[gentoo-dev] GitLab Feature-Set / Was: devmanual moved to github

[sascha-ml@babbelbox.org]

[...]
> > Another option that looks nice is GitLab.
> 
> How does it work? The screenshots look exactly like github.

Maybe, I can summarize it up a bit:

- GitLab is a Ruby-On-Rails Application
  => Requires very few setup on a gentoo system: ruby, a webserver and a mysql
     or postgresl database and redis. Some gems. That's it mostly.

- It makes use of a lot of the FOSS-Code which was written by GitHub.

- Itself is licensed under the MIT-License.

- It used to be based around the gitolite shell, but nowadays has it's own
  shell to implement access restrictions on the managed repositories.

- Repositories can be private (to users or teams) or public with write-access
  granted to individuals or teams.

=> Up to here, it's just a way to manage multiple git repositories via http
   and access them via git://, ssh://, http:// and https://
   It can be used just the same way a pure gitolite installation can be used.
   (Which by the way is true for any repository on github as well).

On top of that:

- It supports "Merge Requests", which are almost the same as PRs on Github,
  which allows user contributions to be reviewed quite easily.

- It can trigger web-hooks in a similar way to github.

It has some other nice features - but I personally believe they are not very 
relevant to gentoo:

- Issue tracking per git repository
- Wiki per git repository

I am running an instance of gitlab for some of my private projects. The 
instance is accessed from roughly a dozen scripts and me. I run it including 
it's database (aside to some other services) on a VServer, which has 1 CPU 
assigned to it and 1 gigabyte of ram. Accessing it never appeared any slower 
to me than accessing github (even given that low hardware). Though, i have no 
data on how it scales to bigger environments.

Updates to it are release on a once-per-month basis. Most of the time they are 
quite straight forward and installed in less than 5 minutes.

The overall configure on the above mentioned hardware took me roughly 2 hours 
(sql, nginx, ruby etc being already emerged). This is mostly due to the fact 
gitlab's author mainly targets ubuntu. But it wasn't very hard to adapt the 
instructions to Gentoo w/ OpenRC.

Hopefully these datapoints help to fill up some gaps :-)

Sascha