[GHC DevOps Group] The future of Phabricator

[Ben Gamari]

Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm entirely happy to move, provided (1) whatever we move to provides the
> functionality we need, and (2) it's clearly what the community wants
> (considering both current and future contributors). In the past when moving
> to GitHub was brought up, there were a handful of core contributors who
> argued strongly in favour of Phabricator, do we think that's changed? Do we
> have any indication of whether the survey respondents who were
> anti-Phabricator would be pro- or anti-GitLab?
>
The comments fell into several buckets:

 a. Those who spoke in favor of GitHub in particular
 b. Those who spoke in favor of GitHub and GitLab
 c. Those who spoke against Phabricator

I seem to recall that (a) was the largest group. No one explicitly
stated that they would be against GitLab, although this is not terribly
surprising given we didn't ask.

Frankly I doubt there would be people who would actively support GitHub
but not GitLab given how similar the workflows are. However, collecting
data for this hunch is one of the reasons for this thread.

> Personally I'd like to optimise for more code review, because I think that
> more than anything else will increase quality and community ownership of
> the project. If using new tooling will make code review a more central part
> of our workflow, then that would be a good thing.

Agreed, currently we have too few reviewers for the volume of code we
are pushing into the tree.

> Right now I think we're
> very Trac-centric, and the integration between Trac and Phabricator isn't
> great; if we could move to a solution with tighter integration between
> tickets/code-review/wiki, that would be an improvement in my view. But not
> GitHub, for the reasons you gave.
>
Yes, I agree. Currently I spend too much time keeping tickets in sync and
this is almost entirely wasted time.


> Would GitLab solve the CI issues? I don't think you mentioned that
> explicitly.
>
It helps, yes. As Andres pointed out, Appveyor has native support for
GitLab, which we use for Windows validation. Furthermore, GitLab's
native CI would allow us to test non-x86 platforms.

CircleCI lacks GitLab support however I believe the integration we have
already developed to support integration with Phabricator could be
easily adapted for GitLab.

Moreover, given that the "Add GitLab support" request is at the top of
CircleCI's feature request tracker, it seems likely that there will be
native support in the future.

Cheers,

- Ben

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