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Not to dunk on Phabricator, but did anyone actually enjoy using it? I always thought it was a mess anyway. Jenkins was also... "jankins". Of course this is all

Not to dunk on Phabricator, but did anyone actually enjoy using it? I always thought it was a mess anyway. Jenkins was also... "jankins". Of course this is all hindsight, but wow it doesn't even seem that long ago.

FrenchyJiby 4y ago
Considering the alternative at work was an old Bugzilla instance, and code review feedback was done by email, adopting Phabricator was a breath of fresh air: good engineering-oriented tickets (subtasks, task grouping), good code review experience + integration with tickets, a wiki, and a few extra... yeah it really rocked. Of course, if you compare to Jira's ticket-management experience, and nowaday's github code review, sure, it's quite jank. But for a brief moment, in a period of time at work, Phabricator really shined!
aidenn0 4y ago
Phabricator's code-review (particularly if you're stuck on SVN) and ticket workflows were both great. Had both a decent command-line and decent web client. A lot of other things were a mess.
cturtle 4y ago
I did! I did the Google Summer of Code twice with Blender and ever since I find myself preferring the patch workflow of Phabricator over the merge/pull request found elsewhere. I am comfortable with both, but phabricator just clicked with me better
- techknowlogick 4y ago
  What was your experience like with GSOC? Gitea has applied to it this year, and are hoping to be able to make it a good experience for any contributor that is matched (hopefully we are accepted as well).
  - cturtle 4y ago
    GSoC was a great experience. It was my first time planning a major contribution to an open source project. It would have been much more challenging for me without the help of my mentor and the other core contributors, so it is important to have a good support system for any involved. My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback. I hope Gitea is accepted!
thaumaturgy 4y ago
I loved it: the code review system, integrated wiki (despite its custom markdown syntax), integrated kanban, remote repo sync, and the ability to easily and cleanly link everything together. It had its warts but I haven't yet found a single system that does everything that it did well. I know Phorge exists, but it seems to be struggling to get traction, maybe because it appeared just slightly too long after everyone had accepted Phabricator's demise.
aseipp 4y ago
Yes, I absolutely loved Phabricator, and still do, even if I don't run my own instance anymore. The code review it offers is still excellent since it's based around stacked diffs, and it had some nice little extras like coverage support, first-class test results from the build reports, etc. The issue tracking is still miles ahead of GitHub and was quite flexible. It had good support for permissions and access levels, and tools like Herald were very useful. Evan also had a very keen eye for many things design wise, and was fun to chat with. I think a lot of the things it did it did very well. But there were definitely some scope issues and other stuff that could have been handled better. It's hard to keep up with GitHub now that they're pretty aggressive about features, etc. But the core competencies have always been very good in my opinion, and it has a nice, hackable codebase.
phailhaus 4y ago
The way it handled branches and merging was an absolute nightmare. IIRC it did this super weird thing that when you put up a diff from the CLI, it made its own little temporary branch for you. And god forbid if you pushed up your branch remotely, it would get all confused and start diffing against that remote branch. Literally couldn't merge via the UI, the CLI was the only way. To be fair, the review system was better than GitHub. It's insane that even today, there's no way to tag your team and have them stay tagged. If anybody comments or reviews, they're dismissed. This is an issue that's been open for nearly five years. [1] [1] https://github.com/community/community/discussions/5289 https://github.com/community/community/discussions/5289

FrenchyJiby 4y ago

Considering the alternative at work was an old Bugzilla instance, and code review feedback was done by email, adopting Phabricator was a breath of fresh air: good engineering-oriented tickets (subtasks, task grouping), good code review experience + integration with tickets, a wiki, and a few extra... yeah it really rocked. Of course, if you compare to Jira's ticket-management experience, and nowaday's github code review, sure, it's quite jank. But for a brief moment, in a period of time at work, Phabricator really shined!

aidenn0 4y ago

Phabricator's code-review (particularly if you're stuck on SVN) and ticket workflows were both great. Had both a decent command-line and decent web client. A lot of other things were a mess.

cturtle 4y ago

I did! I did the Google Summer of Code twice with Blender and ever since I find myself preferring the patch workflow of Phabricator over the merge/pull request found elsewhere. I am comfortable with both, but phabricator just clicked with me better

techknowlogick 4y ago
What was your experience like with GSOC? Gitea has applied to it this year, and are hoping to be able to make it a good experience for any contributor that is matched (hopefully we are accepted as well).
- cturtle 4y ago
  GSoC was a great experience. It was my first time planning a major contribution to an open source project. It would have been much more challenging for me without the help of my mentor and the other core contributors, so it is important to have a good support system for any involved. My projects were focused on user interface improvements, so I also spent a lot of time gathering feedback from users. It was really valuable for me to learn how to get feedback at different stages of the development cycle, and also to learn how to filter the good from the bad feedback. I hope Gitea is accepted!

thaumaturgy 4y ago

I loved it: the code review system, integrated wiki (despite its custom markdown syntax), integrated kanban, remote repo sync, and the ability to easily and cleanly link everything together. It had its warts but I haven't yet found a single system that does everything that it did well. I know Phorge exists, but it seems to be struggling to get traction, maybe because it appeared just slightly too long after everyone had accepted Phabricator's demise.

aseipp 4y ago

Yes, I absolutely loved Phabricator, and still do, even if I don't run my own instance anymore. The code review it offers is still excellent since it's based around stacked diffs, and it had some nice little extras like coverage support, first-class test results from the build reports, etc. The issue tracking is still miles ahead of GitHub and was quite flexible. It had good support for permissions and access levels, and tools like Herald were very useful. Evan also had a very keen eye for many things design wise, and was fun to chat with. I think a lot of the things it did it did very well. But there were definitely some scope issues and other stuff that could have been handled better. It's hard to keep up with GitHub now that they're pretty aggressive about features, etc. But the core competencies have always been very good in my opinion, and it has a nice, hackable codebase.

phailhaus 4y ago

The way it handled branches and merging was an absolute nightmare. IIRC it did this super weird thing that when you put up a diff from the CLI, it made its own little temporary branch for you. And god forbid if you pushed up your branch remotely, it would get all confused and start diffing against that remote branch. Literally couldn't merge via the UI, the CLI was the only way. To be fair, the review system was better than GitHub. It's insane that even today, there's no way to tag your team and have them stay tagged. If anybody comments or reviews, they're dismissed. This is an issue that's been open for nearly five years. [1] [1] https://github.com/community/community/discussions/5289 https://github.com/community/community/discussions/5289