The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
This is the direction page for the Source Code group which is part of the Create stage of the DevOps lifecycle and is responsible for the following categories:
| Category | Direction | Description | Maturity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source Code Management | Direction Page | Core workflows and controls for teams to collaborate using Git | Loveable |
Source Code Management group aims to provide the core workflows and controls for teams to collaborate using Git to build great software.
Source code rules - MVC - We are bringing the settings for protected branches and merge request approvals conveniently in one single place under Settings > Repository > Branch rules. Moreover, as the name suggests, they will be viewed through the lens of a branch as they naturally relate to such. While no functionality will be changed this significantly improves discoverability and intelligibility of your settings. Previously, these settings were in far apart places making them hard to understand as we learned from user feedback including a recent SUS study.
GitLab is working on making GitLab.com FedRamp compliant and the source code team it contributing its share of work (internal link).
We have missed our group's availability targets of 99.95% every month since April. (Worst case was in June with 99.87%.) The root cause has been identified to be a recurring CPU saturation at peak times in underlying infrastructure. It needs to be fixed on multiple levels by the source code team, the code review team and the scalability team. The work is expected to finalize around 15.4. By then it is expected that the availability hits the targets again.
Next to such bigger efforts, we also spend capacity on smaller issues raised by customers as we have a long list of such and want to start burning these downs after having focused on GitLab.com stability and security for a long time.
As mentioned above, we also continue to spend a significant portion of our capacity on scalability of GitLab.com, performance and security to keep up the good level that we have achieved after massive work in 2021 and early 2022 in these domains.
In our milestone planning issues under our prioritization & Planning epic you find a detailed view of work done in each iteration. In the same epic, you also find our working list for prioritization.
Framework for Source Code Rules
GitLab offers a number of controls that can be implemented as safeguards. These controls such as protected branches, approval rules, code owners' approvals and many more can be put in place to enforce adherence to policies that ensure quality. A recent SUS study and other feedback suggest that users struggle finding the different controls and struggle understanding which settings interact how. Framework for Source Code Rules aims at making it easier and more intuitive to administer your Source Code management tool. To do so we are bringing the different controls together into one single place and will organize them on a per-branch basis.
The Source code rules - MVC currently being worked on.
After its release, we intend to also move security approvals under branch rules.
Long-term we will consider also moving settings under per-branch view that currently don't relate to branches but might benefit from attaching them to branches such as status checks or merge checks.
There are different ways for development teams to set up merge strategies depending on their software development, code review, and compliance practices. While we encourage customers practice GitLab Flow, we also need to support different strategies as there is no one right way for our customers. This effort streamlines the settings that allow users to create different flows and adds the option.
Improvements to Code owners
Large organizations with many projects and large projects need to enforce review policies so that they can ensure the correct teams and individuals review changes that impact them. File owners will be automatically added to related Merge Requests (separate feature), but it is also necessary to add controls to prevent changes directly to important branches without approval.
We should continue to improve on the first iteration of code owners. WIP opportunity canvas can be found here - only accessible to internal GitLab team members.
Improvements to the list of commits
Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension, which reduces the impact of large files in your repository by downloading the relevant versions of them lazily. Specifically, large files are downloaded during the checkout process rather than during cloning or fetching..