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Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

blog.wikimedia.org

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Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#51

Post by ausjke »

techdragon wrote: post #46
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.

And that's why I am using Redmine, who has pretty everything a development team needs.

Will check this one soon.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#52

Post by adamors »

leonardinius wrote: post #27
adamors wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.

What would you recommend / advise then?

I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#53

Post by leonardinius »

adamors wrote: post #52
leonardinius wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you recommend / advise then?

I honestly don't know. We've been also using Jira but it doesn't cover all of Redmine's features.

Same here.

I've been Jira user / Jira consultant for some time (around 3.x - 4.x versions). And I loved the tool then. I don't have the same sentiment any more and mostly find it bloated.

At the moment I'm daily Redmine and YouTrack[1] user and find both of them much more superior.

Personally I think YT is one of the most user friendly tools out there, but I also find it quite limited and lacking (especially in regards to reporting and time management). However it seems it's being addressed with 6.x version (it's still not at the point I would like it to be, but hopefully the trend will continue).

At the moment I don't see any viable and full-featured alternatives to Redmine frankly, which is disappointing. I like the tool, however it could be more user friendly (modern) and easier to maintain (at least for non Ruby guy). I'm considering to give a OpenProject[2] a trial demo someday, maybe things are better there (basically it's another Redmine fork). Regarding Redmine performance - yes it could be better. However it my experience it does scale quite decently (e.g. Jira used to have major problems with it, please bear in mind my experience with the tool is ~3 years old, hopefully it's somewhere addressed currently). In one of our Redmine setups we have around 41k issues and we do not experience any major problems with it.

[1]: https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

[2]: https://www.openproject.org/

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#54

Post by jamwt »

Dropbox uses Phabricator extensively for all our projects. Integrations into CI and deployment systems, etc. Great project.

I've used trac, redmine, bugzilla, github/github enterprise, over the last ~10 years, and taken across the whole feature set, Phabricator outshines all of them. All the integrations across the product suite are nice, and the arc tool is really convenient once you get used to its quirks.

It's not the simplest thing in the world, but if you have a bigger shop with some nontrivial workflows, lots of projects, lots of teams, blocking reviews, mandatory security reviews, etc... Phabricator is a great way to wrangle it.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#55

Post by cribwi »

ashot wrote: post #42
cribwi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Since it has been broken some time ago: no. But when it was still working: yes, I found it rather useful. Especially with very small commits/bugfixes and such. I hope they'll fix it soon

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#56

Post by piotrkaminski »

tom9729 wrote: post #41
SEJeff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While GitHub isn't that great, it's sufficiently popular that there's a bunch of tools built on top of its API that supplement its failings. For example, for code reviews you can hook up https://reviewable.io (disclosure: my project), which automatically inserts links to itself into PR descriptions and doesn't require using any new CLI tools.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#57

Post by piotrkaminski »

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…

A bit of hopefully useful self-promotion: for those interested in all* of these benefits without ditching GitHub, check out https://reviewable.io. It has batch comment support (as well as one-off instant send), incremental diffs between revisions (even when rebasing), syntax highlighting in diffs, responsive one- and two-column diffs, and more. And there's no new command-line tools to install and learn -- it hooks right into GitHub.

* The review dashboard already shows all the reviews you're involved, but not yet which ones require action. This feature is coming soon -- I have all the data, just need to add some code to massage and display it appropriately.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#58

Post by yuvipanda »

languagehacker wrote: post #17

It's too bad they didn't use this as an opportunity to ditch Gerrit. Gerrit is terrible, and now they essentially have two code review platforms.

We don't actually use phabricator for code review yet :) It just replaced RT and bugzilla (and hopefully mingle). Gerrit migration happening over the next few months, pending community consultation.

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#59

Post by vaceletm »

leonardinius wrote: post #27
adamors wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, Redmine is your standard? It has to be one of the clunkiest, slowest and all around uncomfortable project management tools out there. We use it at our place of work, and out of 30+ developers, only a handful of people are content with it.

What would you recommend / advise then?

If you are looking for something that does "more than just git" and if being open source is valuable to you, you can have a look at Tuleap[1].

It comes with git and svn for source control, built-in tracking technology (big difference with redmine/jira, anyone can customize models & workflows), code review with gerrit, agile dashboard for scrum (kanban on going). Last but not least, it does scale quite well (10k users, 200k tickets, TB of git repo, ...)

Full disclosure: I'm dev on that very tool.

[1] http://tuleap.org

Re: Phabricator, Wikimedia’s new collaboration platform

#60

Post by vaceletm »

sophiebits wrote: post #21
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…

> 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. Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the revi…

> Yeah, this depends on workflow. We generally send every piece of code to two reviewers but just wait for either one to accept, unless there's a particular reason that both should look at the review. This works well for us but I can see how it wouldn't work as well for people with other processes.

For this Gerrit[1] does offer the possibility to fully customize the approval process. It's a bit freaking odd at start because it relies on Prolog [2] but it's the way to tailor the tool to your process

[1] https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ [2] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/prolog-...

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