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Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

blog.wikimedia.org

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Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#31

Post by jtsnow »

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…

> 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.

Phabricator allows "blocking reviewers", meaning that those reviewers must. There can be any number of blocking reviewers. These reviewers can be groups or individuals. For example, you could require someone from the "Security" group to accept every revision.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#32

Post by SEJeff »

tom9729 wrote: post #26
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…

Shopping around for these kinds of tools recently. Phabricator looks great, but the point you mentioned is a show stopper for me. I would love to see Phabricator have GH-style code review, even if it meant dropping support for non-DVCS. Arcanist is neat but I don't want to learn a proprietary CLI tool just to do code review. Atlassian is expensive and only supports GIT, but the UI for VCS is way better (as is the Jen…

It isn't proprietary, it is open source php. Not wonderful, but the cli works well and hits all of the phabricator bits you need. I've been using it for ~6 months and like it quite a bit.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#34

Post by SEJeff »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
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. :)

I prefer github, personally. Mostly because it doesn't fight the nature of git as much (though, surprisingly, it sort of does a bit). Particularly, if you have a back-and-forth of changes on a PR, the inline comments that relate to lines that haven't changed stick around (and references to no longer connected comments are available in the UI). I find this huge for progressively dealing with things. And it does this w…

FWIW, I found a better (it isn't the default) workflow with phabricator. If you set:

    "immutable_history": true
In your repo's .arcconfig, it will work this way:

When creating a topic branch and you "arc land", it will only put that nasty phabricator formatted commit message in the merge commit that merged the topic branch into the master/develop branch. When you just submit a review against the branch you want to land to, you simply git push, and the review message doesn't go to the repo.

This gives us the best of both in that phabricator doesn't overwrite our commit messages, or rebase squash things, but we get the phabricator metadata in the repo when we want it.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#35

Post by SEJeff »

ausjke wrote: post #2

Every time I saw a project management tool I instantly want to compare it to redmine which is based on Ruby. I failed to see obvious advantages from Phabricator yet.

It has code review that doesn't suck. Redmine is wonderful for issues, but it has no sane code review bits. Also, the gitolite plugin is horrible (I've had to hack several bits of it to work), and there is no really good way to do fine grained access control for your repos.

This is all out of the box stuff you get with phabricator. It does those bits exceptionally well. The niceties you get with redmine, such as referencing commits or issues and autoclosing them on code push also exists with phabricator.

Think of phabricator as a more meme friendly superset of redmine.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#36

Post by dfullarton »

quadrangle wrote: post #33

Why does Phabricator's own site (phabricator.org) link to their own source on GitHub? If Phabricator is great for code hosting, shouldn't they be hosting their own code with it?

Phabricator isn't code hosting, it's repository viewing. The code is still hosted in whatever existing SCM tool is being used. It does have a lot of features that overlap with github which is why it is a bit confusing.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#38

Post by epriest »

dfullarton wrote: post #36
quadrangle wrote: post #33

Why does Phabricator's own site (phabricator.org) link to their own source on GitHub? If Phabricator is great for code hosting, shouldn't they be hosting their own code with it?

Phabricator isn't code hosting, it's repository viewing. The code is still hosted in whatever existing SCM tool is being used. It does have a lot of features that overlap with github which is why it is a bit confusing.

Phabricator does have code hosting, and the Phabricator master repository is self-hosted on Phabricator and mirrored to GitHub.

We link to GitHub because they have more infrastructure than we do for handling heavy read loads.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#39

Post by bkanber »

I introduced Phabricator to my company about 9 months ago. The trick with Phabricator is that each individual applet/tool is a little bit janky. Taken individually, there are better ticket management tools, better wikis, better code review tools, etc.

But Phabricator's power is in the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. As a unified ecosystem we've found huge power in our code reviews living next to our wiki living next to our user stories living next to our wireframes (pholio).

And yes -- even the business, operations, and account management departments are using it now too!

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#40

Post by aidenn0 »

I started playing around with phabricator a few months ago. It was by far the easiest web application install I've ever done, and works really well.

The only downside is that it doesn't allow you to do code review via git pull request. It originally was just SVN, but now has git and hg support, and it uses the same code-review tool for all of them, so it's a bit less git-centric than github.

That being said, they have a command line tool for submitting pre-push code reviews that is really really nice. I haven't figured out a way to easily do a github pull-request from the command line (though I'm sure there's a tool to do ti somewhere).

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