[GHC DevOps Group] The future of Phabricator

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2018-11-02 at 08:13:37 +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:

> What about the wiki? Can we migrate that off Trac too?

I worry that it's a lot of work to migrate it away while preserving the
special markup and features that Trac provides; so the resulting pages
will require a significant amount of manual cleanup and finding ways to
emulate the previous features; for instance, I've been using features
like https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/WikiBoxes a lot as they allow
to highlight important information and footnote-like annotations in; and
thus IMO help contribute to present the information less
wall-of-text-ish which is harder to digest.

[...]

> I suppose we can do a squash-merge when committing to keep the history
> clean, but then contributors have a choice - either do GitHub-style
> where you add commits to a PR to update it and we squash on merge, OR
> Phabricator-style where you keep the same set of commits and rebase
> the stack to update it.

(Minor nitpick: in GitLab there are no pull-requests (PRs) anymore;
they're called "MRs" for "merge-request", which is probably a more
accurate term to describe the concept than "PR" is)

Well, if MRs are to be squashed on merge anyway, I'm definitely not
going to waste my time carefully grooming a stack of atomic individually
validating commits via git-rebase-interactive...

> If you want to do dependent commits then you have to use Phabricator
> style. Choices between workflows make things more complicated for
> contributors, and that worries me.

...submitting a stacked set of commits as invidual overlapping MRs
(i.e. where the first MR has only the first commit, the 2nd has the
first two commits from the stack, and so on) -- if that's what you're
referring to as "Phabricator-style" -- sounds like an awkward workflow
to me.

> Does GitLab keep the history of a PR after it has been updated, like in
> Phabricator? So we can see what happened between versions of a PR?

I wonder too how this is represented in GitLab... especially when a MR
is comprised of multiple commits, and those individual commits evolve,
might get reordered, commits added or removed fromt he stack, or when
the whole MR gets rebased in the process...