Action Required: Status of Harbormaster for Differentials

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for tackling this difficult issue -- I know you've been looking for a better solution.

As I understand it, anyone will now need to add a public key to Phab in order to upload patches. This (as you admit) will increase the barriers to contributions. Are the instructions for how a new contributor should submit patches (without a public key and therefore without CI) posted very visibly somewhere?

Thanks,
Richard

> On Aug 26, 2016, at 9:38 AM, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
> 
> tl;dr. I am working on restoring Harbormaster support for Differentials.
>       Towards this end, GHC's Phabricator instance will soon require
>       that you add an SSH public key to your account in order to upload
>       patches with `arc diff`.
> 
> 
> Hello everyone,
> 
> As you are no doubt aware Harbormaster has not been building
> Differentials for a very long time now. I am currently looking at
> options for restoring this service but it appears that doing so will
> require a bit of action on the part of our contributors.
> 
> Specically, you will need to add an SSH key to Phabricator. You can do
> so by navigating to the Phabricator Settings [1] page, selecting the
> "Personal Account Settings" option, and selecting "SSH Public Keys" from
> the list on the left. There you can click on the "SSH Key Actions"
> menu on the top-right corner and click on the "Upload Public Key"
> item. Here you can specify a key name and paste the key contents
> (e.g. the contents of $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub).
> 
> The reason for this new requirement is that `arc diff` will soon push
> submitted diffs to a "staging area", a Git repository managed by Phabricator
> containing a branch for each submitted Differential. This will allow more
> reliable Harbormaster builds and merges as we will no longer need to
> rely on Phabricator correctly applying Differential patches (which has
> historically been problematic, especially for Differentials where the
> base commit is unavailable).
> 
> If there are no objections, I would like to enable the staging area for
> the rGHC repository in three days, on Monday, 29 August 2016. After
> this date `arc diff` will try to push submitted differentials to the
> staging area, which will require a public key. Note, however, that
> pushing to the staging area can always be disabled with `arc diff`'s
> `--skip-staging` flag (although we won't be able to run CI builds on
> Differentials submitted in this way).
> 
> To be clear: I would have liked to provide an option that did not
> require key-based authentication, but sadly neither Phabricator nor
> Gitolite provide any such option. I apologize for the added friction
> that this new requirement imposes. If enough people feel strongly that
> this is too onerous then I'm happy to entertain alternative solutions.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> - Ben
> 
> 
> [1] https://phabricator.haskell.org/settings/
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