A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high while also being featureful.
Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you.
The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changesets, and the digest for the PR should provide a bit more context to reviewees.
Yes! Gitlab's offerings are great, and our team doesn't even scratch the surface of what's possible with its feature set.
That said, MRs with over 1000 lines of changes are painful sometimes impossible to review. Even small MRs feel clunky, due to how many panels there are (yes, I know they're collapsible). Because MRs are one of our most used features, it sometimes makes me consider switching to GitHub for their much nicer PR UX/UI.
yeah there seems like there is some web -> idea connection that should exist for super slick in-IDE reviews. Best reviews means most context, IDE has the most context about the code (is why its best to resolve merge conflicts too) so we should be leveraging it more.
Always surprised to see people resolving merge conflicts anywhere other than their IDE, IDE has the most knowledge about the inputs to the merge and your chosen resolution, why would you ignore that important info? (like.. does the resulting file compile? for ex..)
Would be very curious about your thoughts on Reviewpad (https://reviewpad.com). The interactions you have on the IDE are very different than a tool that was specifically made for code reviews.
Yeah, I should really quit struggling with Gitlab's.
For really large MRs, I use Tower + Kaleidoscope to view the changes. But then I can't easily leave a comment on a line of code (a big part of the review process)
Nope, they still arbitrarily decide to "fold" big changes (file with a large diff), causing me to miss entire files when reviewing on occasion.
In all honesty, their pull request pages need a lot of UX work: too much stuff going on on the overview pages, jumping to unresolved threads does not work when they are in previous commits...
There's also that merge train confusion where merge trains get "cancelled" without an obvious explanation ("this was cancelled because it is included in a new one" would do). In a sense, I'd say that their UX is pretty bad, but the API is not much better either (you can't fetch pipeline log files with individual script timings that you see floating on the right in the web UI). If anything, all of this only goes to show that you don't need to be perfect to be good!
But I applaud the effort, mission and dedication they put up, and especially their open core nature.
You can "expand" the diff, but sometimes that breaks the UI, makes it unable to add comments, etc. That's probably the reason they don't show large changesets by default.
Neither GitHub nor GitLab quite hit the mark for me with regards to code review. Phabricator (RIP) was close IMO, with first class support for (1) seeing comments and code on one view and (2) supporting stacks which prevent mega changes.
I've been working with some peers on a better code review tool since hearing about Phabricator shutting down: https://graphite.dev/
It syncs all data to GitHub while offering things like a review queue, gif reactions, stacked diffs, etc - all inspired from Phabricator.
Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't nickel and dime you.
The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changesets, and the digest for the PR should provide a bit more context to reviewees.