gitlabhq/gitlabhq — Issue #20: User-oriented UI and easy forking workflow
Author: gaveen
Created: 2011-10-16 03:59:07+00:00
State: open

Found about this project via Google+ yesterday. I beg your pardon if I'm oblivious to the projects set design & goals and, drawing parallels with GitHub.

What made GitHub a big success isn't just the use of Git. Work flows and culture also were partial reasons. You have implemented quite a set of nice features. I'm not trying to belittle the amount of good work gone into the project. What I'm suggesting is the easy fork-code-pull request work flow.

From the demo, projects seem to be the 1st level citizens in GitLab and users can be added as contributors. While this is fine. I wish it was more in the lines of GitHub where users were the focus and they had projects. This is somewhat like the generic workflow in a centralised VCSs.

Making forks cheaper and users the 1st level citizens, not only it promotes easier contributions, but also makes a good DVCS work flow. This way when a new person has an account created and necessary access level to a project, she can just fork it under her name and work with it. Then it comes down to pull requests to get the changes back to any (blessed) repo.

It's a work culture my workplace have been trying to establish, but tools were the limitation. Apart from Gitorious, I've seen nothing open source that comes close. I'd love to see GitLab pick up these features. However I'm aware of the amount of work involved to make that kind of shift in the project. In any case, thanks for making this project open source for everyones benefit.