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Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

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Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#121

Post by boleary-gl »

saurik wrote: post #74
Hamuko wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the stuff that Phabricator was used at our company is now done in (self-hosted) Gitlab. I think the only thing that's still actively there is credential management, and I can only imagine there are better solutions for that than Phabricator.

Is the issue tracker in GitLab a lot better than GitHub? I always was under the impression that they had simply been trying to copy GitHub, but I find most of GitHub's features toy-level unusable :(.

GitLab employee here.

It started that way for sure, but we’ve evolved with boards, milestones, epics, swim lanes, burn down charts and a lot more.

We have a whole group in our engineering and product org focused on making it even better: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/plan/

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#122

Post by tychota »

I've mixed filling.

I'm sad, because:

- I started using Phabricator in 2012 and tried some contribution back then, when I was still learning. I learn PHP working on contribution.

- The product is really awesome and back then, the difference with GH and others was even more striking. Draft PRs years before GH, proper issue management with work board years before GH, a lot of automation (Herald) and an yet unmatched ability to customize the interface, and build extensions to the program. In peculiar, behind able to define custom lint and unit test and have them integrated to the UI is awesome. I've seen others good ideas come before its time, in peculiar with integrated CI/CD, being able to see links between everything (issues, diffs, wikis, ect)

- The codebase is awesome. I mean, they build a fully modular system from nothing, just raw PHP. In my sense, they build one of the best PHP framework along the product. The architecture is nice, and they had really great ideas (overheating queries https://secure.phabricator.com/T13133, EditEngine/ApplicationEditor: https://secure.phabricator.com/T9132). Bob, Chad, and Evan are awesome devs. They helped me improve and shaped me as a developers. They also created a fondation of craftmanship with stances like: "Don't create to much config, it is a sign of badly designed product" and so on

- I learned a lot about infra deploying phabricator.

- They was a lot of humor back then: https://secure.phabricator.com/T10000, https://secure.phabricator.com/T10054#151066, https://secure.phabricator.com/T6389

For all this, thanks Evan, and others. It was a nice adventure. I will really miss this...

... but for me that was expected, the contributions shrinked, the core team went from 3 to 1. External contribution was also more and more difficult and while I understand the reason (reviewing and maintaining is more expensive than doing all yourself), it build a model that only depend on the willingness of one man. Also lack of proper integration with Gitlab/Github (Nuance https://secure.phabricator.com/T12739), sticking to an old, pre React area JS framework called Javelin did make the end inevitable. I did see the contribution decrease overtime(see https://github.com/phacility/phabricator/graphs/contributors). In the last years, Phabricator was just a ghost to me, sadly...

I hopes that Evan is well, and the end of adventure is not to bitter.

I think too much depends on Phabricator for it too end like that, and I'm looking forward to @20after4 or others to fork. Maybe it will have a second breath.

Anyway, so long and thanks for the fish !

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#123

Post by sytse »

tychota wrote: post #122

I've mixed filling. I'm sad, because: - I started using Phabricator in 2012 and tried some contribution back then, when I was still learning. I learn PHP working on contribution. - The product is really awesome and back then, the difference with GH and others was even more striking. Draft PRs years before GH, proper issue management with work board years before GH, a lot of automation (Herald) and an yet unmatched ab…

Phabricator was an inspiration to me when starting GitLab. It is shutting down now. Many of its features were years ahead of its time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334511 and there was a lot of humor in the product. As a tribute to it shall we add Clowcoptarize as a way to merge? This would be an opt in option introduced in GitLab 14.0 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/332215

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#124

Post by Dylan16807 »

dmitriid wrote: post #110
Dylan16807 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if I ask "What the heck is a camry?", then that vague description is much better than nothing . > Phabricator was a (very) different take on the same class of tooling as GitLab: source code management, task management, code reviews etc integrated. Great. If you made that comment 11 hours ago then maybe some downvotes on smitty1e would have been justified. Instead it's "how dare you improve the situation somewhat…

> that vague description is much better than nothing. It's not "better than nothing". It, itself, is nothing at best .

Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there.

You could argue that "LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application" instead of "web app" adds nothing more than "web app", and I won't fight you on that.

But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"!

Also "that vague description" was referring to "cage with an engine and wheels". It's crazy to say that's a useless description, when the starting point is "anything in the world".

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#125

Post by kuba-orlik »

beermonster wrote: post #102
kuba-orlik wrote: post #84

What I really like about Phabricator as a review tool: * keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the changes * ability to add a comment to multiple lines of code * ability to suggest changes inline * comments are saved as I type them, so an accidental tab close saves my work * comments are submitted in batches when I choose to, not one-by-one after saving each one. Its's sooo useful, because it often happens that I as…

I have to say I’m not all that into GH[1]. However, if the above is what you want from a review tool I think it meets most, if not all, of those requirements. [1]I mainly am not a fan of the PR model, GH’s performance if often terrible, availability like a yo-yo, and the UI is not as good as it could be. I’m also not a fan of centralising a distributed tool with a load of vendor lock-in to boot. There are some odd th…

Yeah, I didn't mention self-hostability is a must.

SourceHut is terryfying to junior members

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#126

Post by bogota »

20after4 wrote: post #88

Phabricator has been a huge part of my career. Having spent the past 11ish years maintaining phabricator installs this really hit me hard. Fwiw phabricator is very stable and maintainable code. I would be happy to work with anyone who is interested in collaborating on a community maintained fork.

Without Evan im curious how the project will carry on. He really knew every part of that codebase and all the edge cases. Time and time in the forums I would propose seemingly good ideas but be shown very quickly and kindly by Evan why doing so was going to increase tech debt and wasn’t the best way forward for the project. Not to say it cant be done but losing Evan on the project is just such a huge loss.

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#127

Post by dmitriid »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #124
dmitriid wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that vague description is much better than nothing. It's not "better than nothing". It, itself, is nothing at best .

Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there. You could argue that "LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application" instead of "web app" adds nothing more than "web app", and I won't fight you on that. But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"! Also…

> Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right?

Yes. Yes, it is useless.

> You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there.

No. No, it's not. It still provides exactly zero context, and contributes exactly zero to the discussion.

> But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"!

Yes. Yes, it is: it contrbutes just as much, nothing.

> Also "that vague description" was referring to "cage with an engine and wheels".

Are we still talking about a top-level comment on a link that says "Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"?

So, let me see your alternatives:

- "Phabricator is a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application."

What does this contribute, exactly? Nothing. It's an out-of-context statement that doesn't describe what Phabricator actually is, and why this is relevant to the actual news, of, you know, "Phacility winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"

- just said "web app"

What does this contribute, exactly? Nothing. It's an out-of-context statement that doesn't describe what Phabricator actually is, and why this is relevant to the actual news, of, you know, "Phacility winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"

So, no. It's not "better than nothing". Because it is just that, nothing.

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#129

Post by 20after4 »

bogota wrote: post #126
20after4 wrote: post #88

Phabricator has been a huge part of my career. Having spent the past 11ish years maintaining phabricator installs this really hit me hard. Fwiw phabricator is very stable and maintainable code. I would be happy to work with anyone who is interested in collaborating on a community maintained fork.

Without Evan im curious how the project will carry on. He really knew every part of that codebase and all the edge cases. Time and time in the forums I would propose seemingly good ideas but be shown very quickly and kindly by Evan why doing so was going to increase tech debt and wasn’t the best way forward for the project. Not to say it cant be done but losing Evan on the project is just such a huge loss.

Totally agree with you, it's not the same without Evan.

Re: Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained

#130

Post by Dylan16807 »

dmitriid wrote: post #127
Dylan16807 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there. You could argue that "LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) application" instead of "web app" adds nothing more than "web app", and I won't fight you on that. But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"! Also…

> Pretend the initial comment didn't say LAMP but just said "web app". That's clearly not useless, right? Yes. Yes, it is useless. > You can tell from context that it must be software, but "web app" is an obvious improvement from there. No. No, it's not. It still provides exactly zero context, and contributes exactly zero to the discussion. > But surely it's still at least as good as "web app"! Yes. Yes, it is: it co…

I really don't understand why you think "web app" is not better than "software?" as a description. But I can't think of any way to convince you, so oh well.

>> Also "that vague description" was referring to "cage with an engine and wheels".

> Are we still talking about a top-level comment on a link that says "Phacility is winding down, Phabricator no longer actively maintained"?

Phabricator is the overall topic. But the line you quoted was responding to a specific argument, which said "the description is about as useful as describing a car as an cage with an engine and wheels". That's why the line you quoted had the word "camry" in it, in the part you cut out.

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