[GHC DevOps Group] Phacility -> Reviewable [was: Re: State of CI]

Wed Jun 6 07:14:16 UTC 2018

I really don’t want to act like a tech-pundit here, but I think there’s an
important point worth considering which is perhaps too business-y to be
noticed in the noise around the acquisition. And this is not about
microsoft having better or worse priorities, etc. We can recognize the good
work MS has produced and funded in the past years, and their changed
relationship to free software licenses, etc. and also recognize that there
are going to be business decisions at work that are almost independent of
who acquired github.

Github, like most tech startups, was operating at a loss for years.
Honestly, despite their paid services, the business model  was to give a
bunch of stuff away for free or below cost and make it really nice, to
generate a huge user-base. Having established a dominant share of users,
you then exit by selling off the company, and the users, who are now
somewhat locked-into the ecosystem.  That’s what happened. The issue is not
about values or anything related. It is simply in the nature of the
business model, and in fact is the whole reason github managed to be so
well capitalized despite operating at a loss to begin with. (In fact, the
paid services were not actually about making money — they were proofs of
concept to illustrate how one could leverage the position of github to make
money. The model wasn’t to make money — it was to show how one could make
money after acquiring github.)

However, now that github is acquired — and it doesn’t matter particularly
that it was microsoft rather than ibm or oracle or SAP — there’s no
incentive to give stuff away below-cost just to foster growth in users. And
there’s no incentive to cater to projects that aren’t of the sort that will
pay significant sums for premium services. That’s not about corporate
values or priorities, per se. That’s just business. As is the fate of all
such acquisitions, github will have to be turned around from being in the
red, but with many users, to being in the black. Part of that may be
direct, and part may be in terms of focusing on integration with other
microsoft products so as to steer github users into the broader ecosystem
of paid microsoft tooling. (E.g., I expect that a great deal of development
effort will be devoted to increased integration with visualstudio team
services). That means changes will _have_ to occur. I don’t know at what
pace, and I don’t know how drastic, but that’s just the financial
realities. Maybe, at the end of the day, github will end up being more
suitable, not less, for ghc and related dev, even if that means a certain
degree of payment for premium services. But maybe not. What is certainly
the case is that there will be some degree of growing pains, and if ghc is
seeking something stable that reduces overhead, it does not seem to make
sense to me to make a switch precisely at a point where things are most
situated to have to suffer through these pains.

Cheers,
Gershom

On June 6, 2018 at 2:12:29 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty (
manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io) wrote:

Am 06.06.2018 um 06:51 schrieb Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:

I have no inside knowledge, but I suspect that Microsoft's acquisition of
Github means
- that GitHub will be largely undisturbed culturally
- that GitHub will have more oomph behind it, so it'll become yet
 more the de-facto choice than it already is

I agree, Simon. Microsoft 2018 seems to have different priorities from what
it used to have — that is clear just from looking at the sheer scale of
open-source contributions.

I think, the main obstacle here is perception. Especially among the Linux
community, there are many people who historically distrust Microsoft. We
have seen this discussion on the GHC list before, where some individuals
refuse to even consider GitHub just because not every last bit of their
software is open source. Alas, I predict that these people will feel
validate by the acquisition.

| That is correct. Phacility is moving to an explicitly pay-to-play model;
| CircleCI and Appveyor both only support GitHub,

I know nothing of the nitty-gritty reality, but from what you say about
Phab, it sounds to me as if the wind is blowing us toward GitHub even if it
doesn’t do everything we might want.

This is my impression, too. Now, I see no problem in paying for a service
when it is useful — as in we get better support for code reviews than what
GitHub provides for free. However, if we are going to pay-to-play anyway,
then I would strongly suggest to consider services like
https://reviewable.io, which integrate well with GitHub, and hence with
CircleCI and Appveyor, with no extra work on our side.

In fact, I just looked at <https://reviewable.io>’s
<https://reviewable.io's> pricing and for open source projects it seems to
be free.

Ben & SimonM, could you please have a closer look at whether
https://reviewable.io addresses the issues that you have got with GitHub’s
code reviews? (I notice that one point Ben has made, namely how comments at
specific lines are handled by GitHub, is something that
https://reviewable.io explicitly claims they do much better.)

Signing up for the free option is trivial with your GitHub account and you
can link the GHC org from there. We can try https://reviewable.io on
individual PRs without enabling it for the entire repo to get a feel for it.

I’d like to know if there is any strong reason for not replacing Phacility
by Reviewable.

Thanks,
Manuel

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Ghc-devops-group <ghc-devops-group-bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf
| Of Ben Gamari
| Sent: 05 June 2018 17:30
| To: Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io>
| Cc: ghc-devops-group at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: [GHC DevOps Group] State of CI
|
| Manuel M T Chakravarty <manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io> writes:
|
| > Hi Ben,
| >
| Hi Manuel,
|
| > I just wanted to touch base regarding the state of the GHC CI effort.
| >
| > As far as I am aware, we have CI running on both CircleCI and Appveyor
| > (with Google generously donating the build machines). Is that right?
| >
| That is right. Alp and I have been steadily chipping away at the
| remaining build issues but otherwise things seem to be working well.
|
| > Do these builds also generate complete build artefacts by now? (We
| > wanted to eventually generate everything including documentation
| > automatically.)
| >
|
|
| > If I am not mistaken, we still can’t run CircleCI on Phab Diffs.
| > Moreover, there was some noise that Phabricator might be changing
| > their business model, which might make it less attractive for GHC (but
| > I am not sure about the details). Is that correct?
| >
| That is correct. Phacility is moving to an explicitly pay-to-play model;
| the source is available, but they aren't accepting patches and opening
| tickets requires a support contract. This isn't the end of the world for
| us, but it certainly makes Phabricator less attractive in the long-run.
| However, given the recent GitHub news, I'm not sure this is a terribly
| attractive option either.
|
| All of this certainly complicates the CI story. On one hand, I've been
| a tad reluctant to spend too much time hacking Phabricator/CircleCI
| integration together given the Phabricator situation. On the other hand,
| CircleCI and Appveyor both only support GitHub, so a move to, for
| instance, GitLab doesn't really unblock us.
|
| For the time being I would say we should probably continue pushing ahead
| with Phabricator. It likely won't be too hard to get something working
| and it will finally allow us to begin moving away from Harbormaster.
|
| Cheers,
|
| - Ben

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