[GHC DevOps Group] The future of Phabricator

[Ben Gamari]

"Boespflug, Mathieu" <m at tweag.io> writes:

> Hi Ben,
>
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2018 at 15:34, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Some of the issues I list with GitHub are entirely orthogonal to
>> GitHub's code review tool.
>>
>> While Rust has shown that large open-source projects can use GitHub,
>> they have also demonstrated that it requires a remarkable amount of
>> automation.
>
> Could you say more about how this would affect GHC? The issues with
> GitHub that were listed in your original email are all to do with
> reviews (and to my knowledge addressed by layering reviewable.io on
> top of GitHub as Manuel says), except a couple. Cribbing from followup
> emails as well, I end up with the following list:
>
It occurs to me that I never did sit down to write up my thoughts on
reviewable. I tried doing a few reviews with it [1] and indeed it is
quite good; in many ways it is comparable to Differential. It's a bit
sluggish to load (loading a moderate-sized patch took over 15 seconds in
Firefox) but after that it seems quite usable. The comment functionality
is great; the ability to leave comments even on lines that were
untouched by the patch is noted.

However, it really feels like a band-aid, introducing another layer of
indirection and a distinct conversation venue all to make up for what
are plain deficiencies in GitHub's core product.

Moreover, given that using it implies that we also need to buy in to the
other deficiencies in GitHub's core product, it's not clear to me why we
would go this direction when there are open-source, more featureful
alternatives that also have a history of being adoption by large
open-source projects. I suspect it will make little difference to
contributors; one can authenticate to both with GitHub credentials and
the UX is fairly similar. To me, the choice seems fairly clear-cut.


[1] Admittedly my these were single-shot reviews and lacked the usual
    back-and-forth that one typically has during review, but on
    moderate-size patches, so I think they are fairly representative.

> * Poor integration with external issue trackers (or at any rate with
> Trac), I assume meaning, hard to transactionally close issues upon PR
> merge and other ticket status updates.
> * No merge-on-green-CI button.
>
> So keeping the review UX issues aside for a moment, are there other
> GitHub limitations that you anticipate would warrant automation bots à
> la Rust-lang?
>
Ultimately Rust's tools all exist for a reason. Bors works around
GitHub's lacking ability to merge-on-CI-pass, Highfive addresses the
lack of a flexible code owner notification system, among other things.
Both of these are features that we either have already or would like to
have.

Furthermore, we already recognize that there are holes in our current CI
story: relying on cross-compilation to validate non-Linux/amd64
architectures both complicates troubleshooting and requires that we fix
issues in GHC's build system that I would rather not tie CI to. GitLab would
allow us to potentially continue using CircleCI for "normal" platforms
while giving us the ability to easily fill this holes with GitLab's
native CI support (which I have used in a few projects; it is both easy
to configure and flexible).

On the whole, I simply see very few advantages to using GitHub over
GitLab; the latter simply seems to me to be a generally superior product.
Furthermore, we should remember that no product will be perfect; in
light of this it is important to consider a) the openness of the
implementation, and b) the responsiveness of the upstream developer.
GitLab has the advantage of being open-source with an extremely
responsive upstream; this stands in contrast to GitHub, where I have had
straightforward pull requests [2] languish for the better part of a year
before being merged and deployed.


[2] https://github.com/github/markup/pull/925

> I'm not too worried about the CI story. The hard part with CircleCI
> isn't CircleCI, it's getting to a green CircleCI. But once we're
> there, moving to a green OtherCI shouldn't be much work.
>
Right, and we are largely already there! Hadrian, Darwin, Fedora, and
Debian/amd64 builds are all currently green; i386 is hours from passing
(a regression recently snuck in which I pinned down this morning), the
LLVM build is pending a fix for a long-standing critical bug (#14251),
and we are now two tests away from slow validation being green.

The remaining piece is moving differential validation to CircleCI. This
was one of the motivations for starting this discussion.

Cheers,

- Ben
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