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Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

blog.wikimedia.org

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Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#41

Post by tom9729 »

SEJeff wrote: post #32
tom9729 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe proprietary isn't the right word. I don't like that the only way to do pre-commit code review is using a CLI tool that only works with Phabricator. Contrast this with the GH-style system where you use a standard Git client and a web app. The GH-style system is just much more accessible.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#42

Post by ashot »

cribwi wrote: post #22
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've been using Phabricator for almost a year now in our company. At first, I also had my questions about the workflow with arcanist (the local PHP cli software to interact with Phabricator). However, right now I really love it and miss it on every repository which works without Phabricator. Commands like 'arc feature', 'arc tasks' and 'arc inlines' provide a solid abstraction over the repository to bring the workflo…

does arc inlines work for you?

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#43

Post by contingencies »

Evaluated this when it was still a Facebook project. Decided not to use it as too hacky what with the arc stuff, what looked like weird technical-debt-laden feature creep, and a PITA install. Glad to hear they've fixed the install and they're cleaning it up. Might take another look.

Incidentally, arc offers some cool command line features: https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/arca...

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#44

Post by dfullarton »

epriest wrote: post #38
dfullarton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is the code hosting done in the backend, do you reuse git or is there something bespoke in action back there?

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#45

Post by techdragon »

tachion wrote: post #30

Interestingly, the FreeBSD project also started using Phabricator as a code review tool, under reviews.freebsd.org. As of now its only used by committers and developers, but there is work being done to open it for the wide audience.

It's a shame FreeBSD can't move more things to Phabricator. The bigger the project the better having all the pieces in one tool makes things. Relating code changes to issues and tasks being the most obvious.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#46

Post by techdragon »

bkanber wrote: post #39

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 wi…

This is why it's my new standard for this kind of tool. Having a single unified system for all this stuff is so much better than the patchwork of things I used to have to maintain.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#47

Post by stormbrew »

SEJeff wrote: post #34
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lan…

I had actually forgotten about that from the last time I used phabricator, thanks. Alas, this time a lot of my frustration is born of the fact that I'm actually working on something where the upstream is an svn repo, where I'm using git-svn with it. It's kind of a perfect storm of not very good tool interop, but I've made it work somehow.

I'd still rather be using PRs though.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#48

Post by rvernon »

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…

If you want a nice interface, you should take a look at GitLab. It only supports Git, but it is free software and its user interface is the only one that, in my opinion, can compete with GitHub’s (it is more or less a free software clone of it).

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#49

Post by frossie »

gcb0 wrote: post #20
chralieboy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You need to have someone to assign the PR to. Either you need a second contributor on the repo, or you need to be in an organisation with more than one member.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#50

Post by ausjke »

SEJeff wrote: post #35
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 refe…

It took a while to set up but Redmine Git Hosting Plugin worked well for me on gitolite-based repos. The web git-diff from Redmine's git kind of helps code-review but it's indeed not ideal. I wish redmine is written in PHP so I don't need run Ruby, as all my other server software are in PHP. otherwise, Redmine rules.
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