Programming

GitLab just doesn't compare in my view:

To begin with, you have three different major versions to work with:

• Self-Hosted open source
• SAAS open source
• Enterprise SAAS

Each of which have different features available and limitations, but all sharing the same documentation- A recipe for confusion if ever I saw one. Some of what's documented only applies to you the enterprise SAAS as used by GitLab themselves and not available to customers.

Whilst theoretically, it should be possible to have a gitlab pipeline equivalent to GitHub actions, invariably these seem to metastasize In production to use includes making them tens or hundreds of thousands of lines long. Yes, I'm speaking from production experience across multiple organisations. Things that you would think were obvious and straightforward, especially coming from GitHub actions, seen difficult or impossible, example:

I wanted to set up a GitHub action for a little Golang app: on push to any branch run tests and make a release build available, retaining artefacts for a week. On merging to main, make a release build available with artefacts retained indefinitely. Took me a couple of hours when I'd never done this before but all more or less as one would expect. I tried to do the equivalent in gitlab free SAAS and I gave up after a day and a half- testing and building was okay but it seems that you're expected to use a third party artefact store. Yes, you could make the case that this is outside of remit, although given that the major competitor or alternative supports this, that seems a strange position. In any case though, you would expect it to be clearly documented, it isn't or at least wasn't 6 months ago.

Gitlab feels also a bit weird to me, though.

The git part is perfectly fine, but at my job we're trying to get our cloud tool landscape to work with gitlab CI and it's really a struggle.

Something as simple as packaging the same artifact in two different ways or running tests in docker images before pushing them is really hard. Gitlab seems to insist on having a single commit as its entire context and communication between stages (especially on different runners) is almost laughably limited.

Jenkins on the other hand has at least the option to have a shared workspace. Yes, this has its downsides, but at least I have the option. Gitlab forces you to use outside tools in very involved ways or follow exactly their own, highly opinionated approach.