I'm not sure you can fix it unfortunately but the number 1 thing I would miss is the community. I work with a lot of open source projects and the consistency and speed at which I can file bugs, fork repositories and pretty much do anything is really important, and the access to all the github users is a major part of that.
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OK, this post was going to be some minor thoughts but turned into actual UX/dev feedback. Take from that what you will and keep in mind I haven't used Gitlab much at all.
What makes Github great:
- Ease of sharing a project. They got "social coding" 100% right.
- Filing an issue can take under 5 seconds.
- The UI is just great, slick, super responsive, everything updates without refreshing.
- Syntax highlighting is amazing. Syntax HL in diffs!
- Github profiles are great. For a lot of devs, github is a CV, keep that in mind.
- gh-pages/jekyll integration kicks ass.
- Referencing and auto-closing issues
- webhooks, IRC bots
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Here are some killer features not present on Github that would make me very seriously consider switching some large projects:
- Mailing list support. Think Discourse/Groupserver/Google Groups -> A UI that doesn't suck, easy to enable for any project or organization, one click to subscribe/unsubscribe with your account
- Issue tracker's lack of features is both good and bad. Good for the speed at which issues are filed, but sometimes you really do need some extra features. (Marking as dupe; Making as "fixed" when an autocommit missed it; etc). Shouldn't go the bugzilla route and create meta-work, though.
- Proper support for mirroring repositories (two-way mirrors?)
- Improved IRC integration; eg. bots that watch over bug links / "Take a look at #1234" and spit out URLs and bug titles.
- Sign in with persona. :)
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Where github simply falls short, and misc annoyances I have with it:
- Organizations/permissions. They said they're working on that.
- Gists could be improved and integrated with issues (cf. attachments). BTW I absolutely love gist, does GL have something like that?
- SSL support for gh-pages on custom domains is lacking.
- "Clean commit log" workflows aren't well supported. Rebasing messes with the commit ordering in PRs.
- Issue references in commit messages are great but when force-pushed several times, they spam the issues. No way to delete those messages.
- Comments on PRs disappearing. I haven't thought about proper ways to improve the PR review workflow on GH, but I know it can be improved.
- The contributions graph algorithm doesn't deal well with "mass push" outliers (see what I mean: https://github.com/jleclanche/)
- The "PRs are issues" legacy still shows itself, they moved away from it though.
- I constantly have to clean projects I forked for a single issue.
- Wikis are cool but kinda lackluster. No way to inter-link pages.
- It's closed source!
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UX thoughts on gitlab.com, the site (about.gitlab.com):
- No way to see an actual repository, what Gitlab looks like. Github has a similar issue but at least has an "explore" link. I feel like the "features" screenshots should be on the homepage. There's plenty room if you squish/remove the corp/press logos and twitter spam.
- Video at the bottom is completely out of place. Looking at it, it has 55k views, that's really nothing. This contradicts my previous note but I didn't even notice it at first since it was so low.
- The page is fairly slow to load (~2 seconds). It's also huge. I really think there's just too much on it. Do you really need testimonies there?
- Love the link to that page being present, since it's the first question I'm asking myself. Dropping points on lack of graphics (examples/screenshots)
-> What caught my eye on that page: Attachments in issues. WIP protection is neat but gimmicky. Builtin CI kicks ass! I don't know what Innersourcing means. Maybe "unlimited p/p repositories" should be first? This is a long list, consider reordering some things.
I'm short on sleep, so feel free to follow up with me by email (it's listed on my profile) if you'd like.
Would appreciate better support for the Integration-Manager workflow described in http://git-scm.com/book/be/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-Wo.... It is possible to use this workflow with Bitbucket and GitHub but not with GitLab (possibly due to the differences in roles and permissions). I had already raised a feature request for this some time back. Would appreciate your thoughts on this.
