On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
What are people's experiences with Gitorious? Does it seem sufficiently hackable to perhaps meet our needs, or does it have too many architectural flaws to be worthwhile?
Here are a few things I've been able to find out from poking at it:
- Unlike GitHub, it's fully open source (AGPL).
- It's a Ruby on Rails codebase with lots of gem dependencies and a
reputation for being hard to install (haven't tried it).
- Like GitHub/Gerrit, it's not just a code review tool, but also
manages repositories.
- Like GitHub, it makes it easy to clone/fork entire repos and send a
merge request for a series of commits, encouraging true decentralized development.
- It supports both individual clones and team clones.
- Like most tools, it supports inline comments in code review:
http://blog.gitorious.org/2009/11/06/awesome-code-review/
- Unlike Gerrit, it conveniently shows all diffs for a commit on a
single page, e.g.: https://gitorious.org/gitorious/mainline/merge_requests/208
gitlab is an open source clone of GitHub (which means you can self-host it) which pretty much as the same characteristics as listed above: * MIT licensed * Ruby on Rails (makes me worry about installability and performance/scalability) * Doesn't manage repositories but integrates with gitolite which does * Has most features that GitHub has AFAIK, but I haven't looked at it in depth
- Help build a realistic alternative to GitHub, probably by building
on the open source toolset that's the closest right now in terms of its overall architectural approach and existing functionality. (My impression: Gitorious is closer in functionality but at a lower overall quality, Phabricator/Barkeep are much more limited in functionality right now and therefore would take a long time to be usable with our current workflow assumptions.)
gitlab might be this, but it's written in Ruby so presumably our developer community would be less able to contribute to it. And I'm pretty sure ops is not just gonna say "sure, no problem" if/when we ask them to deploy a Ruby web app :)
Roan