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pornel • last Tuesday at 8:57 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

I can't tolerate it.

The split between tag and branch pipelines seems like intentional obfuscation with no upsides (you can't build non-latest commit from a branch, and when you use a tag to select the commit, GitLab intentionally hides all branch-related info, and skips jobs that depend on branch names).

"CI components" are not really components, but copy-paste of YAML into global state. Merging of jobs merges objects but not arrays, making composition unreliable or impossible.

The `steps` are still unstable/experimental. Composing multiple steps either is a mess of appending lines of bash, or you have go all the way in the other direction and build layered Docker images.

I could go on all day. Programming in YAML is annoying, and GitLab is full of issues that make it even clunkier than it needs to be.

Replies

opello • last Tuesday at 10:15 PM

My ready example of a GitLab pain point is parallel matrix job names include the matrix variables and quite easily, in complex configurations, exceed the static 255 character limit of job names, preventing job creation/execution.

There's been years of discussion about ways to fix it with nothing moving forward.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/263401

And the most recent tracking issue:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285853

sangeeth96 • last Tuesday at 9:05 PM

I have fond memories of using GitLab CI in 2018–2019 and I'm still pissed GitHub didn't just life and shift that kind of a model. Not sure about the particular issues you're running into but I remember GitLab supporting a lot of the YAML features missing in GitHub like anchors in order to build/compose stuff.

Oh and turns out GitHub also has that now: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-18-actions-yaml-anchor...

UPDATE: okay they botched it https://frenck.dev/github-actions-yaml-anchors-aliases-merge...

codethief • yesterday at 12:44 AM

Agreed. I worked with Gitlab CI on the daily from 2021 till 2024 and I started curating a diary of bugs and surprising behavior I encountered in Gitlab.

No matter what I did, every time I touched our CI pipeline code I could be sure to run into yet another Gitlab bug.

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