Let me apologize in advance for neglecting to sugarcoat this feedback:
This would benefit in a major way from a pass by a designer / UX person. The first thing I noticed (and the reason that I won't even try using it) is that it's significantly uglier than my terminal. GitHub has set the bar for Git web UX at "pleasant enough to look at all day" and this falls way short of that. I struggle, probably more than average, with spacing and layout; but I am one dev and they are the Apache Foundation.
It's also hella slow: it is to GitLab as GitLab is to GitHub.
It looks like someone saw SourceForge and thought "You know what would be great, if I could host my project on SourceForge, but have to deal with all of the admin myself too!"
If the infrastructure underneath is solid, it might be as easy as redoing the presentation layer to make it more reasonable... but I'd have to have more than a cursory glance to tell. It's just hard to want to do that when you've immediately got the taste of SourceForge in your mouth...
I think it's the underlying software that powers SourceForge itself. At least, that's what I gather from some pages on sourceforge.net displaying "Powered by Apache Allura" inside the footer.
"Allura began in October 2009 as an open-source reimplementation in Python of the developer tools for SourceForge (previously written in PHP), and was first announced in March 2011. Allura became the default platform for new projects on SourceForge in July 2011."
I love it. The problem I have with Github is that for them everything starts with a repo, even projects, which usually should consist of multiple repo are reverse, one repo can have multiple projects.
I like functionalities, UX sucks but it doesn't matter for me.
I'm also curious why this is such a thing in various code/project hosting applications. GOGS was cloning GitHub's UI (down to the level of copying their CSS) for a long time and still retains a lot of similarities. Is it that hard to come up with a novel UX for code browsing and project management?
Yes. SourceForge developed Allura [1] starting in around 2009 [2], and was accepted to the Apache Incubator in 2012. Meanwhile, the preceding SourceForge software was a fork of a community project that was in itself a fork of their oldest platform, apparently [3].
It's more like a Trac distribution / fork with only few patches to the core, but with some additional plugins and a custom theme.
Trac itself is more active (and stable) though and still has one of the best ticket systems, repository browsers and plugin architectures anywhere. It supports Git, wiki and more out of the box. And there are plugins for nearly everything else including neat auto-completion: http://i.imgur.com/Q9aBtJN.gif
Because as someone new to the project, I have to spend a non-trivial amount of time to learn how to use a demo before I get to see how it works/whether I should consider it.
It's marketing, and a proxy for how much they care about the user experience. A first-contact message of "You work it out" makes me worry that they will prioritize other technical work above user-facing interface issues.
As a new user, which link do I click on? Git, Wiki, …? How do I get to the "compare proposed changes against existing changes" screen? Does it allow me to make comments? How many lines can each comment be associated with?
This is roughly what I want to find out.
edit: I think it's great that you have the time/familiarity to work out how to use the product quickly. I need help to see the potential advantages quickly, and I'd appreciate it if the project made a big effort to show itself off.
This isn't a knock against OSS projects; commercial projects are just as bad (or worse, since decision makers can always pay extra for support and shift blame to the vendor).
Which tells you a LOT of information like "tickets" or "git" or "activity".
now, if you are a tech person, you won't need any more information, this is already exactly same as soureforge, if you are non tech then my above comment does not apply to you.
This isn't about me, it's about how the project is presenting itself. Blaming me for not getting it is missing the point: the project's presentation makes it hard for people who don't know what it is to work out if they should spend some time with it to work out if it's worth paying attention to.
Saying "it's just like SourceForge" doesn't help me: the last time I earnestly used SF was with https://sourceforge.net/projects/sdlpl/files/, and it's changed a lot in the last 10 years, and my single question "can I do code reviews with this?" becomes two: "can I do code reviews with SF?" & "does this project attentively include every SF feature?"
Sorry, I'm talking about GitLab.com. I don't use it, but anytime I visit the site suffer so much with it that the experience makes me think the worst from GitLab in general.
While that may be true, don't you see a marketing problem here? Most people would assume that Gitlab.com is representative of the speed and UX of Gitlab self hosted. It's almost like your demo site to be honest.
Without actually trying it out in a self-hosted scenario (and this is a non-trivial time investment to do), you don't know if that situation is because of the scale or some constant factors. The slowness could be because of thousands of projects hosted, or because of stupid interaction with git which slows down every single page. Until you try it for yourself, it could be either. (it seems to be the former mostly)
The load is probably more important than the server capabilities: I imagine gitlab.com is slow due to the sheer volume of access and the number of projects being hosted. Self-hosted instances aren't likely to a) allow random strangers to host stuff and b) attract a large population of such strangers.
Agree on this one. I know that hosted GL works much better, yet I have to remind myself about that every time in discussions, because I mostly used the hosted version for private projects.
My company tried to migrate to Gitlab.com and had to migrate back off after just a few days because of how awfully slow it is. It has soured our view even of the self-hosted option, and since we would probably need some of the EE features we don't really have a desire to try it out.
Sure, but I'm not asking about the right to use it. I'm in a technical community where maybe someone can explain me why I should try it instead of going on with my company successful utilization of GitLab. I believe it must have some advantages and I'd like to know about them.
I don't have time to play around with this at the moment, but I don't think I would want to mess with something whose author didn't even bother to put a screenshot up for a product that requires you to jump through a lot of installation hoops like setting up docker server, etc.
Heh, any public internet forum will more likely come up with criticism than with new contributors.
In my opinion if you post your project here, it should realistically be for two reasons:
* you want to learn - in which case I think this HackerNews is probably better than the vast majority of internet forums
* you want to promote your project/product and probably have some financial end goal - again, it's probably a good idea to post here if you're at least a bit confident in your product
This would benefit in a major way from a pass by a designer / UX person. The first thing I noticed (and the reason that I won't even try using it) is that it's significantly uglier than my terminal. GitHub has set the bar for Git web UX at "pleasant enough to look at all day" and this falls way short of that. I struggle, probably more than average, with spacing and layout; but I am one dev and they are the Apache Foundation.
It's also hella slow: it is to GitLab as GitLab is to GitHub.