Problems with Gitlab

[JuhaManninen]

Things that came up in the "Forum upgrade" thread.

I cannot login to Gitlab using my eMachines mini-laptop from year 2009. It has an Intel Atom CPU and 1GB RAM.
It has a modern MX Linux 23 OS, installed last summer, a little over a year ago.
Fifefox browser version is recent enough. Clearly the problem is not outdated SW in my laptop.
When trying to sign in, Gitlab wants to confirm I am a human. Usually there is a Cloudflare checkbox but the mini-laptop only shows an animated circle and asks me to check my internet connection.
All other sites can be opened with Firefox in this mini-laptop, although many of them make the browser hog memory and the system starts to swap.
Internet pages are getting heavier and heavier. 10 years ago internet was usable with the exact same laptop.
I blamed Javascript but is that the only reason? I don't even know about the new web technologies involved.

What more, I cannot login to Gitlab using a Falkon browser in my fast Ryzen computer. It has Manjaro Linux and latest versions of most SW.
This time the Cloudflare confirmation checkbox shows up. After clicking it the page shows an animated circle for some seconds and then the checkbox comes back. It repeats eternally.
Earlier I could make it work by setting a fake browser ID for only "gitlab.com" :
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 12) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/108.0.5359.79 DuckDuckGo/5 Safari/537.36
but it does not help any more.
Many sites now refuse to work with Falkon although it is a fully standards compliant browser. Many Google services and my e-mail service Tutanota.com are examples. The list grows. The claim that "a page works if Javascript is enabled" is just not true.

The advice for using a "light weight browser" to solve the resource problems does not work. A "light weight browser" is a myth. For example Falkon is light weight, integrates well with KDE and starts snappily. However when you open a heavy internet page, it hogs as much memory and is as slow as Firefox. There are many browsers but only a few rendering engines. Their speed and memory requirements are rather equal. The problem is the internet page itself!
@Aruna suggested using Lynx for Gitlab. Yeah, not a good joke...

Gitlab is super-slow even in a fast computer. I guess there is some fancy Java framework at the server side.
The old Mantis was made with PHP which is maybe the slowest programming language out there but still it was faster than Gitlab.

There is another irritation with Gitlab.
When I login from a different computer, it sends a verification code to my email and I must type it in. That would be OK if I signed in from a certain computer for the first time, but it happens always. If I switch between 2 computers I must use a verification code every time. I don't have my lazarus-ide.org mail configured everywhere which makes this super-annoying.
Can this be adjusted by project or is it built-in with Gitlab?

Summa summarum: This is a good example of Wirth's law. When computers get faster, people always find ways and excuses to make them slow again.

[dbannon]

Hmm, I found earlier that my gitlab credentials no longer work. These credentials did once work and I have not changed the password. I can login (to gitlab) using github and my github credentials and that is what I usually do. So, I wonder if there is a time between use factor in play here ? Use it or lose it ?

Can you logon to gitlab in any other way ?

In terms of web pages (and their javascript) being resource hogs, I get much of my local news from our nation broadcaster, Australian Broadcasting Corporation but am now in the habit of shutting it down when finished as it will sometimes suck all available cpu ....

Davo

[MarkMLl]

I wasn't able to progress into the sign-in screen using a laptop with Debian 5 ("Lenny") and (in effect) Firefox v3, apparently due to an SSL/TLS version incompatibility which the browser announced (i.e. there was not just a "blank screen" as insisted by at least one user) albeit with no specific version-negotiation trace. I think that in that particular case the connection was refused before it got to the point of trying to use Javascript, which means that any screen-size requirement (which would need Javascript detection) isn't relevant at this point (it might be later).

In this context I think https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/43433 is relevant, which I notice was closed without any suggestion that Gitlabs was interested in resolving it. However in fairness, I'd note that Github now has a similar Javascript requirement.

I don't know the extent to which the TLS protocol version can be forced or overridden, or even traced without using Wireshark or similar. Once the connection has been established something like https://hackaday.com/2022/03/22/wireshark-https-decryption/ might throw more light on what's going on.

Much if not all of this really boils down to inadequate error reporting: browsers not giving adequate information on what TLS version a server's infrastructure demands, a server not giving adequate information on what version of Javascript its software framework assumes (if anybody's actually worked that out) and so on.

MarkMLl

[MarkMLl]

Hmm, I found earlier that my gitlab credentials no longer work. These credentials did once work and I have not changed the password. I can login (to gitlab) using github and my github credentials and that is what I usually do. So, I wonder if there is a time between use factor in play here ? Use it or lose it ?

I saw that a year or so ago: I can't remember the details but I think it was a one-off foulup by Gitlabs' management which was resolved after somebody at the FPC/Lazarus end prodded them.

I've got no specific record of my having to change a password etc., but I might possibly have had to recreate myself with the same userid and password.

MarkMLl

[dbannon]

.....
However in fairness, I'd note that Github now has a similar Javascript requirement.
....

I did have a little play comparing github with gitlab before the previous thread was anonymously locked. (I am not a big fan of that, while I thoroughly respect an admin's right to step in, there should be a "who and why" statement. Please.

Anyway, back to Gitlab v Github ?  I have a U16.04 VM, I no longer test with it but its nice to know I could.  From that VM, and its Firefox 88, I could work with github (read only), it seemed fully functional.  Gitlab on the other hand would not open the Lazarus or FPC source repos in an way.

So, using my current system, turning Javascript off in Joanna's honour, github was usable, few things missing but usable. Gitlab, again, totally unusable.

As Oscar Wilde once said, "comparisons are odorous" but sometimes, they are revealing too.

Davo

Mark
(note, I did not put @MarkMLI)

> recreate myself with the same userid and password.

Wow, now, that is unproffesional !  I will continue to login via github.

Davo

[MarkMLl]

> recreate myself with the same userid and password.

Wow, now, that is unproffesional !  I will continue to login via github.

Yes, but it's what was necessary to get me back into my reporting history etc.

MarkMLl

[cdbc]

Hi
Following this thread and out pure curiosity I logged into my GitLab account, (and yes Juha, I get the same login cirkus with code typing as you do, annoying), from a fully updated linux lappy, it takes its time, but works smoothly.
I then logged out again ...or tried to logout, that is: this sent my poor lappy on some kind of journey, where it used 60..80% on all 4 cores, for about 4 minutes! During which time I could see it receiving in bursts along the way, absolutely NO idea, of what could be going on?!?
I dunno, if it's relevant, but thought I'd mention it all the same...
Regards Benny

[Marc]

There is another irritation with Gitlab.
When I login from a different computer, it sends a verification code to my email and I must type it in. That would be OK if I signed in from a certain computer for the first time, but it happens always. If I switch between 2 computers I must use a verification code every time. I don't have my lazarus-ide.org mail configured everywhere which makes this super-annoying.
Can this be adjusted by project or is it built-in with Gitlab?

You can add multiple email addresses to your gitlab account. I use my regular email address to login to gitlab, while my lazarus-ide.org address is added as additional address.

[JuhaManninen]

You can add multiple email addresses to your gitlab account. I use my regular email address to login to gitlab, while my lazarus-ide.org address is added as additional address.

Yes but it still is a bug in Gitlab and should be fixed. No other site requires an email verification every time you switch between computers, and it makes no sense.
Do others experience the same or is it something tailored for me?

[Joanna]

So far as I can tell with my experimentation , gitlab can only be used from a windows machine which I don’t have regular access to.

I don’t know what would be involved to make this happen but wouldn’t it be great to do the bug reports here in the forums instead of relying on GitHub? An added bonus is you could cross reference the forum history with bug reports. How about a child forum for bug reports? 

[MarkMLl]

So far as I can tell with my experimentation , gitlab can only be used from a windows machine which I don’t have regular access too.

I explicitly said in a different thread that I was using Debian Linux.

MarkMLl

[Joanna]

So far as I can tell with my experimentation , gitlab can only be used from a windows machine which I don’t have regular access too.

I explicitly said in a different thread that I was using Debian Linux.

MarkMLl

That might very well be true but hey maybe you are more talented at this sort of thing !
It should not be this hard to get to the bug tracker.
One should not have to be a computer wiz who knows how to tweak this setting and configure that and go through all sorts of contortions to be allowed to report a bug. This is too high a barrier.
There is already a great shortage of people using fpc enough to find bugs as it is. Thanks to the bug tracker being difficult to access, bugs aren’t being reported.

[bytebites]

Finding bugs is not problem but solving them.

[rvk]

So far as I can tell with my experimentation , gitlab can only be used from a windows machine which I don’t have regular access too.

Just fired up an Ubuntu 22.04 machine and access to gitlab.com from Firefox is no problem at all !!
I could even logoff and log back in several times without problems.

BTW. There is also something called Gitlab Next
https://next.gitlab.com/
Not sure if that would make a difference.

[JuhaManninen]

Just fired up an Ubuntu 22.04 machine and access to gitlab.com from Firefox is no problem at all !!
I could even logoff and log back in several times without problems.

Yes, it works OK. Slow but OK.
Do you experience the problem I explained when switching between computers? Does it always require an email confirmation?

BTW. There is also something called Gitlab Next
https://next.gitlab.com/
Not sure if that would make a difference.

It doesn't make a difference really.