Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2016 13:44:00 +0200
Jonas Jelten  wrote:

> Phabricator is a fun adventure game: http://phabricator.org/
> 
> It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools.
> https://phacility.com/phabricator/
> 
> Many bigger projects (e.g. blender, mediawiki, ...) started using
> phabricator, it could also be very beneficial for gentoo.
> 
> https://secure.phabricator.com/w/usage/companies/
> https://secure.phabricator.com/w/usage/not/
> 
> Wikimedia elaborates about the migration:
> 
> https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2014/12/17/welcome-phabricator/
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/versus_Bugzilla
> 
> https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Tools/Phabricator/Migration
> 
> Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more
> tightly, but still we could consider to use Phabricator instead,
> especially to dump bugzilla.
> 
> If we come to the conclusion we are a really serious business, we must
> set up the "Serious Business Edition", for the most serious businesses.
> 
> Still, I hope we can go with the Awesome Edition :P

This has been suggested already, and if I recall correctly, someone
even set up an instance for testing. Others have already explained to
you most of the 'big' problems with phabricator which make it pretty
much a useless pseudo-enterprise toy.

And before this diverts into discussion about another toy: I'd like
appreciate if we really considered tools that can be better, not worse.
I can agree that our Bugzilla is quite slow for some reason. Still, it
is reasonably fast.

Most of the tools suggested so far are either terribly slow by
themselves (poor design), terribly buggy (error conditions don't happen
after all, do they?), can't handle big git repositories such as our
(become terribly slow) and/or are completely unmaintainable.

Now, if you can find a good tool that is feature-par with Bugzilla, is
fast even under load (no, PHP is not), can handle errors gracefully, is
accessible (like, works without JavaScript enabled), is maintainable
and -- after all -- has some real advantage over what we have now,
please speak of it.

As a side note, few things that are not advantages:

* performing magic operations based on commit messages (which make
  commit messages reliant on software used, and likely breaking any
  other software used in the future),

* software committing to the repository for us (security reasons,
  commit signing etc.).

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny



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Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 04/18/2016 09:44 AM, Kent Fredric wrote:
> 
> Two trends struck out at me, and assuming everything mentioned ( or
> linked in the related GHC entry[0] ) is still true:
> 

They are. Most of the Haskell standard library is still undocumented. If
anyone thinks Phabricator is a good idea, go document one of the
functions in the "base" package (part of GHC) and then see how you feel.

Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Kent Fredric]

On 19 April 2016 at 01:19, Kristian Fiskerstrand  wrote:
> References:
> [0]
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/f74961c953d5ffedd1af9a67fdda6407


Based on the comments in this thread, I'd say I was not entirely
unfounded in being pessimistic.

Two trends struck out at me, and assuming everything mentioned ( or
linked in the related GHC entry[0] ) is still true:

- Anything that requires the use of the `arc` tool is a big "no" from me.
- And the indications are you need to use "specific magic" in commit
messages in order to make it "work", which is another big "no" from
me.


[0] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/WhyNotPhabricator

-- 
Kent

KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL

Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Guilherme Amadio]

Hello,

On Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 01:44:00PM +0200, Jonas Jelten wrote:
> Ohai!
> 
> Phabricator is a fun adventure game: http://phabricator.org/
> It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools.
> 
> Many bigger projects (e.g. blender, mediawiki, ...) started using
> phabricator, it could also be very beneficial for gentoo.

The website lists "Companies probably using Phabricator", which not a
very good for transmitting trust.

We've just been through major migrations: moving to git, website
migration, etc. We should not forget all the work that has been put into
making the current system work for Gentoo, and I have to say, I think that
our new website looks really nice, gitweb looks great too, and we have a
really large history of bugs on bugzilla, that also has a Gentoo theme.
Migrating to something else would be a huge undertaking. That's why,
even though I use and like Atlassian tools, I never proposed a migration
to JIRA, bitbucket and other tools. If others would like moving to
something else, I believe that Atlassian tools are more attractive.
Yes, they are a proprietary company, but they do offer free licenses for
open source projects that could be hosted on Gentoo Infra.

https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request

That said, I'm not saying we should move to Atlassian tools, just that
it's probably a better option than Phabricator, if such a big migration
happens. I think that what we have now is already pretty good.

> Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more
> tightly, but still we could consider to use Phabricator instead,
> especially to dump bugzilla.

While I'm not particularly against integrating more tightly with GitHub,
there is no such goal in Gentoo as far as I can tell. As much as I like
GitHub, I do understand the concerns of others about making GitHub
essential. It has been blocked before in certain regions of the world,
and that's not good for us, regardless of the free vs proprietary
debate. I don't think that GitHub is evil or anything, but GitHub is a
nice place for extras, to interact with the user community, receive
patches, etc. It should not replace our own infra.

Cheers,
—Guilherme

Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Jonas Jelten]

On 2016-04-18 15:10, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 18 April 2016 at 23:44, Jonas Jelten  wrote:
>> especially to dump bugzilla.
> 
> Dumping bugzilla at this time would be a regression really. "Lets just
> discard millions of bugs and their history and important context" is
> not really an option for a web accessible opensource project with lots
> of inbound links, some of which are stashed in git commit messages,
> and are essentially unfixable.

I was more thinking of a migration so all tickets and all history is
preserved of course. One could even implement a redirector that still
accepts the bugzilla links but forwards to the migrated new ticket.

> 
>> It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools. 
>> https://phacility.com/phabricator/
> 
> I tend to find "tightly coupled" a synonym for "fragile" and "Inflexible".
> 
> If there was a way for somebody to informally set up a phabricator
> instance in a non-committal manner
> that could be used merely for review purposes, that'd be nice.

I'm pretty sure that works. As far as I understood the setup, one can
disable any component without being fragile. I'm not sure what you mean
by inflexible, I'm just guessing that each tool does what it promises
and can interact with others nicely, and you just pick those you want.

Of course the wiki/documentation module is not useable for us as we have
the mediawiki.

We can enable more and more components over time, starting with the code
review thingy first if it works out.

> 
> But "lets change to this cool new thing because its cool" is something
> that doesn't resonate with me.
> 
> To 'Change' It has to be _proven_ useful for our usecases, and
> _proven_ to be _better_ than what we have, not dubious, tenuous and
> relatively unknown.
> 
> I'd want to be personally comfortable with using it before I ever
> voted in favour of gentoo changing to it.
> 
> And I'd expect all other devs to require that same high standard.

Agree'd. The first step might be setting up an instance that can somehow
sync all the status from ongoing work. Then people can play around and
try whether it fits their workflows.
However I'm not sure how comfortable and easy this is to accomplish.

> 
> Also: I Hold defacto reservations about anything written in PHP, due
> to both personal history with PHP, and the significant number of PHP
> projects with both atrocious code and glaring security defects.

That is a point, not sure if bugzilla does any better though ;)
Still, I can't say how good their code is, I've just used the result and
it was impressing.


>
> So I would want to be sure that not only is it better than what we
> have, but it is _at least_ as secure as what we have, and I'd want to
> be assured that the development team of Phabricator are competent and
> its not just yet-another-fly-by-night product.

If blender and wikimedia switched to it, it might actually have some
benefits. Which should not mean we follow blindly, but we should
consider its usability bonus.

> 
> 
>> Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more 
>> tightly,
> 
> I have no idea where this "apparent goal" came from: "tight" github
> integration is not and has never been "on the table".
> 
> Github is purely a voluntary auxiliary process intended to allow
> people to augment their workflow in semi-useful ways, and then, some
> of the things github provides is harmful ( Githubs inability to handle
> rebased pulls makes people do horrible long merge commits )
> 
> Its been repeatedly stated that Github must never be "Relied upon" in
> a mandatory way, because it is inherently proprietary and usurps all
> the authority that Gentoo infra have, and puts the Gentoo organisation
> at Githubs mercy, and this would be entirely unconscionable as the
> "only pathway".
> 

I'm fully aware of that, what I'm trying to say is that many of github's
features are present in phabricator, which would make us more
independent again. Which does not mean I hate github and wanna leave it
etc, just that phabricator can give us another, self-hosted contribution
plattform.




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Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Kristian Fiskerstrand]

On 04/18/2016 03:10 PM, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 18 April 2016 at 23:44, Jonas Jelten  wrote:
>> especially to dump bugzilla.
> 



> If there was a way for somebody to informally set up a phabricator 
> instance in a non-committal manner that could be used merely for
> review purposes, that'd be nice.

Indeed, kensington already did some experimentation on this this a
while back[0], but I'm not sure what what lessons were learned from it.

My personal 2c is that there is a very big difference between a
read-only review tool and something more deeply integrates when
considering security.

References:
[0]
https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/message/f74961c953d5ffedd1af9a67fdda6407
-- 
Kristian Fiskerstrand
OpenPGP certificate reachable at hkp://pool.sks-keyservers.net
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Kent Fredric]

On 18 April 2016 at 23:44, Jonas Jelten  wrote:
> especially to dump bugzilla.

Dumping bugzilla at this time would be a regression really. "Lets just
discard millions of bugs and their history and important context" is
not really an option for a web accessible opensource project with lots
of inbound links, some of which are stashed in git commit messages,
and are essentially unfixable.

> It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools. 
> https://phacility.com/phabricator/

I tend to find "tightly coupled" a synonym for "fragile" and "Inflexible".

If there was a way for somebody to informally set up a phabricator
instance in a non-committal manner
that could be used merely for review purposes, that'd be nice.

But "lets change to this cool new thing because its cool" is something
that doesn't resonate with me.

To 'Change' It has to be _proven_ useful for our usecases, and
_proven_ to be _better_ than what we have, not dubious, tenuous and
relatively unknown.

I'd want to be personally comfortable with using it before I ever
voted in favour of gentoo changing to it.

And I'd expect all other devs to require that same high standard.

Also: I Hold defacto reservations about anything written in PHP, due
to both personal history with PHP, and the significant number of PHP
projects with both atrocious code and glaring security defects.

So I would want to be sure that not only is it better than what we
have, but it is _at least_ as secure as what we have, and I'd want to
be assured that the development team of Phabricator are competent and
its not just yet-another-fly-by-night product.


> Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more 
> tightly,

I have no idea where this "apparent goal" came from: "tight" github
integration is not and has never been "on the table".

Github is purely a voluntary auxiliary process intended to allow
people to augment their workflow in semi-useful ways, and then, some
of the things github provides is harmful ( Githubs inability to handle
rebased pulls makes people do horrible long merge commits )

Its been repeatedly stated that Github must never be "Relied upon" in
a mandatory way, because it is inherently proprietary and usurps all
the authority that Gentoo infra have, and puts the Gentoo organisation
at Githubs mercy, and this would be entirely unconscionable as the
"only pathway".

-- 
Kent

KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL

[gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Jonas Jelten]

Ohai!

Phabricator is a fun adventure game: http://phabricator.org/

It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools.
https://phacility.com/phabricator/

Many bigger projects (e.g. blender, mediawiki, ...) started using
phabricator, it could also be very beneficial for gentoo.

https://secure.phabricator.com/w/usage/companies/
https://secure.phabricator.com/w/usage/not/

Wikimedia elaborates about the migration:

https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/2014/12/17/welcome-phabricator/
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/versus_Bugzilla

https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Doc/Tools/Phabricator/Migration

Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more
tightly, but still we could consider to use Phabricator instead,
especially to dump bugzilla.

If we come to the conclusion we are a really serious business, we must
set up the "Serious Business Edition", for the most serious businesses.

Still, I hope we can go with the Awesome Edition :P

Cheers,
JJ



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