection and you factor in the time it takes to fetch all resources. Cached or uncached.

> GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).

Neither of which are important for Open Source projects.

> We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.

I think Gitlab is a reasonable website to use for commercial hosting; I just don't see it for Open Source software.

[sytse]

Right now GitLab is hosted in Germany (AWS Frankfurt) and I was testing from the US (Mountain View). But I sometimes see the same delay you mention. We'll move it to the US east coast over the next couple of months.

I think protected branches are really nice for open source projects too, although I agree that most contributions will come from forks. Right now no open source projects use Git Annex but that might change now that it becomes easier to use, probably it is really nice if you have an open source game with huge digital assets.

[realityking]

Out of curiosity, why Frankfurt?

Speaking as a European, it would be nice if you could keep it performant over here too ;)

[sytse]

Because Frankfurt was close to Delft and we wanted to reduce latency to move the data, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171533

We think the east coast of the US is the best compromise considering our user base. Can't solve speed of light :/

[avinassh]

On GitLab I could not search for top repositories by programming language. For a beginner like me, it is very important. I could go to Github and search for top repositories in the language I am learning. I usually find top projects, try to figure out how they work, how a experienced dev does a specific stuff (compared to noob like me) and I ask myself how can I "copy" those traits and improve myself.

On GitLab, if I stumble upon any repo I can't figure which language it uses. On GitHub it is very clear. It even shows percentage of programming language used.

Open Source helps in so much for learning about programming for a noob like me and GitLab no way does that as like GitHub. Thats the one reason I don't use GitLab much, though I have an account. And one more reason why GitHub shines over GitLab for open source projects.

[sytse]

Thanks these valid concerns. We would certainly like to improve the discover functionality in GitLab. Right now https://gitlab.com/explore is pretty limited. But the community is actively working on this. This month we introduced a commit calendar and I'm sure that it will improve further over the coming months.