I feel like sourcehut really ought to be mentioned more. It federates issue and PRs by email and has a wonderful interface while not having any ads—which is why hosting one’s own repo (and their CI and IRC but nothing else) requires $2 a month, unfortunately.
I don’t think it makes any sense to mention source hut because none of the features you mentioned are killer features (or relevant. Why should I care about implementation details of feature tracking?) and it completely fails to address GitLab’s main value proposition: it’s CICD system.
Anyone can put up any ticketing system. They are a dime a dozen. Some version control systems even ship with their own. CICD is a whole different ballgame. It’s very hard to put together a CICD system that’s easy to manage and has a great developer experience. Not even GitHub managed to pull that off. GitLab is perhaps the only one who pulled this off. A yams file with a dozen or so lines is all it takes to get a pipeline that builds, tests, and delivers packages, and it’s easy to read and understand what happens. On top of that, it’s trivial to add your own task runners hosted anywhere in the world, in any way you’d like. GitLab basically solved this problem. That’s why people use it.
I use gitlab ci mainly and dabble in github actions. Can you clarify how “Not even Github managed to pull that off”? IIRC, actions is quite featureful and it’s open-source, so I assume that can be run with self-hosted runners as well.
Can you clarify how “Not even Github managed to pull that off”?
GitHub actions has an atrocious user experience, to the point that even a year or so ago people where doubting it was production-ready.
Sure, you can put together a pipeline. But I challenge anyone to try it out with GitHub actions and then just try to do the same with GitLab or even CircleCI or Travis.
The fact that people compare GitHub Actions go Jenkins of all things is everything anyone needs to know about it’s user experience.
Using email for anything is a non-feature for me. I want nothing to do with that outdated, confusing piece of tech that has been shoved in all sorts of places it doesn’t belong
Since forever. It’s very slow, I’m still not sure replying is actually in the spec or email clients fake it with Re: and then force you to quote the entire history of the conversation back and forth. Also very easy to break if you don’t like the Re: or something. People are constantly replying to the wrong person or persons, sometimes even to themselves. You have weirdly named fields “cc” and “bcc” that are present all the even though I use them like 4x and 1x a year, respectively. You can’t unsend or delete emails.
And all this is before I get into doing git or calendars over email.
Email is in fact one of the reasons I’m not sure I want the fediverse to succeed right now, because then all the faults of activitypub will be forced on us for centuries, like they are with email.
