[GHC DevOps Group] Phabricator -> GitHub?

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

[RESENT MESSAGE — see https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devops-group/2017-October/000004.html]


I have spoken to a number of people about the question of using GitHub pull requests and code reviews instead of Phabricator for GHC development. And while some people are quite happy with Phabricator and/or prefer it due to using it at work anyway, the majority of people I talked to would prefer to use GitHub. In fact, some people (such as Neil Mitchell, Will Jones (VP Engineering @ Habito), and myself) stated that they do not contribute patches to GHC because they don’t want to deal with the overhead that Phabricator imposes. (So far, I haven’t had anybody who said they would not contribute if they have to use GitHub, but obviously my sample set is small and likely skewed.)

Having said that, obviously, we will always find people preferring one tool over another. And also obviously, both tools can do the job (and for GitHub there are options for more sophisticated than the basic type of code reviews if need be: http://reviewable.io/).

Hence, I like to offer two technical and one social reasons why we should replace Phabricator by GitHub (and I do mean replace, not run both side-by-side).

= Technical

(1) Rule One of DevOps: minimise custom infrastructure
[Our resources are scarce. Why waste them on something that can be outsourced (for free)?]

(2) We really need to sort out CI and integration with GitHub is easier — see also (1).

= Social

* Virtually every developer knows how to use GitHub and custom-anything creates friction. That learning Phabricator is little effort compared to learning to contribute to GHC is a red herring IMHO. Firstly, if the learning curve is steep, you don’t make it steeper. Secondly, there are people (e.g., Neil and me) who can very well contribute to GHC, but who don’t, because they don’t want waste time on yet another random tool. Life is too short!

The reason why I don’t want to run Phabricator and GitHub side-by-side is because this would fail to help with the two technical reasons.

Cheers,
Manuel

PS: This is *not* about moving Trac to GitHub. We are only talking about pull requests and code reviews.


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