Well there's more than pushing changes upstream. Modifying/customizing Gerri's UI is supposed to be able to be done without pushing back upstream. As a relative novice of GWT, modifying/customizing UI in gerrit seems rather opaque. But before I go whole hog on Phabricator, I'd have to look more into how it handles templating and customization… I think there is a large class of changes we might want to make that aren't so programmy as to involve using Conduit or Arcanist to get it done.
In any case, I think at the moment Gerrit does what we want and its finally usably fast. I'm sure off the top of my head I can think of a number of things that keep something written in PHP (Phabricator) from matching Gerrit's feature set (LDAP? ACLs?), and pushing upstream patches isn't high on my list pro/con any of these systems.
But things are changing here at a rapid pace so I'm not going to say Gerrit now, Gerrit forever. ;-)
On Jul 25, 2012, at 5:01 AM, Chad wrote:
On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 7:29 AM, Terry Chay tchay@wikimedia.org wrote:
Related is the fact that we seem to have a lot of PHP web dev expertise (for some reason) and Gerrit went from Python (serviceable) to Java (totally opaque). Apologies to those of you at the WMF who lurv themselves some Java… all two of you… and one of you is probably the guy who wrote the "case against"The more I've thought about it, the less that I feel "language it's written in" really matters at all. The number of people contributing upstream is always going to be relatively small, and as long as those who /want/ to contribute upstream are comfortable with it, it could be written in Cobol for all I care.
It kinda struck me the other day when the subject of bug-tracking tools came up again. Had we been using $SOME_OTHER_PRODUCT and people were advocating switching to Bugzilla, I'm sure people would complain "omg, it's Perl--we can't contribute upstream." But in reality, how many people *have* contributed upstream to Bugzilla? Most people file bugs in our tracker and they get re-filed upstream, which is perfectly fine as long as there's an upstream who responds, which in this case there is.
I think the choice of platform matters when we're talking about "ease of installation/upgrading" to some degree so we don't make the ops angry, but that's a total non-issue with Gerrit because installation/uprgrades are very very easy :)
-Chad
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