Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in how we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Phabricator is a code review tool written by and for Facebook that has been open sourced. For an introduction, see this: http://phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Introduction.html
I've written up some documentation about Phabricator for our uses here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
I would really like for some of our developers and reviewers to try this out as an alternative to gerrit. Personally I've found it much more pleasurable to work with than gerrit. If we think this might be a viable solution for us then I'd be willing to work on adding more integration (LDAP support and Unit testing integration).
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 8:08 PM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in how we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Regardless of where we end up with this, let me just say a huge Thank You for putting in the effort to get this set up and writing up the docs -- fantastic work. :-)
Erik
Just want to check in to see how everyone's doing. I see a lot of account creations however no posts to differential. Is there a problem I'm not aware of? Documentation problems? Software issues? Do we see something we don't like?
What's up?
On 10 February 2012 21:01, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Just want to check in to see how everyone's doing. I see a lot of account creations however no posts to differential. Is there a problem I'm not aware of? Documentation problems? Software issues? Do we see something we don't like?
Probably just people trying to open the example link from the wiki page ([1]) - it needs a login, and considering it's easy to create one, I suppose a lot of people did. The lack of response probably means there are /no/ problems - people are generally more vocal about things not working than things working ;-)
Best, Merlijn
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 12:01 PM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Just want to check in to see how everyone's doing. I see a lot of account creations however no posts to differential. Is there a problem I'm not aware of? Documentation problems? Software issues? Do we see something we don't like?
What's up?
Hi John,
Just mulling it over, mainly. I love having a test instance to play with, and agree with you that it looks way easier to use than Gerrit on the surface. I don't want that to be taken as an endorsement of the system just yet, because I don't know enough about either system (Gerrit or Phabricator) to have a valid opinion about which is better for us.
What Chad, Sumana and I spoke about earlier today was the tough reality we're in. In order to get moved to Git in the very short term, we're going to have to stay the course on Gerrit. That said, one beautiful thing about Git is that Git repos are far more portable than SVN repos. We could decide we're going to use Gerrit on a probationary basis, and have a serious reevaluation in three months. Sumana and I would like to go in that direction, and we twisted Chad's arm hard enough on this point that he might just say he agrees with us, even if he's secretly blowing us off ;-)
There's at least one feature we would need to use this system, which is LDAP integration. I don't think we can seriously consider a system that doesn't have some sort of sensible plan for how it's going to work with our LDAP server. I do, however, love the idea of using OAuth for filling in credentials from other services like Github. It would be ridiculously cool if people could use their Wikimedia SUL logins to access this system.
It's also nice that this is written in PHP. Since we have an abundance of PHP developers, that means it's far more likely that customization we need would actually happen.
In general, it's good to have options. Like I said, I don't want to put the brakes on our immediate plans, but I think it's worth consideration after we've given Gerrit a try.
Rob
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 9:59 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 12:01 PM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Just want to check in to see how everyone's doing. I see a lot of account creations however no posts to differential. Is there a problem I'm not aware of? Documentation problems? Software issues? Do we see something we don't like?
What's up?
Hi John,
Just mulling it over, mainly. I love having a test instance to play with, and agree with you that it looks way easier to use than Gerrit on the surface. I don't want that to be taken as an endorsement of the system just yet, because I don't know enough about either system (Gerrit or Phabricator) to have a valid opinion about which is better for us.
What Chad, Sumana and I spoke about earlier today was the tough reality we're in. In order to get moved to Git in the very short term, we're going to have to stay the course on Gerrit. That said, one beautiful thing about Git is that Git repos are far more portable than SVN repos. We could decide we're going to use Gerrit on a probationary basis, and have a serious reevaluation in three months. Sumana and I would like to go in that direction, and we twisted Chad's arm hard enough on this point that he might just say he agrees with us, even if he's secretly blowing us off ;-)
There's at least one feature we would need to use this system, which is LDAP integration. I don't think we can seriously consider a system that doesn't have some sort of sensible plan for how it's going to work with our LDAP server. I do, however, love the idea of using OAuth for filling in credentials from other services like Github. It would be ridiculously cool if people could use their Wikimedia SUL logins to access this system.
It's also nice that this is written in PHP. Since we have an abundance of PHP developers, that means it's far more likely that customization we need would actually happen.
In general, it's good to have options. Like I said, I don't want to put the brakes on our immediate plans, but I think it's worth consideration after we've given Gerrit a try.
Rob
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I compeletely agree with that. It would be a complete waste to have chad and others' work from the past 5 months thrown away at the last minute for a solution brought up this late. We can initially use git for the migration however if we decide to later, Phabricator is still available. :-)
I compeletely agree with that. It would be a complete waste to have chad and others' work from the past 5 months thrown away at the last minute for a solution brought up this late. We can initially use git for the migration however if we decide to later, Phabricator is still available. :-)
Indeed. We should continue to evaluate phabricator, and see if it fits our model better than Gerrit in the long run. Also, we should start keeping a list of things phabricator needs to be usable (like we are doing with Gerrit).
- Ryan
Good idea, I've done just that.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/todo On Feb 13, 2012 1:33 PM, "Ryan Lane" rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
I compeletely agree with that. It would be a complete waste to have chad and others' work from the past 5 months thrown away at the last minute
for
a solution brought up this late. We can initially use git for the
migration
however if we decide to later, Phabricator is still available. :-)
Indeed. We should continue to evaluate phabricator, and see if it fits our model better than Gerrit in the long run. Also, we should start keeping a list of things phabricator needs to be usable (like we are doing with Gerrit).
- Ryan
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 5:08 AM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in how we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Phabricator is a code review tool written by and for Facebook that has been open sourced. For an introduction, see this: http://phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Introduction.html
I've written up some documentation about Phabricator for our uses here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
I would really like for some of our developers and reviewers to try this out as an alternative to gerrit. Personally I've found it much more pleasurable to work with than gerrit. If we think this might be a viable solution for us then I'd be willing to work on adding more integration (LDAP support and Unit testing integration).
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
We have to consider how this will affect the operations team as well. We have a very hard requirement of review before merge, and we must have fine-grained permissions per-branch. It would be a serious shame to use phabricator for mediawiki development and gerrit for operations development. We need *more* integration between operations and development, not less.
We also need to consider Labs integration. I've been putting a lot of effort into building things around gerrit's model (which is fairly good, even if its UI is terrible). I'm fine with switching to something else as long as it's going to actually work.
- Ryan
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 5:08 AM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in how we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Phabricator is a code review tool written by and for Facebook that has been open sourced. For an introduction, see this: http://phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Introduction.html
I've written up some documentation about Phabricator for our uses here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
I would really like for some of our developers and reviewers to try this out as an alternative to gerrit. Personally I've found it much more pleasurable to work with than gerrit. If we think this might be a viable solution for us then I'd be willing to work on adding more integration (LDAP support and Unit testing integration).
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
I forgot. There's one other thing I wanted to point out about phabricator. To properly use it, you must have php installed wherever you are working from. I like that it uses PHP on the server side, but despise that it uses it on the client side.
I also have a few questions:
* Who's going to get stuck with maintaining the LDAP support? * Does it already integrate with Jenkins? * Does it use the system SSH, or a separate SSH daemon? * What permissions model does it have? * Does it manage the repositories and branches? * How are repos created? * Does it support server side branches? * Does it handle merges automatically?
- Ryan
On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Ryan Lane rlane32@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 5:08 AM, John Du Hart compwhizii@gmail.com wrote:
Unless you've been living under a rock (If you have, how's the wifi under there?) we're moving to git soon. Along with this will come a change in
how
we do code review. However, some people have expressed concerns over the usability of gerrit. Therefore I'd like to propose an alternative.
Phabricator is a code review tool written by and for Facebook that has been open sourced. For an introduction, see this: http://phabricator.com/docs/phabricator/article/Introduction.html
I've written up some documentation about Phabricator for our uses here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator
I would really like for some of our developers and reviewers to try this out as an alternative to gerrit. Personally I've found it much more pleasurable to work with than gerrit. If we think this might be a viable solution for us then I'd be willing to work on adding more integration (LDAP support and Unit testing integration).
Let me know if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!
I forgot. There's one other thing I wanted to point out about phabricator. To properly use it, you must have php installed wherever you are working from. I like that it uses PHP on the server side, but despise that it uses it on the client side.
I also have a few questions:
- Who's going to get stuck with maintaining the LDAP support?
- Does it already integrate with Jenkins?
- Does it use the system SSH, or a separate SSH daemon?
- What permissions model does it have?
- Does it manage the repositories and branches?
- How are repos created?
- Does it support server side branches?
- Does it handle merges automatically?
- Ryan
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
* Me * Why would it need to, it runs unit and lint tests before the diff is posted
The rest of the questions are irrelevant because, unlike gerrit, Phabricator does not manage git repositories.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org