Hello together,
I see this discussion here and think about KISS principle. gitlab is really huge software with a lot of dependencies and it need really time to maintain it. For gitolite3 just need install it with apt-get install gitolite3 and configure it for all your needs with very flexible hooks possibility (trigger), VREFs, wild repos, mirroring ... https://gitolite.com/gitolite/cookbook.html https://gitolite.com/gitolite/vref.html https://gitolite.com/gitolite/vref-2.html https://gitolite.com/gitolite/wild.html
I would prefer gitolite at this point with patches on mailing list and/or wild repos for every new member with pull-master branch like https://git.kernel.org/
Best Regards, Juri Grabowski