As someone who has worked with Differential outside of Wikimedia projects, I can summarize this back as: The problem of Differential is not the possibilities and functionality, it is a problem of usability (UX). Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket have the UX of using tons of different repo's down, and Differential/Phab does not. And the reason is that the first three have been developed as massive community projects that could not afford to NOT focus on usability of one user interacting with many repo's, owning them etc. (they have traditionally traded down on ticket management and projects, because people already had good options outside of repo hosting for this, only in the past 2 years or so you see this part quickly evolving for them as well).
Phabricator however has always been much more driven technology-first, focused on smaller numbers of developers and Enterprise situations. This does have some advantages, I think the way that Maniphest, tags and workboards for instance have evolved to being very useful, is partly due to the fact of building a solid technology stack first. But unfortunately, the UI for the differential stuff has sort of lagged behind and is not properly exposing and simplifying the power of differential (likely because there has not been enough need yet to fix it). The problem is that you have to hunt for an app called Owners, instead of pressing a 'Claim ownership'-button, not the fact that you cannot have an owner. DJ > On 9 mei 2016, at 21:42, Mukunda Modell <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Krinkle, > > I think you've raised some valid points, however, you've missed a couple of > details that are relevant. I'll try to fill in the details so that we can > get a better vision of what the workflow looks like with Differential. Rest > assured, those of us who advocate for using Differential do not want to > break your workflow, or anyone else's. There will be some changes for sure > but we've been working extremely hard to address everyone's concerns for > many months and the only reason that concerns have not been addressed is > because we weren't aware of them or we haven't gotten to them yet. > > I'll address each of your major points inline below the quoted text: > > > On Mon, May 9, 2016 at 1:26 PM, Krinkle <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > >> I apologise if some of the below does in fact exist, I'd gladly find out! >> >> There are three major parts of my workflow as project maintainer and >> contributor that I find lacking in Differential right now and are strong >> reason for me to discourage anyone from migrating to it. In addition, >> projects that have already migrated are essentially non-existent and blind >> to my workflow as a result. I've tried but even if I accept loss in >> productivity, I can't even find a workaround for these. >> >> 1. Casual notifications about new patches and merged commits (IRC >> notifications). - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116330 >> <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T116330> >> >> > If you follow the trail of blockers on that task you end up at > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123417 > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T123417> which is assigned to me and will > be addressed. This will be a small amount of work and it just hasn't > happened yet because it hasn't been the highest priority, especially when > people still regard migration to Differential as "premature." > > >> 2. Discover pending patches. >> >> While Diffusion is a fine repo browser, it appears to lack any link back to >> Differential. Even when manually going to Differential, it doesn't appear >> to be any concept of "repo". It only has a global concept of "diff" and >> "reviewer" (e.g. you can list diffs for review, and your own open diffs). >> Unlike Maniphest (which has a concept of projects that have their own pages >> with useful outgoing links). There is no list of projects with a link to >> see a project's patches. This unlike Gerrit or GitHub where projects are >> linked to searches for open patches or open pull-requests. This makes it >> very non-transparent for potential consumers of our code, and casual >> contributors to find out about open patches. This is an important indicator >> for developers to determine the health of a project. It's also an easy >> way-in to for new reviewers, and an important interface for project >> maintainers to easily list open patches from time to time. Without this, I >> expect our code review habits to become even worse than they already are. >> >> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/differential/ (no projects listed) -> >> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/differential/query/all/ (no repos named >> alongside the diffs) -> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/D229 (links to >> diffusion) -> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/GOJR/ (no link >> to >> query to differential). >> >> If I see this correctly, there is simply no way to naturally get to a list >> of open patches of a project. >> > > This is a valid concern and I think Differential really is lacking in ways > to browse open patches, however, I think you've missed some critical > details. > > > 1. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/differential/query/advanced/ > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/differential/query/advanced/> gives > you a way to query by project tags > 2. Phabricator is almost completely organized around tasks. You can add > a differential revision to a task and the final commit also gets attached > to the task. The way to browse units of work is by searching maniphest, > not searching differential or diffusion. > 3. Phabricator does not consider 'one repository' to be equal to 'one > project' and there is a tool specifically designed for organizing > repositories in to larger units called 'packages' - that tool is > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/owners/ > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/owners/> by combining owners with > herald rules you can get granular notifications of patches submitted in > your area of interest/expertise/responsibility. Not only is this granular > but it's automated - appropriate reviewers get added automatically to > patches that affect the specific code that they are qualified to review. > After you've been added as a reviewer then revisions show up in > Differential and there is visibility into new patches as well as "stale" > patches which are blocking others and have been waiting for some > (configurable) amount of time. > 4. Differential links to 'recent similar revisions' on the differential > revision page: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/D224 > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/D224> > > So while I agree that diffusion should really have better integration with > differential, and differential browsing is less than perfect, I disagree > with the statement that there is no way to "naturally get to a list of open > patches of a project" > > You rightly point out that Differential doesn't integrate with Projects > nearly as well as it should. I would propose a few changes to improve the > situation: > > 1. Show projects on differential search results > 2. Show Differential revisions on Diffusion repository pages > 3. Show Differential revisions on Project profile pages. Most obvious place > would be right above 'recent activity' on > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/1449/ > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/profile/1449/> or perhaps on a > separate panel since some projects will probably have a lot of open patches. > > >> 3. Notification about new patches and merged commits. >> >> There is appears to be no way to subscribe to a repo (e.g. as a maintainer >> of that repo) so that I may be notified of new diffs and/or landed commits. >> This is worse due to #2, which would've been a workaround (albeit a costly >> one, due to pull:N vs push:1). >> >> > Totally untrue. That's what owners is for. See point 3 in my response to > your second concern. Owners (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/owners/ > <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/owners/>) > does exactly what you want. Once you create a package, phabricator notifies > you about new diffs and commits, With it's configurable down to the > filesystem level, so you can be notified about changes to specific > sub-trees within specific repositories, or groups of repositories. > > >> In addition to these workflow concerns, there is also Continuous >> integration of course. But that's a separate issue. >> > > Continuous integration is a concern that has been thoroughly addressed. > Differential and Jenkins work well together. Phabricator also has > harbormaster which could theoretically replace jenkins in the long term, > however, we already have a whole lot invested in our existing Jenkins setup > and it doesn't seem wise to abandon all of that without a clear reason to > do so. > > >> I'm bringing up these concerns now because contrary to what I expected, >> Differential is being adopted by quite a few repos now despite it being >> premature. >> > > The sooner the better! We can't address concerns if we haven't heard them. > > So while I totally sympathize with your concerns, I disagree that it's > premature to start using Differential. We can't work out the kinks without > having experience using the tool and the best way to move forward is to do > it. > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l>
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