Welp, there goes an obvious good thing we had high hopes would help enrich our infrastructure! Monday is going to be a very depressing day in the office for everyone: we're going to have to go to cgit or some such, and there'll probably be screaming and crying and whaling and self flagellation over that one.
Ya'll should provide an easy to use configuration for using gitlab as a RO mirror of any arbitrary git repository.
Hope you have a lot of great new things in the pipe that gitlab-shell is providing. If configuration was the problem, why not try and scrape gitolite's configuration directly and run gitlab from that? There's certainly another acceptable path- the one you took, creating your own repo server- but I have a hard time qualifying this- as this press release does- as a feature: it's a migration, a lateral jump: there's nothing new that happens, nothing better, it's just a different configuration routine to do what Gitlab and Gitosis.
I wont be suckered by such suavity, but there's a lot of people who would be more enticed by "new super configurable way better than gitolite repo server" as a sales pitch that probably were happy enough running Gitlabs at it used to run that don't really see this as a feature, as they were already on top of it. When releasing features, put the featureful ones foremost.