On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 11:59 AM, Juliusz Gonera jgonera@wikimedia.orgwrote:
My worry with Phabricator is that it seems to be a monolithic piece of software that tries to do everything. I haven't played with it yet, so I don't know how dependent its parts are on one another.
I thought the same thing but it looks like it's only semi-monolithic; that is, it's actually made up of what appear to be multiple pieces of software - 'a collection of open source applications'. I'm not really sure if practically that makes much of a difference in terms of avoiding the pitfalls of monoliths. That said, the folks who've been vocal in the broader conversation seem to be converging around this, in part because it resolves the problem of having so many different tools and in part because it's written with PHP/JS. Apparently it's used by some heavyweights like facebook, quora, deviantart, etc.
I did play with GitLab a bit and I had a positive first impression. The learning curve also shouldn't be too steep with this one since it's modeled after GitHub/BitBucket which probably almost everyone knows already.
Do we know how this will be decided? Voting of some sort?
There's the RFC, but I am not clear on whether or not this will go through the usual RFC process. I would assume not since it's not really architecture decision. Andre and Guillom are the primary drivers and Robla is deeply involved. They are trying to forge towards some kind of consensus with those who have gotten involved in the conversation. The big open questions right now (besides which approach to take) is exploring how migration would work.
If you want to get in on the convo, I suggest chiming in on the RFC and/or mailing lists, and there will be another IRC meeting about it in a couple of weeks (I think it is yet to be scheduled). Alternatively, you can let me know your thoughts/feelings and I can try to represent them as best I can. If you have strong feelings, I encourage you to jump into the convo as I think your own voice will carry more weight.