Hi,

== Closing the Phabricator RFC ==

As previously announced [1], we've been facilitating an RFC proposing to replace Wikimedia's current product management tools and development toolchain by a tool called Phabricator: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator

We'd like to thank everybody for discussing and testing Phabricator and providing very helpful feedback for the last three weeks! In order to move forward and avoid letting the RFC be forgotten in a dusty corner of the wiki, it's now time to close and summarize it.

The goal of the RFC was to gauge interest in simplifying our development toolchain and consolidating our tools (gitblit, Gerrit, Jenkins, Bugzilla, RT, Trello, and Mingle) into Phabricator. At first glance, it seems that there is support for this proposal. The consensus is also that there are blockers that must be addressed before any migration is considered, and that any migration must be carefully planned and as carefully executed.

To be clear: It's not yet been decided to move to Phabricator. The RFC has shown that there is interest and enthusiasm about Phabricator, and this means resources could now be devoted to work more specifically on the blockers and the migration plan. We expect that there will be another (shorter) discussion down the road to serve as a reality check. Its format will be lighter than that of the RFC, since its goal will mostly to check that blockers have been resolved and the migration plan makes sense.

== Plan for blockers and migration ==

A first phase of the migration would focus on migrating all the Bugzilla data to Phabricator, and merging the project management work being done in Trello and Mingle. A second phase —that could be worked in parallel— would focus on substituting Gerrit for code review, and RT. There is also a possibility to deprecate Jenkins as a continuous integration tool, but this option is out of scope for now. A few blockers have been identified in these areas, and we will collaborate with the Phabricator community to fix them.

The schedule for this migration depends on resolving those issues which are blockers for Wikimedia moving to Phabricator. The Engineering Platform team at the Wikimedia Foundation would lead this project allocating the resources necessary to define a detailed plan, proceed with the migration, and maintain the new infrastructure.

A longer version, requirements to still sort out first, and concerns raised have been summarized by Quim at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Phabricator/Plan

== Join the next discussions ==

There will be a session about Phabricator at the Wikimedia hackathon in Zürich this week-end (see [2]), as well as another IRC discussion next week (in #wikimedia-office on Wednesday, May 14, at 18:00 UTC: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Phabricator+migrati... )

Cheers, Guillaume and Andre (and Quim)

[1] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-April/075993.html [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Topics#Future_of_v...