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Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

blog.wikimedia.org

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Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#11

Post by chralieboy »

sophiebits wrote: post #9

Phabricator rocks, primarily as a code review tool – we've been using it at Khan Academy since 2012. It's sad how much better it is than GitHub PRs, especially for a large team. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow. :)

Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use.

Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#14

Post by sophiebits »

chralieboy wrote: post #11
sophiebits wrote: post #9

Phabricator rocks, primarily as a code review tool – we've been using it at Khan Academy since 2012. It's sad how much better it is than GitHub PRs, especially for a large team. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow. :)

Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use. Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.

GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear of spamming people's inboxes. When someone updates a PR, it's hard to see what's changed since the last version you saw.

Phabricator also has other niceties like syntax highlighting within diffs, two-column diffs (which admittedly GitHub added about a month ago), and a solid command-line tool ("arc") for sending off reviews, etc.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#15

Post by nbm »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #8

I've been using the code review portions recently. The pre-commit workflow doesn't work too well with git, since the review happens before you upload the code. So everyone needs a local php program to both upload code diffs, and download the code diffs (to support multiple VCS systems). And once it's approved, you need to merge and push it locally (there is a command in the program to do this in one step). Writing un…

I'm a little confused by what you mean by "the review happens before you upload the code"? Can you explain what you thought should happen vs. what does happen?

Thanks!

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#16

Post by chralieboy »

sophiebits wrote: post #14
chralieboy wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use. Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.

GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear o…

GitHub does have the ability to assign to (https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r...) and filter by assignee (https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r...). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them.

Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have multiple reviewers because you don't know who should have the final say.

Github has Hub (https://github.com/github/hub) which is as powerful, if not more so, than arc.

The commenting system is a matter of preference, but having forgotten to "Clowncopterize" (a great demonstration of the professionalism of those who hack on Phabricator) comments, and given that they thread in email, it hasn't been a problem for me. Though I understand where you're coming from.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#18

Post by gcb0 »

nbm wrote: post #15
keeperofdakeys wrote: post #8

I've been using the code review portions recently. The pre-commit workflow doesn't work too well with git, since the review happens before you upload the code. So everyone needs a local php program to both upload code diffs, and download the code diffs (to support multiple VCS systems). And once it's approved, you need to merge and push it locally (there is a command in the program to do this in one step). Writing un…

I'm a little confused by what you mean by "the review happens before you upload the code"? Can you explain what you thought should happen vs. what does happen? Thanks!

i guess he want something that compares remote forks a la github, instead of a patch uploader that is agnostic to where you store your repos

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#20

Post by gcb0 »

chralieboy wrote: post #16
sophiebits wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub doesn't have a way to assign reviews to more than one person or to see the code reviews that you need to take action on (meaning code you need to review or reviews you authored that need updating, without showing reviews that you're waiting for another person on) on a single repo, let alone across all repos. GitHub's emails are incredibly noisy to the point that I'm reluctant to make inline comments for fear o…

GitHub does have the ability to assign to ( https://help.github.com/articles/assigning-issues-and-pull-r... ) and filter by assignee ( https://help.github.com/articles/filtering-issues-and-pull-r... ). If you want to pull in multiple reviewers, you can @mention them. Even in Phabricator, though, when you have multiple reviewers only one has to accept for it to be accepted. Oftentimes it is _more_ confusing to have mu…

I have no idea where that help page took those screen shots from... but it is definitely not from github.com or github enterprise. I see no way to assign pull requests... i don't even see the checkbox they mention on the PR list!
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