Last week I continued researching the features of the GitLab Gold and GitHub Free platforms. I continued going down the list of the features listed for GitLab Gold on its feature comparison page and then seeing if GitHub Free had similar implementations of these features. I originally thought that most of the GitLab Gold features would be exclusive to this platform, but to my surprise GitHub Free supports quite a few of GitLab Gold’s advanced features. I found that GitLab Gold does have some features that GitHub Free doesn’t though, some of these are either advanced features geared more towards enterprise environments, others seem to fall under more advanced user permissions such as selecting which users can approve merge requests. I found that GitLab Gold’s issue board system is much better than GitHub’s project boards with the ability to create more advanced boards than GitHub, such as a board with user assignee lists or a milestone list. I am again finding that certain features between the GitHub and GitLab platforms are easily comparable and have a direct counterpart such as requiring commits to be signed and other features are a bit more ambiguous such as supporting what GitLab calls “backlog management”. I am finding this is largely due to how clearly GitHub’s and GitLab’s websites document and explain the features the platforms offer. Another thing that I am finding that makes this comparison process harder is that the description for the feature on GitLab Gold’s product comparison page doesn’t always match exactly with the features described in the documentation it links to, or sometimes the links provided from the feature comparison page don’t go to a specific section of the online document. I have also begun to use the test groups to see for myself what features are available in these platforms. I have been mainly using the GitHub organization to compare its project board features to GitLab Gold’s issue board features as I find it is easier to actually see what’s available in GitHub than to use its website guides. I have also started to take note of what I think should be tested in the workflows between GitHub and GitLab, this includes the project/issue boards and some of the more advanced options GitLab Gold offers, along with other user permission settings GitLab has such as push rules.  I am hoping that at the meeting later this week we will refine the workflow so I can begin testing these features. I plan to finish the comparisons between GitHub Free and GitLab Gold before the meeting at the end of this week so that I have a good idea of all the advertised features of all of the platforms.

In addition to continuing research on the platforms, I also began to learn more about the LibreFoodPantry project. I did this by going through all of the past meeting minutes that were sent to me. I wanted to get a better idea and background on the project to see what decisions have been made so far and how my research into version control software fits in to this. I also wanted to this before the meeting later this week, so I could get a better idea of my purpose in these meetings.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.