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Phorge: Going Public
- dom96 4y agoBrilliant to see this. I still miss Phabricator + Mercurial from my time at Facebook, best code review experience ever.
- legerdemain 4y agoI only had patience for two months at Uber, but Phabricator + their own layer on top of Phabricator was about 30% of why I left with no regrets.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoHow bad was it? I want to hear the war story. The longer the better.
- goodoldneon 4y agoGood stuff! I miss Phab’s task trees and stacked diffs
- Groxx 4y agoStacked diffs are truly excellent. I miss them every time I do anything substantial on GitHub.
- ComputerGuru 4y agoIt would have been nice to get some commitments from the bigger Phabricator users before going public, so I could read this and see oh projects x, y, and z are going to be using Phorge! But maybe they wouldn't until they see what kind of project it's going to turn out to be..
- skybrian 4y agoWhat is Phorge: https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/introduction/ https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/introduction/
- Jabbles 4y ago"Facebook has 500+ fulltime engineers" Technically true, but seems out of date...
- mdaniel 4y agoAnd while I'm sure that documentation is handy for standing up one's own Phorge, I find concrete examples to be more useful Issues: https://we.phorge.it/T15034 https://we.phorge.it/T15034 Pull Request: https://we.phorge.it/D25015 https://we.phorge.it/D25015 (or the less "Outlook-ish" view of show me the goods, then I'll know what you're talking about: https://we.phorge.it/D25015#toc https://we.phorge.it/D25015#toc ) CI: https://we.phorge.it/harbormaster/build/69/ https://we.phorge.it/harbormaster/build/69/ and I guess a "stack overflow for teams" replacement: https://we.phorge.it/Q14 https://we.phorge.it/Q14
- stolsvik 4y agoWhat is Phorge/Phabricator compared to Gerrit? In particular wrt. the code and review process. They sound a bit similar?
- ferdowsi 4y agoExciting stuff! Phabricator was one of the better project/dev management systems I've interacted with and I'm glad to see developer energy behind maintaining and improving it!
- KerrAvon 4y agoI seem to be in the minority, but I found Phabricator to be a very unpleasant code review experience. Because it doesn’t speak git natively, it would frequently just spew commits from an arbitrary branch into PRs, for no apparent reason. And because reviews weren’t based on actual git branches, people could throw patches that you couldn’t actually build into it. Awful, awful thing.
- encryptluks2 4y agoIs that different than JIRA? I always thought Phabricator was just awesome as a JIRA alternative
- cpeterso 4y agoPhabricator is a whole suite of integrated web-based software development tools: * Differential, a code review tool * Diffusion, a repository browser * Herald, a change monitoring tool * Maniphest, a bug tracker * Phriction, a wiki
- Rexxar 4y agoThey clearly should have called the two first tools Dipherential and Diphusion
- xani_ 4y agoThe guy with speech impediment was on vacation when they named those
- encryptluks2 4y agoThank you. I'm aware of that but was just mentioning it is awesome as an alternative to JIRA alone.
- cpeterso 4y agoSorry! I misinterpreted “just awesome as a Jira alternative” as “only awesome as” instead of “very awesome as”. :)
- yuan43 4y agoSo is this like an open source GitHub issues? What problem(s) does it solve that can't be solved through GitHub?
- encryptluks2 4y agoI think you answered your own question but it does a lot more than that. Did you check out the features page?
- yuan43 4y agoI'd like to hear from someone who has used it.
- chucky_z 4y agoI used Phabricator a long time ago before we eventually moved to Github due to a handful of blocking issues with the `arc` tool, and CircleCI only supporting Github (this was even pre-circle 2.0 days). I really, really liked Phabricator and would happily have replaced Jira + Confluence + GitHub with Phorge if I was starting somewhere from scratch.
- bsder 4y agoGiven that Github is now owned by Microsoft who can pull your identity or shut down your repository on a whim, being an open source GitHub issues is plenty enough, no?
- bogota 4y agoHaving more than one option should be generally seen as a good thing. I don’t think an open source project needs to justify its existence if you dont want to take the time to learn what it actually does
- SergeAx 4y agoHaving a self-hosted solution inside company's security perimeter is nice by itself. This is why I use GitLab on all my projects since I don't remember when. Also, the GitHub way of doing things is not universally liked, so having an alternative is always welcome.
- _mway 4y agoThe "features of Phorge" link on https://phorge.it/ https://phorge.it/ is broken: it currently links to https://we.phorge.it/book/phabricator/article/introduction/ https://we.phorge.it/book/phabricator/article/introduction/, which is a 404 (looks like just a s/phabricator/phorge/ typo in the URL). Edit: actually looks several of the homepage links are broken.
- schemescape 4y agoPasting the correct link for anyone reading on a phone with terrible text editing capabilities: https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/introduction/ https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/introduction/
- dfee 4y agoJust take a look at that page. Line height issues. Odd icons. Weird verbiage. Swapping ‘ph’ for ‘f’. A declaration the author is a ‘User’, with no projects, and a “tada” token (whatever that is). Phab users may feel right at home. Unfortunately. Yes, my phab experience has been underwhelming and quite confusing. Each piece functions nominally, but is a miserable cacophony of integration. I hope the leaders of this project take some creative liberties with the vision and organization. It’s needed - lest a full restart of this thinking take the reins.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoI think some people are angry that you admonish the project. However, those are some valid criticisms from someone who clearly was frustrated by the previous incarnation of this project.
- remote_phone 4y agoI loved Phabricator. It’s the system that made the most sense to me, with no real issues. I was shocked when I saw that no more work was going to be done with it and I’m glad to see someone pick it up!
- bsimpson 4y agoLikewise. I never got GitHub's PR model. Maintaining separate branches of a single codebase is something I want to do approximately never, and a single commit is the right atom for code review. Thus, I find Phabricator to be intuitive in a way that branch-based workflows never were.
- SergeAx 4y agoWhen we develop software task by task, feature by feature, some (actually, most) features are too big to be represented by a single commit. This is because we need code versions history to understand those changes in the future, even if the author is not around, and wrapping my head around +5000/-3000 diff is very complex task by itself. On the other hand, in most CD systems pushing commit to master branch triggers a new version deploy. So we are doing small atomic "always green" changes in a separate branch, and then merge them all at once into master branch.
- redsaz 4y agoHas your team considered using feature flags? For large changes that can span weeks of effort, being able to PR and get small portions in to main branch and then "flip the switch" at the end usually works out better for us than "okay our feature branch is done but now we have to catch it back up to everything that happened in the meantime from the past few weeks."
- SergeAx 4y agoWe are thinking about it. There are still some gray zones like database migrations. It is easier to daily rebase big feature branches onto master, IMO.
- lxe 4y agoHope they retained the lighthearted tone. https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/tone/ https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/tone/
- dang 4y agoRelated: Phorge: A community-maintained fork of Phabricator - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27773747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27773747 - July 2021 (26 comments)
- tomasreimers 4y agoCongrats on launching! I'm personally a huge fan of pharicator, having used it at FB and realizing how much I missed stacking, the review queue, and herald after leaving. We built Graphite (https://graphite.dev https://graphite.dev) to bring a lot of that goodness to developers still stuck on Github for one reason or another (after finding that we ourselves were locked into GH). And I'm glad others are championing that as well.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aseipp 4y agoI am very happy to see this. Phabricator is an incredibly well written and deeply thought-out tool (even if people may disagree with some of its philosophies regarding e.g. patches and code review) and it had a tremendous influence on my career and the way I thought about managing and contributing to software projects. I say that as someone with a few patches in Phabricator itself. I hope Phorge is just as successful and retains that levity and unique polish that Phab had; looks like a lot of the old guard contributors are around as part of this, so I'm very hopeful. Maybe I should spin up some of my old patches for things like WebAuthn support and re-submit them...
- mike_d 4y agoMe too. I was just looking for something last week as a good on-prem solution. Phabricator was the first thing I looked at but quickly discovered it was "dead." For what it is worth, GitLab and GitHub both do an absolutely terrible job of selling to someone where cloud isn't an option.
- mdaniel 4y agoYou are aware that GitLab is MIT licensed and self-hosting is a strongly supported use case, right? Maybe I misunderstood the "selling" verb there
- mike_d 4y agoIt is near impossible to find on their website, and any comparisons I could find on the site highlight a mass of missing features. I honestly couldn't even figure out how to buy an on-prem license.
- john_cogs 4y agoGitLab team member here. If you go to the pricing page[0] and click the “Buy GitLab <tier>” you’re interested in purchasing (Premium or Ultimate), a pop up will appear and you can purchase an on-prem license by clicking the “Purchase self-managed” button. 0 - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
- ghostly_s 4y agoWhy does the logo look lewd?
- nsm 4y agoI loved Phabricator and still miss it at the current job. Is there a code “watching” system as good as Herald integrated into GitHub?
- cutierust 4y agoKDE i believe uses phabricator (so likely phorge going on)
- detaro 4y agoKDE is/has been migrating to GitLab.
- SergeAx 4y agoLove the domain name!
- wodenokoto 4y agoI always thought Phabricator was closed source. I was completely out of the loop about it closing. Any tldr articles about the whole thing?
- IshKebab 4y agoIt's been open source for many years. Not sure if it was ever open source. The twist is that it was developed by a commercial company called Phacility, and their monetisation model was that you had to pay to be able to submit bug reports or even create an account on their Phabricator instance. As a result I don't think they have many external developers. They packed up shop a few months ago. Phorge was created to continue development.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoWow, that seems like such a genius move at first, but clearly it's really bad.
- IshKebab 4y agoI dunno, Phabricator is mainly popular in companies (since it's an easy self hosting option) so they're basically selling support. My company paid, and I'm sure they wouldn't have donated anything if they didn't have too. Quite frustrating to not be able to even comment on issues though.
- aseipp 4y agoYeah, AFAIR the basic realization at some point was that most freely submitted user reports were either of low quality, part of something that wasn't on the near-term roadmap, or part of something to be addressed more broadly in the near term anyway, so the value of them got lower over time. It kind of happens in every FOSS project to some extent; early on in a project's life, user feedback is almost always useful to help hone your direction and future scope, but at a certain point, that value diminishes once you know the contours of what your users want, competitors do, what timeline you can complete them in, etc. Phabricator and its vision were very stable. Evan at some point moved to a support-only model IIRC because he didn't believe the value versus support burden justified the alternative anymore. (And actually, you could still submit bugs and comments generally speaking if you were an "old school" contributor who had generally high-value contributions; I was in this category and never had my permissions pulled, and dropped by from time to time to submit things -- but that was the exception and not the rule.)
- tchaffee 4y agoYour announcement tells me nothing about what your product does except that it replaces another product.
- boltzmann-brain 4y agoValid criticism. I came away thinking the same thing.
- watchdogtimer 4y agoHow does Phorge/Phabricator compare to other code management tools like Gitea or GitLab in terms of resource requirements? Can it, e.g., run along side other apps on a single-board computer, or does it take more system resources than this?
- pas 4y agosince it's PHP it can run with very low-resources available
- ofrzeta 4y agoI revisited the site regularly and honestly never thought they'd make it to 1.0. We were using Phabricator at work and had to migrate (Gitlab) after the project was sunset. I still miss many features of Phabricator although it's not without flaws and quite idiosyncratic. I wish the Phorge people best luck!